[InsaneOne]

I don't know if this would be useful for anyone but what if shields worked in a way that they stop the damage of a weapon based on their integrity?
Like if the shield had 100 hit points and was at 100% then took 10 damage it'd stop all 10 and go down to 90 hit points and 90% integrity, and then if it took another 10 points of damage the shield would take 9 damage and the hull 1.

[Mars]

Heya... like armor in quake.

[Solatar]

If a capital ship had a "surface shield", this might be how I'd expect it to behave now that I think about it. It's not so much the case on fighters, because the shield is far from the hull.

[WMCoolmon]

I'd love to see the shield designs that I came up for Ferrium get used sometime, but they'd require a considerable amount of work to implement.

Basically, the idea was to have two different sets of 'shields' (for Terran ships, there were ideas for other races as well).

One, an EM field surrounding each ship. This 'shield' would operate at a constant power, but would be limited in the number/size of projectiles it could resist. The EM shield could also be of two different types, focused or diffused. Focused would allow the ship to resist large projectiles, by concentrating the EM field in one direction (Hey, this is sci-fi ), while diffuse would be better against a big spread of projectiles. Obviously, nonmetal projectiles would also be effective against ships with an EM shield.

The EM field generators could also be toggled into stealth mode, where they wouldn't do anything to resist projectiles, but they would act to cancel out the ambient EM radiation from the ship's systems and reduce the effectiveness of EM sensors against the craft.

The second shield system mounted on fighters would be a heat sink system embedded into the hull. This would work to diffuse energy beams across the surface, to prevent any one spot on the hull from reaching its melting point. However, a concentrated beam or a beam focused on the same spot for long enough that exceeded the system's capacity to redistribute heat would eventually melt the hull plating.

Like the EM field generators, the heat sink system would also be toggleable between normal mode and a stealth mode. In stealth mode, the ship would attempt to concentrate all heat generated by the craft to a very small cross-section, in order to cool the rest of the hull as much as possible and reduce the effectiveness of IR sensors against the ship.

(On a side note, the technology that I was going to use to explain the advanced EM capabilities of craft was a device called an MFU (Magnetic Focusing Unit), with the capability to create electric/magnetic fields some distance from a craft. I also wanted to use the tech for a capital ship that could use it to grab nearby asteroids and fling them at nearby planets/ships, or create a concentrated magnetic field within the center of a fighter to crush it near-instantaneously, but the idea was vetoed as too unrealistic. )

[Nuke]

wouldn't mind a battletech style ams system, where incoming projectiles are intercepted by a small machine gun or laser. you could have little ams domes on the ship which contain mini beam cannon, which can instantly vaporize any incoming projectile. of course it has a limit on the number of simultaneous interceptions it could carry out.  the more domes you have the better your "shielding". you are not protected against energy weapons at all. of course energy weapons would be the weaker weapons in any game or mod i do. you could also overwhelm the system with something like a gatling gun. but any large heavy shell would never get through.

wouldn't mind variable shields where its "opacity" to incoming projectiles is dependent on how much energy you have diverted to the system. depending on the size of your reactor the shield would absorb between 60 and 90% of the damage at full power, being reduced as you divert power to other systems. sort of along the same lines as my variable cloaking idea (where how invisible you are is determined by the power you put into the system, to fully cloak you need your engines and weapons down to the bare minimal level or completely off). couple this with variable output energy weapons, and you got some interesting gameplay.

yet another idea is to have shields that must be lowered in order to fire your guns, making you most vulnerable when you're attacking. would make bombing almost impossible.

[InsaneOne]

yet another idea is to have shields that must be lowered in order to fire your guns, making you most vulnerable when you're attacking. would make bombing almost impossible.

Well the bombing we normally see in Freespace at least, lowering shields worked fine for the bombers in Starlancer.
Also, would it have to lower all the shields or just the area where the weapons must pass?
Having to lower shields would also make defensive turrets either pointless or detrimental.

[Nuke]

also i like the idea of destructible armor plating. where your ship is fully armored in like explosive armor, which self destructs in order to save the space ships skin. however in the process that section of plating is destroyed. any hits to the armor does zero damage to the ships, but it does diminish your coverage. hitting the same spot would cause the shots to directly damage the ship. you could probibly do this with subobjects. but who would want to model it.

[Flaser]

As far as a simple damage equation goes I think Fallout had the best to date:

Damage = (Rolled Damage - Damage Threshold) * Damage Resistance. So an armor could be so thick that it would shrug off low caliber shots. (Though with a critical hit, which meant 1-2 x damage or even more in extreme places one could still 'find a nick in it'). Beyond that, it also simulates the damage ablation of the armor.

There were also several kinds of damages:
Normal, Laser, Fire, Plasma, Explosive and an armor had a different threshold and resistance against different kinds of damage.

[achtung]

also i like the idea of destructible armor plating. where your ship is fully armored in like explosive armor, which self destructs in order to save the space ships skin. however in the process that section of plating is destroyed. any hits to the armor does zero damage to the ships, but it does diminish your coverage. hitting the same spot would cause the shots to directly damage the ship. you could probibly do this with subobjects. but who would want to model it.

You mean Reactive Armor?

[Nuke]

yea pretty much.

it would be cool if ships had a damage map too, which actually gets dynamically rtt-ed with damage marks and rendered over the other maps multiplicatively. it could also be used to determine if the area a shot his has been damaged or not and apply damage accordingly.

the map would start out solid white since its applied by pixel multiply, and modify the diffuse map (and perhaps others). when a shot hits the ship, its position on the map is calculated and a decal is rtted into it. ships would need to be uv mapped in a single layer, no doubling of parts for it to look right (it would still work if you don't mind the inkblot effect). if another shot hits the non-white area then damage is applied to the hull, otherwise only a scorch mark is added. doing armor in this way you could also have an armor threshold that prevents the armor from being scorched if the shot is not sufficiently powerful (of course that would be more or less for ablative armor).