[Legate Damar]

I seek your technical expertise, Terrans. If one wanted to make a functional in-game sheath shield that worked as described (i.e. it rendered the shielded ship immune to all weapons aside from beams, which it provided no defense against), what would be the best way to accomplish this?

You have my word we will not use this secret against your Federation, if that is your worry, as well.

[Droid803]

Armor.tbl : make your shield armor type impervious to all weapons, and then keep beams pierce shields (which requires no additional work as that is how they behave normally).

or the LAZYMAN way,

Set your ship's shield points to some ludicrously high number like 9999999, though be warned that a suitably powerful weapon could still deplete its shields (again, keeping beams as piercing shields)

[MatthTheGeek]

Armor classes. Give all your non-beam weapons one damage type, all your beam weapons another damage type, make your shields invulnerable to non-beams and vulnerable to beams. Since beams pierce shields by default unless you force them otherwise, that should be it.

EDIT: NINJA'd

[Legate Damar]

I wasn't aware that armor classes worked for shields. Also how would I add a shield mesh to a pre-existing model, like say the Lucifer?

[Snail]

Easiest thing to do is not add a shield mesh at all and just use the "surface shields" flag, but that won't give you the visual effect.

[Fury]

Doesn't FSPort have Lucifer with an actual shield mesh?

[Snail]

Yeah, but I don't think it was the high-poly version. But I'm not sure, I still don't have the latest FSPort version.

[mjn.mixael]

We do have a high poly lucifer with a shield mesh. I'm not sure if it was in the latest release though.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

We do have a high poly lucifer with a shield mesh. I'm not sure if it was in the latest release though.

I know for sure that a shielded luci was released within the past 6 month. I can't remember where it was release, but I am pretty sure it was released recently, as I it had been sitting on my desktop for sometime before I plugged it into fsport.

[Legate Damar]

Shielded Diablo and Vinashaak would also be useful

[Dragon]

IIRC, there's a shielded Diablo in ITDOH campaign. And Vinashaak from INFR1 should already have a shield mesh.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

We do have a high poly lucifer with a shield mesh. I'm not sure if it was in the latest release though.

I know for sure that a shielded luci was released within the past 6 month. I can't remember where it was release, but I am pretty sure it was released recently, as I it had been sitting on my desktop for sometime before I plugged it into fsport.

You are correct

[Droid803]

Shielded Diablo and Vinashaak would also be useful

Those two already are shielded. All versions of them.

[jr2]

Would it be possible to make it so that if a ship had sheath shields, the weapon impact effect could be changed to appear as though it was hitting a shield on the surface of the ship?

[redsniper]

I thought "surface shields" already did that. Am I wrong?

[StargateSpankyHam]

If someone figures out how to make a special shield-hit effect display whenever a surface-shielded ship is hit by weapons...

 

Or has some spectacularly awesome modder among us already done this?

[jr2]

Not yet... -looks in Valathil's general direction, wondering if he could do it in his sleep-    j/k, I have no clue how hard that would be.

[TrashMan]

If someone figures out how to make a special shield-hit effect display whenever a surface-shielded ship is hit by weapons...

 

In theory? It would have ot be done on a programing level.

Assuming you don't want to dispaly the effect exactly on the surface (may look bad), you detect the polygon that has been hit, back up along it's normal to get some distance form the surface, then render the effect on a small flat plane parrallel to the polygon.

In theory. But that would require qute a bit of processing power if I'm not mistaken.