[krevett62]

Is it possible to make a subsystem on a shielded capital ship not protected by the shield? I'm using the "surface shield" flag for the ship but I want some of its subsystem being able to be destroyed with the shield active.

[zookeeper]

I don't think so.

Aside from some convoluted scripting magic, anyway.

[krevett62]

That's what I was thinking it's impossible for now. Perhaps if someone introduce a new subsystem flag like "ignore shields" that woul be great! I'd like to have somme capital ships shielded (like in starlancer) but have their shield generator being able to be destroyed with standard weapons and then a SEXP would disable the entire shield on the ship.

Just hope one of our coder working on FSO will see this request, I really don't know how difficult it would be to implement that kind of flag for subsystems.

[zookeeper]

Well it might not be difficult to implement that, but then it'd likely only work for surface shields, which would be an awkward limitation.

Are you sure you'd want the shield generator to have no shields at all? That seems awfully weird. After all, you could have one shield segment cover only the generator area. Of course you might want that segment to be weaker than the others and would need some other feature to implement that, but still.

[krevett62]

For now I'm just tinkering, but I wouldn't mind if it had no shield instead of a weaker quadrant on the generator (of course the second solution is better). Anyway I can't do any of these for now (I'll take a look at SEXP to see if it could be implemented on a per-mission basis.
I'm no modder or coder, but I like to tinker a bit with tbl/tbm and I'm FREDding some mission for my personal entertainment

[zookeeper]

Ok, well, any similar solution one could possibly come up with right now requires at least editing the model and some scripting magic. It's not an simple thing to do no matter how you go about it.

Or, maybe, in theory you could simply do this: write a script which checks for collisions against the ship class which has the generator. If the hit occurs close to the generator (and shields are still on), apply some damage to that subsystem. I don't know if you could do it with some regular mission events... maybe.

[krevett62]

I thought about it perhaps with adding an armor table entry to apply to the subsystem that would allow damaging it? I'll look into this possibility and see what I can do

[Cyborg17]

Well you could guardian the hull then guardian all the other subsystems at 100 to simulate the shields protecting them, then un-guardian everything when the "shield generator" is down.  Not an amazingly pretty solution since you have to skip out on the shield mesh, and the "shields" have to be lucifer grade, but it would get the job done if you write it well. 

Further ad hoc crazy workarounds are also possible if you do want the ship with the shield generator to "take damage" before the shield generator is down.

[krevett62]

I see it's quite difficult, and yes I would like the ship to be able to be damaged even with shield generator still on. If I can't come with something that please me it's not that important I'll wait until more features are released after all I'm just doing all of this for my entertainment, I'm not skilled enough to pretend to mod on my own just picking models I like, putting them together in an organized tbm, creating some new weapons and mission for me and a friend to play in coop mode
Thanks for all your suggestions!