[Kusanagi]

Hey all!

I know it's possible to have a capship with shields, as this has been demonstrated several times, although the surface shield flag is preferable.

I was wondering if it would be possible to have a shield like effect that is seen in the Homeworld games, specifically the defense field frigate or the sentinels used in Cataclysm.

Basically, you have a cruiser or a corvette with a shied mesh several times the size of its hull. If other ships stay close to it, they should be protected as long as their mesh falls within the shield mesh of the corvette, correct?

Beams would still go through as they normally do, but in order to attack ships inside the shield of the frigate, you'd have to pass through the shields or blow up the frigate.

Has anyone else tried this?

[Tantalus53]

I have once, and yes it should work. Just like if you get /uber/ close to a fighter/bomber that has a shield mesh thats too big (i know one of the bombers used to do it, not sure which) you can hit the hull.

An interesting concept you have here though... A mobile Shield Grid...

[Trivial Psychic]

A few of the Shivan capital ships from the old Inferno R1 release had shield meshes.  The Diablo, the Iblis, and that planet killer ship.  The later of the three has quite a tight shield mesh, but the other two appear to have a bit of space in their meshes, so it could be possible to hide some small cruisers within it... perhaps.

[General Battuta]

Wings of Dawn has shields on almost all its capships, and yes, you can fly under to attack the hull or key subsystems.

[Dragon]

Defense Field Frigate could be a nice idea, especially for HW conversion, because it'd work exactly like HW one.
Stopping beams is a matter of a few flags.
Modelview has a tool for manipulating shields and PCS2 could someday have one too, so creating such frigate wouln't be that difficult.

[Colonol Dekker]

Make it so.......

[Droid803]

You'd probably also want to make the shield not have quadrants, since at that size, it becomes kinda weird to have for parts for six surfaces.

[Snail]

Where's Spoon when you need him?

[Droid803]

On IRC?

[Scooby_Doo]

Shielding on capships can be kinda tricky.... not from their shape but from their polycount.  Too high and it can tax the collision system.. not enough and they look ugly.

[JGZinv]

Granted I didn't put a ton of work into it, but maybe it'll help with visualization.



Basic idea is a lattice work of an object (honeycomb or hex grid) or energy making
a forward facing shield. I included the genesis ship from SW since it's a better illustration
of the shape.

Maybe take a look at Protoss concept art, as there was some designs in there.

Instead of caps, you could have shield emitting mines or drones.

[Kusanagi]

Well even with Homeworld, the Defense Field Frigate was always a favorite of mine due to the strategy element. The frigate would power up and project a shield around it that would be enough to cover a formation of fighters, one or two other frigate sized ships in formation OR one large capital ship like a carrier or a destroyer.

The downside is that the frigate would only remained powered up for a certain amount of time, and then it would power down to recharge.

In Homeworld, this shield would be strong enough to stop regular guns, but it wouldn't stop missiles or beam weapons. While in Freespace you wouldn't be able to do what homeword did and prevent all regular gunfire within the sphere of influence, you'd definitely be able to make sure you had to get in range of the ship to do some damage to it. No more long range subsystem targeting with the Maxim.

I imagine you could just have the shield mesh be 200-300 polys if there's not an extreme amount of detail on the hull. The Homeworld frigates have no armament, so no turret subobjects. Without quadrants, you couldn't wear down specific areas of the field, right?

The second thing that I loved in Cataclysm was the Sentinal. These were tiny ships (about half the size of a fighter) that could join with other Sentinals to form a shield. 12 of these in a sphere would form a spherical shield around the ship it was guarding and any other ships that were inside, and if you took out the Sentinal, or shot at part of its shield repeatedly, you'd weaken that area of the shield or even create a gaping hole.

The way I can see this working in Freespace is a sentinal pod with a large shield mesh that expands behind it in an umbrella fashion. The ship you were protecting couldn't be moving, of course, but if you position eight or ten of them around a capship with various orientations and distances, the shields should overlap.

Take out one sentinal and you take out the shielding in that area, allowing for bombing/beam weapon runs along that specific area to everything inside.

The frigate or the corvette would be the shield projecting capship, while the sentinals would be the mines/drones.

So many possibilities, so little knowledge of modding! I really wish I knew more but it's so hard to do things when all you have is a crappy 32bit laptop that will only run FSOpen at 2 fps >_< I'm stuck trying things in retail graphic settings. 

[Droid803]

Granted I didn't put a ton of work into it, but maybe it'll help with visualization.
<snip>

Isn't that top one a Solar Sailer?

[chief1983]

I was under the impression that shield meshes which are too far from the hull of the ship don't work very well, causing the mesh to need to roughly resemble the shape of the ship it covers, the bigger the ship, the more skintight it needs to be, and so the more high poly it ends up getting.  I'm also not sure any concave spots are allowed for it to work right.  So I'm not sure the mesh of one ship could ever protect another ship.  Would love to see that work though.

[Galemp]

I was under the impression that shield meshes which are too far from the hull of the ship don't work very well, causing the mesh to need to roughly resemble the shape of the ship it covers, the bigger the ship, the more skintight it needs to be, and so the more high poly it ends up getting.

This is true in most cases because you don't want fighters getting under the shield mesh. But what we're describing is the opposite; a shield that's many times larger than the shielded ship, that can act as an umbrella over smaller ships in its field.

[Colonol Dekker]

Nexus 2 shield footage was sexy hexagon shaped. It worked.

[JGZinv]

Granted I didn't put a ton of work into it, but maybe it'll help with visualization.
<snip>

Isn't that top one a Solar Sailer?

Correct, I included it for design, not it's function in the SW universe.

[Scooby_Doo]

Nexus 2 shield footage was sexy hexagon shaped. It worked.

Isn't Nexus 2 a different game engine?  The way fs2 shields work I don't see it possible unless some modifications are made.  It seems shields are based on triangles polys so hex isn't possible, although it would look very cool.

[Colonol Dekker]

We'll see how it goes on Dodgy mod

[Kusanagi]

I got it to work as a proof of concept!

Imported the Beast version of the Taiidani defense field frigate, and gave it a 320-poly shield mesh roughly 360 meters in diameter. Set some cargo inside of it and it worked perfectly. It takes about 15-20 seconds of fire from all 8 banks of a Circe-loaded Erinyes fighter to bring one quadrant down. Meanwhile anything inside the shield shoots at you with impunity.

Knock out the gigantic phallus at the front of the ship and the shields drop via sexp.

Got a few screencaps - there's still a few issues to work out mainly because I don't know much about converting/modelling, but want to learn.

Anyhoo, here are the screencaps:






Yes, I'm flying a Turanic missile corvette.

Is there some way to have a non-quadrant shield? I didn't see a flag in the wiki entry for ships.tbl, and the warpin Homeworld effect doesn't seem to work.