First off, thanks for being so accepting, lots of forum goers get crazy if you attack their ideas.

The Marza uses Radiation bombs, not quite what i was thinking, rather, an actual nuke. For all we know, the Marza Radiation bomb is simply a gamma or neutron bomb? I was talking the million degree, 1000 kiloton bombs we have nowadays. would be cool, uncounterable maybe, and ultimately unusable, but still cool.

Do you mean EM fields as in a magnetic field to disrupt projectiles? Or as in Electronic Countermeasures vs Missiles?

I was talking about an actual magnetic field to stop slugs, or at least push them out of the way. As for missiles, like i said, thats all just programming and anti-countermeasures.

Okay, let me be clear, first of all, when i talk shields, i mean the shields you see in Star Trek, Stargate, and Sci Fi novels everywhere. The one that uses charged particles (or, in the case of space) some sort of exotic energy field to form a barrier against incoming threats, be they radiation, slugs, missiles, energy weapons or even just debris and space junk. You, i believe are talking about shielding oneself with countermeasures. im not saying the two are mutually exclusive, on the other hand, i think one without the other is stupid, but in the case of Sins, we just have the typical Sci Fi shields. If you read the manual, when it explained shield mitigation, it was talking about changing the field harmonics to more efficiently absorb damage. The 'shields' you are talking about dont do that. Also, i dont know how much you know about countermeasures, but nowadays, its not just one or two forms of tracking u need to decieve you actually need to decieve a whole suite of methods, hence why its called a Countermeasures Suite. lets take radio tracking, you jam one frequency, the enemy changes frequency, Radar tracking, you jam radar, enemy uses heat, you jam heat (very difficult) enemy uses optical. If you mean that energy shielding would have an inherent natural ability to disrupt missile guidance systems, then thats possible, however, it would only be on one 'frequency' for lack of a better word, and is therefore counterable.

Why would a laser not be harmful? A laser's power is related to A) the style of generation (i.e. chemical reaction or X-Rays etc) and B ) the range, which is a factor of the amount of power put into the laser.

Nowadays, we have laser cutting tools. Same principal applies to lasers as weapons, however i think the lasers in Sins are unrealistic. Beam weapons would be more how i see lasers. Lasers as a weapon would act much like laser cutters today, just longer range and higher powered. For the reason they would be harmful. Like Sawakaki said, everything has a point of failure. Story of the universe, its a race between discovering harder and harder materials, and more and more destructive processes. A tightly confined beam would definitly do damage. Sawakaki said 1/4 of an inch.. im talking like 720 nm (go look it up, its VERY small) NASA never had to counteract a hostile race firing supercharged laser cutters at them.

Now, these "navigational shields" what are they composed of? Do they shield against matter (i.e. meteorites etc) as well as radiation?

Also, we know simple things like Iron can block most radiation, so, 1000 years in the future, i think they could have developed a more effecient way to block radiation by incorporating it into the hull armor... that said, in combat, after the shields fail, the armor starts taking hits, meaning radiation could get in... but by that stage i dont think the crew is worried about radiation all that much...

And yes, we do have to forgive the game for alot, its an inherent failing of Sci-Fi that due to the lack of actual figures and the serious lack-luster nature of real science, Sci-Fi writers etc embellish a HELLUVA lot

Crashmatusow, we are way off topic. Not that I'm going to get back on topic, but just letting you know that I do notice and you are right.

Okay, I was thinking the Marza used a straight nuke, but I honestly didn't read the description of the weapon that carefully.

EM stands for electromagnetic field, thus what I'm talking about. I am not talking about countermeasures. The IDF tanks emit a constant EM field which causes the arming device of an explosive to detonate prior to impacting the vehicle, avoiding any penetrating damage. What I'm saying is that a force field (the Sci-fi one you talk about) would most likely counter missiles, potentially on multiple frequencies (see metaphasic shielding and rotating field harmonics). As for bullets, it is just a matter of conjecture since we don't know what repulsor technology will come.

The generation of a laser is moderately important. Assuming we have energy shields, we can also assume that the shields interact with a wide variety of spectrum. The strength and concentration of a laser is far more important. In the case of Sins, the ships only have to endure the radioactive equivalent of the van Allen Radioactive Belt. So a very powerful laser (range would depend on focus) would do damage. In the case of Star Trek, the 'navigational shields' endure radiation beyond any generated by a single object in the universe (makes you respect the Federation).

Current 'navigational shields' are relatively weak (but the goal is to shield against radiation, solar ejections, and micrometeroides). We have no means of erecting a stable energy field. What we do rely on is radiation resistant materials (btw, iron does block a fair bit of radiation, but it's also heavy and absorbs a lot of radiation, making it dangerous to possess afterwards. Not busting your hump, just saying) and short jaunts through space that minimize exposure. We are notoriously weak against micrometeroids, although we are seeking to rectify that. The Russians have developed a Deuterium treatment which does not stop deep space radiation exposure, but fights against the effects (predominantly cancer).

And just to poke fun at the devs... If it's so far in the future, why do we have to research ferro-ceramic armor we already have?

It would render everything in orbit completely useless except to the dumbest of players.  ANy smart commander would just time his attack force to blast your planet when all your defences are on the far side of the ohase lane.

How about a mirror?

i never resorted to name calling? and i especially never had to resort to it to defend my argument, seeing as you werent even talking about reality (that being, that for some reason you thought i meant all strutures should orbit, when, in fact, i was clearly only talking about starbases orbiting). read the post again, i agreed with you that automatically orbiting gauss cannons and the like would be stupid (realistic yes, but then Sins isnt totally realistic) however, i first suggested allowing starbases and starbases alone to move. and by move, i mean giving them the ability to move along a trajectory (much like an orbit). i later suggested making it an ability that needs to be commanded, just like telling the Vasari starbase (Orkulus) to move, or like telling a ship to move, except that the Advent and TEC starbases could only move to a limited extent (see my last post)

Whats the Kotsura? Do you mean the Kostura, the Vasari superweapon? i dont usually play as them so i cant comment.... but... are you saying it can move with a fleet? does it have phase jump capability? or are you postulating that the Vasari superweapon moving would be useless and... somehow, exploitable? i honestly dont know what you are getting at here.

All im saying is that currently, immobile starbase range seems to make sense (maybe increase it slightly) but by giving it a limited, controllable orbit, the Vasari starbase remains unique and the other starbases can be used more effectively.

The clone superman was able to get the lead ball(filled with kryptonite) out of his head by using his heat vision on a mirror in a hair salon!!! (Superman: Doomsday cartoon movie).

So it MUST work....

i always imagined that the sci-fi shielding systems we see in things like Star Wars, Star Trek, and Sins of a Solar Empire would have to be a fairly complicated array of different defensive systems. 

for example:

you could use wave interferrence to counteract many types of electromagnetic pulse type weapons. this would be incredibly energy consumptive though as you'd basically have to exactly match the energy emission of the weapon directed at your ship in order to cancel it. 

you could use dispersive surface coatings/angles (the same technology used for RADAR stealth in aircraft) to reduce the intensity of beam weapon hits. this could defend against Laser type weapons to a large degree. not all Lasers are light mind you, you'd also have to be able to disperse coherent X-Ray beams and other high energy stuff like that. 

you'd have to use an incredibly strong magnetic field (or some other kind of repulsive field) to take momentum out of solid projectiles. but that wouldn't stop a ceramic rod (or any kind of insulator used as a projectile). so you'd have to have some kind of ablative system for that. you'd probably never bother with magnetic deflection because it would not only be relatively easy to overcome but it would interfere with your own projectiles just as much as the enemies'. i'm thinking ablation all the way since it applies to all types of projectiles and doesn't screw your own stuff up. 

so those are some of the actual physical ideas that would have to be represented by imaginary technology. you could get ablative and dispersive effects with a sci-fi tech that produced fields that were effectively solid or semi-solid. configuring the field emitters in real time could allow you to adjust the characteristics of dispersion to be more effective (thus the raising of %mitigation over time). building up the virtual "thickness" of the solid field would allow you to have ablative properties that could be restored as the field recharged and gaineds its "thickness" back. 

so thats what i imagine when i think about sci-fi shields. its some kind of imaginary technology that uses energy to create a screen of what is effectively a customized solid surface with specific dispersive and ablative characteristics that can be adjusted on the fly to better match the weapons it is being exposed to.

its imaginary tech. there's no such thing as a solid field emitter. i've never even heard of any theory of modern physics that speculates that such a thing is possible. but this is sci-fi, if we want it we can have it. 

what i do think Sins has got right, especially with the TEC faction, is that 20th Century type weapon systems are actually extremely powerful and could still be used in recognizable forms even thousands of years from now.

high energy chemical propellants are a fantastic way of imparting Kinetic Energy to a mass projectile. the projectiles themselves can contain even more chemical propellants on the tip (i.e. explosive tipped auto-cannon rounds). the biggest problem with a mass projectile weapon would be range and momentum. this type of weapon would be hard to use at something in a very different orbital path. presumably a non-issue in a game like Sins because everything in the grav-well of a planet is in a similar orbital path around that planet. what we really see in Sins is a zoomed in view of the small slice of orbital that is suitable for building structures and fighting in with ships. 

guided missile weapons should also work very well. all the same benefits of a mass projectile but longer effective range because it could course correct. assuming that guidance systems could keep up with jamming and stealthing type systems there's no reason a conventional sort of air-to-air (space-to-space?) missile system wouldn't work perfectly. 

projectile and missile weapons actually benefit from being able to strike targets out of line-of-sight range if you have adequate telemetry at the time of launch. that could be a major benefit of this type of weapon compared to directed energy weapons, which would have to be almost strictly line of sight due to the characteristics of Light and other similar types of energy.

so i just imagine that any sort of range penalty you take due to slower-than-light projectile speed can be made up for by firing early and often using remote telemetry. 

in any case, modern weapons are incredibly destructive and there's hardly any sort of non-imaginary defensive system that you could put on a space craft that would adequately protect it from something as common in the 21st century as a Sidewinder Missile or 125mm shell. you'd NEED solid field projector type defenses before you could even contemplate militarizing your spacecraft.