Shield Design

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This next area is top secret but you have been cleared to take a look around. This is the shield section of our research facility and you will get the full tour while you are here. Shields are meant to be a supplement to defense not the primary method of it. Shields have two configurations which you will most likely use a lot and which one you use will depend on the size of ship it is for. Shields depend heavily on the special research you have available. W will look at basic configuration and look into some of the basic design principles.

Shields have five fields that you can manipulate and they are the hit points, the recharge rate, the recharge interval, the hull size, and at the bottom it has the shield color. The hit points determine how much damage the shield can soak up. The recharge rate and recharge interval go hand in hand. Recharge rate determines how many hit points you can recharge for every recharge tic. The recharge interval determines how long it takes between each recharge tic. Essentially if you put the two numbers together you can come up with a recharge per second by dividing the rate by the interval. So three hundred rate and one second interval means you can counter three hundred damage per second before you ever have to worry about the total hit points on your shield dropping. Finally we have the hull size of the shield which determines how large a ship it can cover. A three thousand hull shield can be used on any ship that has a size lower than three thousand but can not be used on any ship above three thousand. Also the max hit points allowed before you start taking large penalties on your design is twenty percent of the hull size, anything over that and the design nears impossible. Once you have picked out your initial numbers you can move on to the three mineral slots which are the Coil, Accelerator and Casing slots. Finally you have the shield color with seven colors to choose from: Teal, white, yellow, orange, blue, red and purple. Every time the shield takes damage a hollow sphere will surround your ship in the color you chose.

The first thing we will talk about is maximizing the recharge per second. This is heavily dependent on the size of the shield and the research available. Dividing your hull size by four hundred gives you the optimal number for research time versus power consumption so you will not always use this but it is a nice thing to know. That number is not as important for smaller shields but the larger you get the closer to that number you will have to be. You are able to maximize the fighter hull right off the bat so you can follow the steps below to make one as an example. This is a good general shield to have in the beginning because it gives you an edge over any unshielded ship of comparable firepower. You will be able to improve this design concept later as you unlock more research. You can never have a rate that exceeds the maximum hit points so always keep that in mind. The whole point is to have your interval as low as you can get it then raise your rate as high as you can before the design becomes flawed. Once numbers start jumping into the impossible range you know you have gone too far. At this point you will match your hit points to the rate and you have the best numbers for that recharge per second. So for the fighter set your projection size to three hundred, your rate and hit points to 60 and your interval at eight seconds.

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