REAL Starship Shields Types - They Work Like This...Animated Breakdown! 

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Just one thing: most weapons in Star Wars are called lasers, but aren't actually firing light but ionised tibanna gas. (Similarly as laser sword blades are actually plasma blades)

Plasma shields do have another disadvantage, omitted in the presentation. The plasma will eventually run out. If used in close proximity or inside an atmosphere, the charged particles will react with the nearby matter and eventually lose their charge through recombination, turning them into non-ionized gas that will leave the magnetic bottles. On top of that, even left on their own, the charges will eventually recombine when moving along side the spiral trajectories around the magnetic force field. So as long as they are on, plasma shields have to be recharged. An alternative form of plasma shield can be an "electron cloud" shield. That is, using only free electrons as a plasma substitute. This will generate a negative charge bubble around the ship that will interact with the electron clouds of the normal matter and act as a deflector of sorts. Suffers similar penalties as the general plasma shield and doesn't stop heavy particles especially baryons with no charge, so your ship will be vulnerable to neutron radiation. Star trek i think uses local space-time distortions as their deflector shields. Several clues taken from LCARS and tech manuals support this. For one, the shield emitters strength is measured in Cochranes, same unit used for measuring warp fields. Then there is a graviton frequency associated with the shield state displays. Also, local force fields placed on doorways and corridors, seem to act in a repulsive manner to normal matter.

The Earth’s Ozone layer acts like shield for ultraviolet radiation through absorption and deflection. Intense light waves cause interference to lasers. Combine that with a film similar to solar panels on the hull and you could use the diffused energy of the laser that penetrates this shielding to recharge the ship. [edit:] This was an off the cuff comment, but since it’s spurred discussion, I wasn’t thinking specifically ozone, but particles that could act in a similar manner. My idea assumed a field to keep the particles in proximity to the ship or it would just pass through them like a plane through a cloud. Film idea was backward. It would be better to be reflective (as some pointed out heat shedding is problem in space). Anyway, thanks everyone for engaging with the topic, been a lot of quality ideas in these comments.

4:53 Star Wars shields consist of two overlapping layers of deflector shields. Ray shielding would stop "energy" such as plasma, lasers, electricity, radiation, etc. Particle shielding would stop physical objects from passing through it, bouncing/redirecting objects like strike-craft or asteroids off and away from the ship. An object that hit it on a pretty direct course or couldn't be deflected would end up similarly to running your car at max speed into a solid wall or sometimes disintegrated. The particle shield can also be turned on/off separately from the ray shield to allow strike-craft and shuttles to enter/leave the ships hangar.

Another interesting use of shield systems in sci fi is the reflex gun in space battleship yamato where the beam is reflected from different satellites with shields to attack a enemy ship from multiple directions.

About the ships getting knocked about even with shields up; while the real reason for this more likely for the sake of drama and keeping things interesting (hard to build tension of the crew can ignore the effects of weapon hits) there are two good reasons for it scientifically. First is conservation of momentum. If the shields stops an attack that has physical force (like guns and missiles) that momentum doesn't just go away and the shield generators have to absorb it. While you can lesson the felt impact by spreading the force over several generators you can only "cheat" so much. A smart design would have the generators on a sliding rail so it can rock back across it so slow the impulse of the impact (much like the slide action of a semi-automatic pistol) while also making it so that that the rail will fail if the generator takes to much impact so it rips away safely without taking a chunk of the bulkhead with it (I'd also have a reactive armor blow out panel behind it help slow it down one it's ripped away). The second is shields can only really spread out, deflect, deform or turn attacks bleeding energy out of them. If the shields are powerful enough then they can bleed out enough energy that the attack that it's ineffective but it the attack has enough penetrating power it can get through with enough force to maybe not damage the hull but knock the crap out of it.

There's actually a form of vehicle armor developed in the UK called electromagnetic reactive armor. It consists of two conductive metal plates spaced a few inches apart and protects the vehicle from damage by using high-voltage electricity to instantly vaporize projectiles that come into contact with the armor.

7:38 - would be interesting to see in a space battle a ship using 2 different types of weapon projectiles one right behind the other to fool the shields sensors like a plasma torpedo and there is a normal torpedo right behind it or the plasma torpedo is followed by a quick laser

In different Sci fi tech manuals it is explained that the ships that have shields will either use a quick rotation system or a layering technique. Your explanation of bleed through explains alot.

In my own sci-fi universe, shields are available and used, but some factions, including the various human groups, still use armor as the primary defense for their starships. Because most of the hostile alien factions favor plasma, laser, or particle-based weapons, human armor is specialized to deal with those kinds of weapons in particular, while still offering acceptable protection against kinetic projectiles. Laser weapons in particular are popular for any group that can make a powerplant and heat sinks strong enough for them to be viable because none of the shields in this universe can block them.

4:15 I love this animation... the idea of shield triggering only on impact makes sense and fits well with Stargate visual effects... The tuning for various damage types also fits well to this and was sometimes part of the story.

I always love your work..very well done..

I always thought a point defence system should be in star trek. Even if only a little incoming fire is Intercepted that by the point defence system it's still fewer hits on your Shields. So you could last longer in a fight. Just my two cents. Love your channel.👍

In the Honorverse by David Weber, gravity fields are used both as defensive shields and propulsion

The Expanse: haha, PDC's go BRRRTT

Fun fact: Magnetic manipulation of plasma is how Covenant plasma projectors (And most plasma projectors work.) in Halo. Most directed energy and directed plasma weapons work off this principle. Pulsed is harder.

Lasers? Mirrored hull plating. Kinetic weapons? Smart point defence batteries. Most effective tactic? Shoot first, shoot accurately, and from very far away. First rule of combat. I recommend Isaac Arthur's discussions on space warfare.

One of my favourite examples of unusual "shields" is in one of the Warhammer 40k novels, Wraithflight. Tyranid bioships are described as puffing out clouds of crystalline powder to refract laser attacks, while also having dense spore mine clouds around them and point defense to intercept projectiles, missiles and strike craft.

All neat and straight forward enough. I was wondering if you'd touch on the Galaxy Class' shields as this delves into new physics concepts that can be applied to defense. The Forerunners from Halo used slipspace technology (hyperdrives in SW) to compress light into a hard matter-like state. They also used it to manipulate panels and could reconfigure their ships on the fly. I feel science has a lot of unexploited potential and that no one is bothering to investigate that anymore.

There's also the 'sponge' type of armor or shields, that gobble up laser energy and dump it back into the ship's systems, usually into the point defence capacitors. There's Chaff and Microprism dust to consider, especially if you're already using magnetics to keep it dusting the ship. The armor is probably going to be some laminate to better deal with a bit of everything.

Very interesting. This mostly talked about real-world possibilities but that is still cool. I had no idea these form of energy shields were already so close to viable. And of course the Earth already has a shield!

That would work for me. But you could nest them. A weakpoint in energy shields is that if you overcome the powerplant's output, you could overcome the shields and if you match it you could render weaponry ineffective. So your energy weapons and shields would need to work from bateries that are constantly being resupplied by the powerplant and are drained on use. And you want to to to layer. The stuff that's tuned for c-speed threats need to be on all the time, but not all the way on. If hull sensors find that the armor is being heated beyond reasonable tolarence then they be snapped to whatever is reasonable. Anything coming in at less than c can stay off until the threat is calculated. Anything that makes your ship hard to hit would likely also make it hard to see and anything that makes your ship hard to see will also make it hard to see out. The ST: TNG Tech Manual states that their shields is a use of subspace to change the nature of space around the ship. It seems to me that if that were true, you could make the shields change in a chaotic fashion to make the ship harder to focus on.

I forget where I read it (it was over 30 years ago), but I remember some short story where the ships used reflective nested and overlapping inflatable gasbags as shielding. The reflectiveness and rolling helped dissipate laser energy and the gasbags worked like a whipple shield, breaking up fast kinetics. Of course, like Brennan-Monster, aka. Vandervecken said, the best defense is distance coupled with unpredictable movement.

when i used to draw my own spaceships, i gave them... i can't remember what I called it, but basically anti-laser shield which worked by first releasing a powder of ferromagnetic metal, which was then manipulated and held by magnetic fields... same as you describe plasma could be, except these were solid metal particles, thus opaque and would disperse and absorb lasers.

As you mentioned EVE Online, which i played a lot some years ago... One downside of Shields is a great strain on power source. I pvp-ed a lot in EVE with passive armor buffer, sometimes with shield buffer but mostly armor. So depending on situation, if you have some kind of home base close by to the battle, armor is better because it greatly frees up your ship's resources. In Star Trek, for example, where a ship is long time away from some kind of base or repair dock that is not good... but even in Start Trek in some combat scenarios, such as Wolf 395 or some battles in dominion war, maybe Starfleet would benefit from passive armor, or shield, tanked ships that have much more power resources to dish out damage. Especially at Wolf 395, imagine if Starfleet had a few passive tanked ships that could fire phasers with power twice or thrice greater than their ship should, think Miranda class with additional armor plates and with Galaxy class phasor emitters slapped on, just unleashing on that Borg cube and warping back to starbase for quick repair and out again.

Ok, I have to say it, there is another type of shield, one that redirects the energy of the inbound object into a different dimension. I am talking about the Void Shield from Warhammer 40K. Ships of the Imperium utilise a shield array that redirects weapons fire into the alternate dimension (used for FTL and is the domain of some very nasty entities) called the Warp. Void shields when activated form an energy layered shell around the ship, the Shield forms as a series of layers, the Void Shields can only take so much incoming energy fire before the layer collapses. Now ships of the Imperium are colossal in size, and will have a number of void shield generators, if the ship doesn't take fire for some time, the void shield will recharge at a very fast rate. These shields are also employed by the titanic walker units of the Collegia Titanica, the Titans. They have downsides, Psychic phenomena and warp storms can cause these shields to lose effectiveness, or fail entirely, they are very power hungry, and as with most imperium tech, their technical understanding on how these shield work is very limited. But then as with everything in WH40K, its very much grim dark, over the top, and utterly batshit crazy. Don't get me started on the Orks.

Good take on actual believable shields. A magnetic shielding would effectively make any kind of plasma weapon completely useless, which means no phasers or disruptors, not even Borg particle projectors, could harm a ship with such shields. Matter, on the other way, would be simply unstoppable, unless you created a sheet of really superheated plasma around the ship, as you suggested. But that would also create a barrier hampering both your sensors and light-based communications, especially your own targeting systems, much like it happens to any ship reentering atmosphere, when it is enveloped in plasma due to attrition. Also, magnetic fields and charged plasma offer little protection against neutrons, which can kill the crew in no time leaving the ship intact. Some media suggest using gravity to create a warped space bubble around the ship to simply deflect everything thrown at you, but that would mean to deflect also the light that allows you to see your enemy in the first place. A really dumb idea. Some kind of armor seems to be the best investment for any kind of space warship, then, because no matter what the shields are made of, they would still let something through. Also, shields require energy to exist, which can't last forever.

I’m doing a little challenge where I try to reimagine Star Trek without adding or removing any of the material (I can’t just add a fifth season to Enterprise or Drop Star Trek V without either taking episodes from other places to assemble it or putting a new movie in its place), and shield work is one of my top considerations. Your research and thoughts on this will be most helpful! Thank you!

In Star trek, at some point, the distinction stopped being made between deflector screens and shields. The original series mentions them along with The Motion Picture. When the A was being pelted with torpedoes from the cloaked bird of prey, it seemed as if they only had energy shields with no screens. You would think that deflector screens would have been more useful against torpedoes than standard shields as the shields were penetrated with every hit

Having researched this for over a decade (on and off) you're on the right track. Yes, tuning fields of electromagnetism can modify plasma clouds to do a lot. Additionally, a strong enough magnetic field can actually levitate non-magnetic objects. Look up levitating frog for an example. Strong magnetism can potentially slow or stop incoming bullets or even sheer them apart. Plasma shields are unlikely to stop physical objects, but they can soften them. The heat can detonate warheads and soften or even vaporize projectiles. That said, a plasma shield may still let through the resultant cloud of particles and this can still do significant damage, but armor can be used to stop the rest. Indeed, shields don't have to stop incoming fire. They only need to weaken it so the armor can do the rest. There is another type of shield I rarely see: spatial shielding. Any civilization sufficiently advanced to create warp drives can manipulate space time enough to make "bubbles" of spacetime. That's the basis of real warp field mechanics. If you can do that, you can shape space time in other ways like, say, bending a region of space back on itself so tightly it tears physical objects apart on the molecular level, and scatters incoming energy beams or packets. One major limitation of shielding is Isaac Newton's laws of motion. Specifically, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you shoot a shield with a bullet, and that shield stops the bullet completely, the kinetic energy is imparted on the shield directly. It has to go somewhere. Either the shield has to flex towards the ship, or the shield generator is pushed by the field or both. Hilariously, this could result in a ship's shield stopping a railgun blast, but the ship crumples in half like a tin can because the energy is imparted as a push on the generator. Or the generator is pushed so hard it rips out of the ship. A way around this is to have the energy change forms from kinetic (impact force) to thermal (heat). I'm actually writing a sci fi where that's how shields function. They're designed to slow or dissipate damage and let the armor take it. The energy is transfered to the shield generator as heat, and the limiting factor on shielding is how hot the generator can get before failing or melting the actual deck around it.

I always liked the physics around the warships of the Honorverse, makes for great long range battle visuals

I think some of the best examples of high sci-fi puts shielding, particularly plasma shields, are the Halo novels. Even in the earliest books, the authors take care to note that because the Covenant uses both plasma-based weaponry and high-powered magnetic shielding, the shields themselves are typically segmented and they must be powered down in order for covenant projectiles to pass through. However, because the magnetic tuning on their lighter plasma-based weaponry and shields are different, they can use these lighter armaments without compromising shield integrity.

With regards to defending against laser type Weaponry one of the Sci-Fi series I've read over fo years has way to do shielding against projectiles and energy weapons by using the same magnetic Shield approach you describe, and also suspending particles in the shield that are a derivative of the "brilliant Pebbles" concept from the SDI in the 80s, and is nearly the same as "Smart matter";the ships use magnetics to screw with physical projectiles, and use the pebbles/smart matter that "rides" the magnetic shield bubble to wherever they are needed, and ablate away to defend against particle beams and lasers/masers/grasers.

Would love to see an expansion on this video based around point defense as well! A comparison of armour, shields, and point defense weapons and a discussion of how they could be balanced out for the most effective defense would make such a cool video. Absolutely loved this video, you earned a happy subscriber :)

In Star Trek, I’ve always taken damage or movement despite the shields being up as just natural reaction to a force acted upon the craft and as the shield generators not being able to compensate for the extra force. That’s why you see EPS ruptures.

Sulu: "shields, SHIELDS!" Me: "shields won't be installed until Tuesday"

I'd like to hear his thoughts on the Holtzman Shields in Dune: space-time reactive Shields that stop fast moving objects, and react violently to lasers/energy weapons...

I would like to give a shoutout to Battlestar Galactica's *FLAK SHIELD,* which functions by delivering a continual barrage of steamin' hot lead in the general direction of your enemy. The don't even require sophisticated targeting computers. Just turn your ship's broadside towards the nearest enemy and watch their missiles and fighters explode mid-air.

About the point of shielding from lasers, plasma shields can do that. Plasma is opaque to lasers and stops them. That's why most lasers in the real world are pulsed. Their energy creates plasma along the path, which makes it opaque and wastes lots of energy, so they turn on, laser goes through, plasma builds up, laser is turned of, plasma dissipates and laser can fire again. It's done within nanoseconds so it looks like a continuous beam to us, even though it's not. A plasma barrier can therefore stop the laser.

Shields are just a lazy way to add stakes without needing to blow up their miniatures. I always appreciate franchises like the 2009 BSG and The Expanse for using armor and plating instead of some hand-wavey mystical energy shield that protects the model from being damaged

Sounds a lot like how star citizen approaches shields.

There was a tabletop game series back in the 1990's by FASA called Renegade Legion. Their shields acted by having a vibratory frequency, and affected both physical and directed energy weapons. However, they could not be maintained all the time, and had to be shut off and on dozens or hundreds of times per second. They pretty much automatically deflect incoming attacks that hit them, but the overall effect is a penalty to hit. They also could not stop heavier projectiles, such as full gauss cannon rounds. Therefore tanks would have "painting lasers" to measure the flicker rate of the shields, and enable them to time their incoming attacks for the moment the shield flickers off.

One correction: "laser" weapons in Star Wars actually don't shoot laser beams at enemies. They use lasers to create plasma bolts that are being shot at enemies.

Not sure about the Star Wars universe but Star Trek staffers have gotten pretty good at explaining how their tech works. Try reading through the TNG Tech Manual. "Deflectors Shields" are a TOS techno-babble because the writers and Roddenberry only had half an idea about anything Trek. By TNG these systems were better defined and while they work in similar manners, "Deflectors" and "Shields" are two separate systems. Both are modulated graviton fields but "Deflectors" are generally of low intensity for keeping small debris from shedding the ships hull but there is a secondary deflector that works similar to the tracker beam and is used to help move larger objects, like asteroids and comets out if the way. Both of these are emitted from the "dish" usually found somewhere on the front of the Ship. On the other hand, Shields are high intensity and high density gravitron fields that are emitted from grids mounted directly to the outer surface of the hull.

How did you make objects reflecting after the impact, did you use some physics or animated manually? Are you still in Blender?

This was also explored in an episode of StarGate Universe, where the crew of the Destiny discovered the shields of the ship where looping between every frequency needed to deflect and protect from every possible incoming object or weapon. When they tuned the shield for laser based firing only, the ship took almost no damage, but then the enemy started using bullets and missiles to inflict damage since the manually tuned shields would not stop that.

6:37. I agree with this a lot. I love stellaris's space combat because it takes this into account. Certain weapons can simply bypass shields, some weapons are terrible for combatting a sheild and take a lot of time to wear it down. Energy isn't infinite, and the shields would eventually runs out.

Am I finally early?

Since we're talking about how shields and armor are implemented across various canons, I think it's worth mentioning that in many settings there actually are ways to adapt and repair armor in the field. For example, in EVE, you can fit your ship with armor repair modules, though they're slower and less effective than getting repairs at a station, and armor hardeners can be used to dynamically increase your armor's resistance to various damage types. In Freelancer, you can deploy nanobots to repair your ship in the field.

The aurora borealis is not plasma. The plasma ionizes air molecules which are what we actuall see. So the aurora borealis is caused by plasma but it is not plasma.

I like how Stellaris does things kinetic weapons ignore shields but stopped by armor. Energy weapons eat through armor but are stopped by shields.

Keep in mind that in a gas, some types of lasers self-focus and filament into extremely intense beams of white light. This means if you're deploying a gas envelope around your ship and trying to refract incoming laser light, it may misbehave in certain cases by locally changing the temperature and chemistry of that envelope.

Something I don’t know if anyone has talked about (or has even realized) is that kinetic energy is still transferred across two interlinked objects even if that connection isn’t material/physical. I’ll use two examples, one of which I’ve actually seen in a RU-vid video. I’ll start with the one I haven’t seen in a youtube video, although surprisingly enough I figured out this whole thing and came up with this example specifically by thinking about Megumin’s staff, Megumin from Konosuba. Let’s say that you have a hard light energy generator that makes a plate of energy exactly and precisely one meter in front of it. Let’s also say that it gets hit by something fast or heavy enough to push it, a cannonball should suffice for demonstration. Because the plate of energy will always be one meter in front of the generator, if the plate gets pushed back, so too will the generator. In order for the generator to not get moved, the energy plate would need some other way to deal with the kinetic force of impacts. Because let’s do another thought experiment. You have a shield generator the size of a shed, and it projects a bubble shield 1km in diameter. Your ship is on a collision course with a large asteroid, and it hits your shield. You briefly think to yourself that maybe since the largeness of it means that the force gets spread out over a large surface area, and that might mean you’ll be OK, but no. All of that force has now been concentrated into the shield generator, making it like the tip of a pile bunker. Having lots of shield emitters scattered across the ship’s hull might diffuse the energy, especially if the emitters position on the hull don’t correlate to the position of the shield they emit, but I digress. Next is the youtube one, let’s say that you have a pair of superconducting magnets, and have gotten them to magnetic/quantum lock (this principle is what would be used in maglev trains). You then place the magnets on a scale, one of them hovering in the air due to the locking. You then place an object on top of the floating magnet, and if you didn’t predict this then to your surprise you watch as the scale shows an increase in weight. Even though it wasn’t through a direct material connection, the force of the added weight was carried through the superconducting magnetic fields and increased the force applied onto the scale. In conclusion I’ve never seen this directly addressed, although it does explain why you hear shield impacts in Star Trek and the like.

One of the things I like about Eve Online is that two of the kinetic weapon types, missiles and projectiles, can vary the damage they output. Missiles can be of a high explosive warhead, an EMP warhead, a plasma warhead, or essentially a shaped-charge with a sabot to propel the projectile through the shields or armor. {blasters/rail guns use a shell of titanium with a core of various metals/antimatter suspended in plasma)

At least in TNG, the navigational deflector used tractor beams for larger than microscopic particles. And the navigational deflector sensor array was used as part of tracking and adjusting of the deflector shields.

At about 7:40, you mentioned how EVE Online handles differing damage types, and it immediately reminded me of the system Star Conflict uses. In Star Conflict, there are three damage types: Kinetic, Electromagnetic, and Thermal with each damage type having different resistances. Kinetic damage is dealt by railguns, and shields have really good resistance against it, while hulls are weaker to kinetic. Electromagnetic damage is dealt by plasma, and it very quickly drops shields, but is less effective against hulls. Thermal weapons most commonly take the form of lasers, and they tend to be in a halfway point between Kinetic and EM damage. They deal less damage to hull and shields than the dedicated damage types, but at the same time, they deal more damage than one of the other two hitting it's opposite medium. To put it to numbers, on a scale where 100 is unmodified, kinetic damage would do 150 damage against hull, but only 50 damage against shields. EM would be the opposite, where it does 150 damage to shields, but only 50 damage to hulls. Thermal, being a halfway point, would do 100 damage to hull AND shields. Obviously the numbers are grossly exaggerated, but it gets the basic idea across. And ships can have modules installed that change how much damage they take, or how well they recover from damage. In my builds, I don't bother trying to modify resistances, because increasing one resistance tends to weaken you to another. Instead, I build for maximum shield and hull volume, combined with maximizing regeneration. Smaller, more agile ships are a bit different for me, though. Since they're normally much weaker than the bigger ships, I'll actually sacrifice hull and shield capability in favor of agility and speed, and rely on just not being hit.

yeah i think your bang on with bleed-through damage in star trek, i've been thinking much the same thing especially for the TOS era where ships are just generally less spongy. makes me think what did space combat in trek look like before the advent of effective shield systems...

Thanks for this :) I'm writing a world where magnetic shields are a thing, they are great against kinetic hazards, and they stop plasma dead, however, the plasma dissipation challenges mean that the ship has to deal with a heat surplus as the plasma is funneled towards the emitters, effectively making short range plasma weapons and plasma warheads a go-to effective shield breaker. Laser type weapons can be neutralized with ablative or reflective armor. However, reflection becomes difficult with X-ray lasers.

IN regards to the Enterprise series of ships in startrek, its important to note that the Deflector dish or otherwise specified as the "deflector array" is that colorful lit up section located on the front of the engineering section of starships. Gene Roddenberry described the deflector as beam that is shot off into space which eliminates all matter in its path as the ship travels at warp speed, so that the ship is not contacting small pieces of matter while moving near the speed of light.

I worked on a shielding device that was tested on the X37, basically a plasma layer cake of ion/electron/ion/electron alternating directions, intended to deflect alpha and beta radiation around an object. Works extremely well and low energy with the field modulated by a superconductor - which converts the kinetic energy of the radiation into thermal energy, picked up by the superconducting mass. Hit a big cloud of particles and watch a bit of liquid helium boil off

This is some pro video making and i love that there was a bit of all the sci-fi (seriously was that a terran wraith?!?). How are you not more popular?!

i would love to see an analysis of the different shield types used in Stargate. some of them can even hold back gas and liquids.

4:40 Worf: They are now locking lasers on us Riker. Lasers ? Worf: Yes, sir. Picard: Lasers not even penetrate our navigation shields, don´t they know that.

Real life shields tend to be physical barriers though: radiation shielding, heat shields, Whipple shields. This in turn blends the distinction between 'shields' and 'armor' when it comes to real life scenarios. Afterall, a shield was originally a piece of armor anyway. 🤷‍♂️ Similarly, when it comes to spacecraft the distinction between hull and armor IRL isn't as meaningful as it may seem. However, there seems to be a clear distinction between passive protection systems like these, and active protection systems (APS), which also include things like smoke launchers, decoys, and CiWS aka what we might call 'ballistic shielding', etc. I think it's better to talk about APS instead of just shields, which seems to be useful when proposing the more realistic idea that a ship's "shields" is actually an array of integrated systems of different kinds performing different tasks. In my own clumsy & clueless amateur writings that I am too shy & ashamed to share 😅, I tend to describe the systems you've mentioned respectively as artificial magnetospheres (or just magnetospheres), plasma screens or plasma belts (depending on the shape given to the ship's magnetosphere), and finally I tend to talk about the ship's 'ionised atmospheric layers' or IAL, for the gaseous component. And yes, that basically boils down to spacecraft which seek to imitate the kinds of protections that planets possess, the 'shell' or 'crust' being its composite armor layers. I have their magnetospheres and plasma screening being generated by their fusion reactors by the way, and their IALs sort of contained or shepherded by their magnetospheres around their crusts, thus all these APS are tied to the ships' power generation and propulsion (the generated plasma being usually channelled through, magnetically compressed, and accelerated even more by VASIMR type thrusters).

I had an idea once for a series where the manipulation of gravity has been achieved. This enabled FTL travel (by targetting points of space and pulling them closer with gravity beams). But another novel idea someone else pointed out to me is that a ship that could control gravity and lock things to it could use ozone, or non-newtonian fluidic shields. The idea being that the vessel vents an amount of ozone which is then held densely around the ship, which will burn up incoming projectiles and also dissipate directed energy weapons. The idea of using non-newtonian fluids would be such that the harder something hits, the greater the reactive force of the fluid, which hardens and breaks the projectile, while also dissipating energy in the same way as an ozone layer would.

Sooooooo glad you’re doing these videos again! Also taking on a sponsor was a fantastic idea! You may even call it brilliant!

In Warhammer 40k they use a different mechanic. Much like how their FTL engines are just "lets rip a hole into hell and hope we make it through alive and sane," their Void Shields are just shunting projectiles, energy, particles, and bad feelings off into hell until we run out of the power needed to do that. Then the void shield falls and you're screwed.

Insightful as always. Physics is pretty close to spot-on. The state of the art in plasma manipulation is still very primitive.... we have only been doing magnetic containment of plasmas for about 70 years. And fully magnetohydrodynamic code is processing intensive to simulate. You also have the problem that you need an electric field to also manipulate plasma and counter the problem that the poles of your magnetic field geometry will be weak (if using a quadropole field geometry).

Thanks. I needed this. I like the idea of shields in sci-fi and fantasy but always thought they were a plot device to just work as the plot needs them to work. With this knowledge in the back of my mind I'm finally able to "realistically" integrate them into my stories.

Fun thing with Star Wars shields and the Death Star attacks. The exhaust port (one of at least a dozen) had ray shielding, much like many of the exposed systems on the Death Star, and that made them immune to most blaster fire. However, the designers knew about the threat of a bomb being dropped into a critical system, and many of these systems were given particle shields as well. These can sit flush with most surfaces or enclose gaps, and are even used as airlocks due to how they interact with fluids. However, Star Wars particle shields by their very nature don't play nice with solids. They _need_ to have a gap between the edge of the shield and any nearby solid surfaces, such as those they are protecting, or they can overload or damage the surfaces. So, that plan and the crazy approach was actually 100% needed by the in-universe logic: a dive bomb approach would have protection from both bombs (upper particle shields) and blasters (inner ray shields), you _had_ to slip a physical projectile under the edge of the particle shield so it could then go through the ray shield beneath that. The solution for the Death Star II was also pretty simple in concept if complicated in logistics: Just have a massive offside base project a planetary-sized ray shield around the station, that way ships would crash into it if they approached. Throw up a sensor jammer and they won't even see what they're about to crash into.

Recently i was unlucky enough to see few kinda scientific( it stills fiction) videos, where was nothing about topic. Just some fog. But here i found some short, but reality-related basis. So i'm really impressed. Thanks for video

Also remember that the weapon commonly called a 'laser' is not actually a laser in most franchises, as an actual laser beam would be pretty easy to counter, and also travels at the speed of light. Lasers ironically *are* lasers in Star Trek, but are extremely uncommon. Most franchises however, a 'laser' is a bolt of superheated plasma or something similar, simply called a 'laser' for practicality.

In a sci-fi I'm writing, I make use of armors and shielding. At the start, the shields of the ships really don't do much. Most weapons are kinetic, so, smaller ships focus on mobility and larger ships armor, with some shield effect. The most effective shield is the MCs produced shield since in can make pin-point shields as needed, usually to deflect small projectiles, but, not very effective when hit with something, like a fist, though it can dampen it a little. It is described as a repulsing shield, since it emits from the body outward and dissapates (how, is a plot of the story). It is more effective at canceling/manipulating waves like light, magnetic, and thermal as far as machine scans go. Does not trick eyes, though. Later, you start to see weapons like lasers more commonly, where shields and armor both are more effective because kinetic weapons are too costly you use often. In all cases, bleed is posable.

I like the Shields in the game "I-War" ship shields were a function of the FTL drive. Consider: if you have the ability to warp space to move your ship, you can also use that ability to warp the trajectory of incoming projectiles away from your ship.

Programmable matter in Star Trek is gong to be interesting for shielding. You could, theoretically, create ablative armor, or change the properties of matter at the projected point of impact to something best capable of dealing with the threat. For example, if someone fires EM weapons, you could make that spot on your hull momentarily retro reflective, sending the energy back at the attacker. Transporter tech should see more use in defense, as you can get around the conservation of momentum problems. From what I have seen, transported objects conserve their momentum from the point where they were dematerialized and retain the speed and direction when rematerialized without exerting force on the “beam” apparatus. So, for projectiles, you could simply lock them and transport them back pointing a slightly different direction, even back towards the attacker. I also like the idea of programmable matter weapons that would have to conserve mass, but could figure out the best payload to deliver a given target milliseconds before impact based on sensor data.

Looking at klingon technologies, the cloaking device is based on gravitational warping, forming a shell around the ship. The warp core bubble is also a type of shield, since while the bubble moves through space, the ship is no longer a part of the universe. It follows that a warp field and a gravitation field can also be used as shields.

I mean, if you wanna stop photon- or plasma-based directed-energy beams like lasers, your hullplate would need to be tungsten D (for strength) with a flecfrac (reflective/refractive) coating of crystal microgranulate to break up and redirect incoming energy... Or just huck a beer can at the emitter. That usually works.

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Armor is great for ablative and conductive protection, a laser or particle beam hits and the heat /charge can be bled off over a large surface area, not to mention if the armor is designed to mirror finish itself when heat damaged. Which means you only have to shield so much damage or change how that damage is being applied, which means you can use shields to downshift from higher spectra to lower more reflectable ones.

this is why i love how shields, armor, and hull works in stellaris, it makes a lot of sense from many different standpoints. shields are very effective against lasers and plasma but awful against mass drivers, autocannons, missiles, and torpedoes. armor is very effective against mass drivers, autocannons, missiles, and torpedoes but is pretty bad against lasers and plasma (armor doesn't soak up heat very well in space, which is why the ISS needs such huge radiators), and hull is suprisingly effective at dealing with all damage types except for disruptors and torpedoes (since its the innermost layer the armor absorbs most of the damage while the hull absorbs the shock, disruptors counter this by weakening the integrity of the hull to the point of being brittle to any kind of shock). there are ways to strengthen/harden shields against kinetic weapons but this dedicates more systems and power to one type of defense, weakening the rest. you can harden the armor but you suffer from heavy costs for construction (not so much speed/maneuverability penalty bc weight is relative in space), but suprisingly hull is the clear defining winner in the early to mid-game in stellaris (not so much late game since there are no repeatable research tech's for improving hull unlike armor and shields).

I can think of a few situations in Star Trek where they had to up their shields game, - Vs the Borg. which could scan shield, & match harmonics. Similarly if you stole a Federation star ship, the captain of another Federtion ship could look up your shield freaquency, & blast you. - Shield Frequency matching also allowed a ship to use transporter beams, or pass through shields with shuttles and such. - Vs the Borg, the Federation had to up their shields game by remodulating their shield frequency. Same for their weapons, the borg adapted their shields specifically to the weapons being used against them, In order to keep their weapons affective ,the Federation had to modulate the phasers energy freqauency harmonics, or whatever. --- Another situation was with DS9, First the Dominion using phased polaron beams to cut through shields, The Federation had to adapt their shield tech. Seeing a galaxy class ship cut up with Phased Polaron beams like it didn't even have shields was a shocker to the Federation, Conversely when DS9 used a shield the was able to counter the Phased Polaron it was the Dominion that had the wtf moment. - Then the Breen came in with Energy dampening weapons. The Klingons accidently had a fix because of a modified tritium intermix chamber. Whatever that is. But again the Federation had to adapt their shield tech by reverse engineering the Breen weapon.

Keep in mind an additional factor that behaves an awful lot like a shield. Hard Kill Active Protection Systems. It's a lot easier to fire some little minimalist drone out to detonate beside or in front of an incoming enemy projectile, or hit it directly, than it is to make your ship armored enough to take direct hits. Being able to shoot some little interceptor out that turns incoming weapons into a cone of debris a few hundred meters out is both feasible with *modern* technology and extremely beneficial for defending a spacecraft where every gram counts.

with star trek's warp drives being able to bend spacetime, you'd think they could use that to redirect basically anything that exists within regular spactime

i should mention that deflector shields in star wars are mounted on smaller ships like freighters & star fighters, ray shields are mounted on warships, in cooperation with particle shields. particle shields work by acting as a strong magnetic field that induces gravity to push hard objects away from the warship, allowing it to absorb /vaporize, redirect & prematurely detonate torpedoes & other physical weapons. with this one with ray shields & projected in a space around the ship, the heat is dissipated by the cold vacuum of space.

Thermal weapons can probably be dealt with using plasma pretty well, as having matter disconnected from your ship take the brunt of the damage is the main principle of an ablative shield. To direct a collection of plasma would allow you to protect any part of the ship instead of needing to add an ablative layer to everything

Warp drives based off of Miguel Alcubeire’s model will also function as a shield since space itself is warped around you so anything that touches said bubble of spacetime will be instantly flung behind it.

Would you ever be willing to discuss the designs and possible doctrines and uses of the ships of Battlestar Galactica? Or do you only talk about series and franchises that you’re familiar with?

I’m working on some sci-fi stuff, and the starships have reflective hulls and plasma shields, so this is pretty lit!

You can see in startrek, that they also can modulate the shield frequency to deal with different frequencies of energy weapons which can be used to surpass the shields

In my own imaginary Star Trek ship called USS Destiny, I have a multiband shield system with a phasing cloaking device that makes it completely indestructable when cloaked and also the weapon systems do work when cloaked. It also has a transwarp capability and a spore drive.

It sounds to me like the most practical strategy for shield use would be to have a tunable plasma shield that's normally set to deflect the most common forms of high-speed weaponry, with some sort of detection system that can retune on the fly to respond to slower moving threats.

in one episode of STTNG once they met a Ship which still had Laser as Weapons, Riker mentioned with such antiquated Weaponry their opponent wouldnt even be able to get through the navigation deflector but Phaser on the other handy is powerful enough to get through

I absolutely LOVE that ship design near the end of your video, it looks like a Romulan type of ship. It looks pretty badass!

Static shields project a field of static electricity that discourages or even fully disables people passing through by doing exactly that; projecting a static charge (the kind you feel when a thunderstorm is coming irl, or when you drag your feet on a synthetic surface and touch a radiator or other conductor). In Titan A.E., Star Trek and Star Wars we sometimes see people pushing through such a shield with great pain to the person attempting this.

This was a great video, explaining how energy shields can really be used effectively against multiple types of weaponry. (The Star Trek Technical Manuals explain the tech in more futuristic terms - activating a giant magnetic field can wreak havoc with all kinds of present-day technology, avionics and electronic control systems for engines [ !!! ] among them.) Really the limiting factors to energy shield effectiveness from this angle seem to be •Threat knowledge and preparedness • Energy output and heat dissipation • Reaction time and computing power Two additional points below:

In Star Trek, shields and deflector technology are based on the use of graviton generators. In essence, they harness artificial gravity to create a graviton field. For the main deflector, which is primarily used in warp flight (though impulse flight to a lesser degree) to create a line of artificial gravity in the ship's flight path. This has the effect of "deflecting" or altering the trajectory of objects that would otherwise hit the ship in flight. This is generated by the "dish" at the bottom front of most starships. Shields, however, are generated by grid like structures on the hull itself. This is the typical "bubble" like shield effect you're used to seeing in the show and is most commonly what you see enemy weapons "hitting" in the series and movies. These are intended for combat but also general radiation protection. This is also most commonly what they refer to when they say "shields are at 47%". Deflector shields are required for warp flight. Standard shields are required for combat protection and will not protect the ship at warp velocities from objects on the ship's flight path. There's a little gray area in the recent movies in the TNG era where the shield bubble was no longer there and it was sort of acting like Star Wars shields. I don't know if this was intended or not, but the inconsistency is annoying.

Star Trek Beta Canon (Best Destiny) explains there is a difference between the shields of Constitution Class and Excelsior Class. Constitution was designed with multiple types of shields that overlayed and were focused to defend against a specific type of attack, Excelsior has a "General Shield" that protects against all of them but can't automatically adjust.

Elite Dangerous handles it in interesting way. The shields there look like a generic energy barrier, but they are actually physical. The shield generator crates a transparent layer of matter that is maintained in a form of bubble around the ship. When something hits it, it acts as a physical barrier and passes the inertia to ship, and when they are hit by laser or other type of thermal weapon, it becomes opaque in a small area of impact. Bigger ships require more powerful generators as the area of the shield grows exponentially with the size, big ships that are more than 1km length are not equipped with shields at all.

a note regarding star wars ray shields use against lasers, is that "laser gun" in star wars actually refers to a laser in the gun used to create the energy bolt. The bolt itself is plasma.