Basics: Shield Resistances - #00064
Vive la resistance!
Anonymous
In order to fully understand the technical blah that follows, you should have a basic understanding of Elite's damage model, which consists of four 'pathways':
- RAW damage - mechanical damage by rams and hitting objects like ships or space stations
- THERMAL damage - caused by weapons of 'thermal' type like lasers
- KINETIC damage - caused by weapons of 'kinetic' type like cannons (of all sorts)
- EXPLOSIVE damage - caused by missiles, mines and torpedoes
General damage 'pathways'
Unmodified Shield Generators...
... as in 'fresh from the shop', which have never seen any engineer's love, are said to be weak on lasers and strong on kinetic weapons and explosives.
Let's look at a basic shield's resistance values, a random outfitting says here:
Explosive 50%
Kinetic 40%
Thermal -20%
On a stock Cobra for example, this translates a raw shield value of 124 MJ (4A shield generator) into protection of about
248 MJ in EXPLOSIVE damage (50% resistance)
207 MJ in KINETIC damage (40% resistance)
and
103 MJ in THERMAL damage (-20% resistance)
To the mathematically adept cmdr (No way, not me!) it is obvious: 50% positive resistance doubles the raw shield protection value for the given damage pathway.
All shield generators are created equal...
... is true for all unmodified shield generator modules, not so much, more the contrary is right for engineered shield generators.
In engineering...
... there are a multitude of options in modifications (and in experimental effects on top of that).
A lot of CMDRs opt, for example, for a thermal resistance modification on shield generators, which is basically a good thing:
Without the need for a bigger power plant, without added module mass and other hassles comes a modification that enhances your shield generator's thermal resistance from
-20% to +40% with a grade 5 thermal resistance modification
(Okay, your shield's kinetic resistance decreases a bit, but hey... it was way too high either way)
This jump from -20% to +40% on our dutiful as-an-example Cobra Mk III lifts your little ship's damage resistance against lasers from 103 MJ to 207 MJ - which is basically twice as much!
... read more on page 2