Silverware wrote: ↑Sat Apr 14, 2018 4:07 am
However, do remember, with the advent of shields, ramming becomes a mostly non-useful tactic.
Your opponent is winning? his shields will be up, yours wont, you die, he survives.
Your opponent is losing? his shields will be down, yours up, he dies, but you could have just shot him again. :V
That depends a very whole lot on how shields handle things that are a whole lot larger than bullets :V
pulsed magnetic shielding does perfectly fine to deflect rockets and bullets but will have a whole lot harder time deflecting something that weighs tons instead of single digit kilograms at most :V
or they could have the same problem as shielding tech in Dune, inability to block slow moving objects.
And a ship is a whole lot slower than a bullet or missile.
Or how shielding interacts with other shielding.
(With shield tech being available some variation would very likely be incorporated into structural design. Ships would partially consist out of force fields)
Or simple conservation of impulse could fuck you up more than the external collision, by ripping out the shield gen and pushing it through the soft juicy innards of your ship (very nicely illustrated in Neal Asher's Polity series' hardfield generators)
TL;DR: without knowing how shield tech works any claim about "it makes blah useless" is very much a shot into the very dark :V