Sci-Fi shield or not to shield.

Im working on a Sci-Fi novel and I cant decide if I want shields to be a thing within the universe im writing. I like shields personally and they can help add more identity to the ships of each race or faction imo, but I wanted to get the opinions of other sci-fi genre fans.

I have made use of other distinctly sci-fi concepts such as artificial gravity.

I think they should be used, for two major reasons:

1) We thought of them. History shows, what Sci-Fi writers invent in their stories, are often invented in real!

2) Besides the protection they could offer vs. Klingon weapons (et.al.), they could also be used to protect the ship's outer shell from man-made and natural space debris, as it moves through solar systems.

If your ships are travelling at the kind of velocities required to move people between planets before they grow old and die, then those ships will need shields and shielding of some sort to protect them from hitting dust and rock, which however small, at that kind of speed would be lethal to all aboard. So, if they already have shields to protect them against natural disaster, it will automatically become a defence against weapons attack too. However, weapons will be designed to penetrate these shields, and shields will be redesigned to protect against the improved weapons, and so it goes...

I prefer the non-shield B5 and BSG ethos, if only for the gritty feel this imparts.

I assume that you're talking about specifically some sort of 'energy field' shield, as opposed to the 'mechanical' sort they put on the International Space Station - Whipple shield - Wikipedia

Shielding is a logical consequence of advanced space travel and potential space battles. Not having shielding for any reason is illogical and impractical, and I'd say effective shielding would predate advanced space travel 9 times out of 10, as the latter cannot be possible without the former.

You would have a very tough time rationalizing not having shielding of some sort, breaking suspension of disbelief, for me at least.

I can see not having an energy shielding system on some ships.

Heck I had idea for some back water planet to have ships without fancy computers or anything like that. Everything would be down to the pilot. So manual everything, of course the implications of such mean one screw up and well..

Which would make the ships highly primitive in comparison and not having an energy shield would make their ships turn up as space debris if scanned by other ships Which in itself might be an advantage. Or not depending on what the scanners are searching for!

Yeah, shield technology is basically a prerequisite for interstellar travel – unless we invent a wormhole ship first, which is basically almost as plausible as a ship that hurtles through the universe at light speeds or above. (And, technically speaking, above light speed travel may be downright impossible, since it takes infinite energy to move something at light speed.)

Dave said:

If your ships are travelling at the kind of velocities required to move people between planets before they grow old and die, then those ships will need shields and shielding of some sort to protect them from hitting dust and rock

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In the Star Trek universe, most of this is handled by the deflector dish, rather than the shields. Shields are only raised during confrontations, and rely on fairly dubious speculative science. I would say it depends how “hard sci-fi” you are leaning. Personally, I like them.

One of the most realistic of interstellar travel scenarios has ablative shielding in the form of ice which must be replaced every so often.

Don't leave the solar sytem without them.

Parson said:

One of the most realistic of interstellar travel scenarios has ablative shielding in the form of ice which must be replaced every so often.

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I first came across this idea in Revelation Space (Alastair Reynolds' classic). However, ablative has been used on various high speed atmospheric vehicles for quite a few decades now. So it's a natural transfer of an idea from one environment to another.

There is an engineering alternative to using an ablative shield - namely a self-repair hull. Research work has already been done for spacecraft designed to orbit the Earth. I'm not sure how far this has got to. It has one possible advantage over ablative shielding... it means there is significantly less risk of one part spaceship's structure failing due to repeatedly being bombarded by particles / meteoroids / dust (whatever you want to call it).

I think ye olde energy shield is a bit of an outdated idea. And how does it work, exactly? It's like a magical ward, an ephemeral barrier which can be overpowered for story purposes.

Why would you expend energy on shielding your ship when mechanical and physical means are more efficient? Armour doesn't weigh more in space, it won't slow your ship down, and we already have technology to make bulletproof t-shirts and flexible glass. It isn't hard to extrapolate that in an interstellar age ship armour can be physical without requiring several feet's thicknesses of material.

You could use nanomachinery for self-repair hulls, but do remember that the bulk, the mass of material they use to effect repairs, must come from somewhere. Perhaps your ship harvests material from space debris and asteroids and stores it for future use should it be required - again, this won't increase the "weight" of the ship or make it harder to propel. We already have nanotechnology, so that's not too hard an extrapolation either.

I can see an energy shield being something similar to a process like GTAW. (Tig welding) where you are inducing plasma and directing around the hull of ship. Might not do much for travel as the energy costs would be a bit high, but it would burn the hell out of anything that it touches. This would be a defensive thing, I could also see there being a gravity shield if you could manipulate the way gravity goes around the ship you could simply reflect things that are physical by never having it get near your ship or simply orbiting. Which honestly could also work great if you have that much control over the gravitational properties around your ship you could theoretically use space debris as shields or even launch it at enemies.

Nanotechnology for self repairing could easily be done with the collection of resources. Heck I had a thought of the backwater people's ships being called dust burners as thats what they use to fuel the ships is the random dust and crap the intakes can scoop up as they're going through space.

I do wonder just what is out there, There might some new materials or constructs which were we don't know about. You might have a material with a crystal structure that is able to grow if feed the right energy or etc. I know crystals can grow pretty fast as the damn salt rock lamp I have has doubled in size and exploded the bulb inside of it. It's just a growing giant chunk of salt right now. It made a good lamp, but I can't physically fit a bulb in there anymore. So an alien race could easily go for it.

I speculate you might be able to simply go down the route of having the ship be designed like a freaking tank. As it oh yeah she'll get plastered, but the materials it is made out of is able to take the hit, and even through engineering or simple design philosophies be able to disperse out the force. This would be critical with the front design of the ship. This is how I imagine the backwater people doing it.

Or the creepier option. MAKE IT ORGANIC! Self repairing? Check, designed to withstand quite a bit. Check? Making people question the implications of having a cancerous, lichen like growth on the hull of your ship? Priceless!

Farscape used living ships to very nice effect.

Problem with relying on physical armour is that big enough space debris could alter the ship's velocity or even throw it off course on impact. And once we take into consideration higher-velocity ships, coupled with the velocity of space debris... I don't think there's a material that could withstand such impacts straight-on, no matter how advanced the tech. Ablative armour helps with that, but it's still not enough, specially considering bigger ships, like a generation ship. Some energy shielding external to the hull would be nice to soften the blow. Doesn't the military already have energy shielding against bullets and missiles? Granted, it's made to be used in conjunction with air, IIRC, but we aren't that far off.

Living ships are a good idea. If they were made of some cartilage substance they could even be flexible enough to take hits straight on with minimal deviation of trajectory, and elastic enough to withstand direct decompression (if punctured) without "breaking".

Are the self-repairing hulls already in place at NASA? I recall they were working on a sort of foam behind the hull, that would rush in to cover damage and then immediately solidify.

Ihe said:

Problem with relying on physical armour is that big enough space debris could alter the ship's velocity or even throw it off course on impact. And once we take into consideration higher-velocity ships, coupled with the velocity of space debris... I don't think there's a material that could withstand such impacts straight-on, no matter how advanced the tech. Ablative armour helps with that, but it's still not enough, specially considering bigger ships, like a generation ship. Some energy shielding external to the hull would be nice to soften the blow. Doesn't the military already have energy shielding against bullets and missiles? Granted, it's made to be used in conjunction with air, IIRC, but we aren't that far off.

Living ships are a good idea. If they were made of some cartilage substance they could even be flexible enough to take hits straight on with minimal deviation of trajectory, and elastic enough to withstand direct decompression (if punctured) without "breaking".

Are the self-repairing hulls already in place at NASA? I recall they were working on a sort of foam behind the hull, that would rush in to cover damage and then immediately solidify.

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The paper I came across was Australian in origin, but that was a few years ago now. Don't know if NASA has taken up the research.

When you get towards larger and creepier generational ships the rules change.

When I was thinking of physical armor using materials and engineering I was imagining a small ship. Maybe I should go write that backwater planet thing as a short story.

If you're writing hard science fiction, be prepared to explain the tech to some extent either way. Other than that, choose what feels right for the story and the world. You can make both work, so it's really down to what you'd rather write about. My very general impression is that space combat involving shields is usually a bit "cleaner," with combatants less likely to suffer any damage of consequence since much of the firepower thrown around is deflected before reaching the ship itself. That said, you can do whatever you please, as long as you keep it consistent.