- tjal
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Regardless of how the shield exactly works. All the bull-blam!- of thermal backlash and blabla doesnt matter.
1. you have a round with a certain speed and mass. When it hits it's target, depending on it being a solid collision or a elastic collision and the angle of the impact, some part of the kinetic energy is transferred to the target.
2. the shield is powered by something, which in turn allows the shield to deflect a percentage of the power generated (there is always loss in power). However, power: j/s and kinetic energy is simply joule, so I would not really know how much energy it can actually reflect. It could store energy, this way a smaller generator can reflect a very powerfull shot once every few minutes?
3. This is the most important part: the slugg has kinetic energy (the energy created by the impact can never be more then the kinetic energy and is most likely close to 75% of the kinetic energy, but that depends on the angle in which the slugg hits the target. So it doesn't matter if thermal backlash occurs or not, that's just another way of describing the way the energy is released.). The shield can absorb/reflect a certain amount of energy. If the shield holds, nothing happens to the ship, since all the energy is absorbed/deflected. If the shield do not hold, but can only aborb say 70% of the actual kinetic energy transferred from the slug to the shields, the rest is transferred to the ship. But again there will be loss of energy.
In my opinion this entire discussion is completely useless and full of people that don't have an understanding of physics.
We do not know how strong the shields are and we do not know how resistant a supercruiser is to damage (the plating etc.).
Ps: I'm not English, so don't go wreck on the way I write ;)
Pss: I'm a 2nd year Electrical Engineering (bachelor) student and I wrote this to the best of my abilities, there may be errors :S
[Edited on 06.12.2012 9:51 AM PDT]