- anton1792
- |
- Noble Legendary Member
"Find where the liar hides, so that I may place my boot between his gums!" - Rtas 'Vadum
Posted by: tjal
You are saying that if you punch a house, the house explodes because it doesn't move? Or if you shoot a tank with a pistol, the tank should explode because it doesn't move? (actually they do move, but only a tiny tiny bit.)
The ship weighs A LOT more then the mac round, meaning it never moves a "significant" amount. Do you even know what inertia is?
Inertia is not time based, so there can't be a "before" when considering inertia. Inertia simply is the formula with F = m*a
I actually think the ship will move a few hundred yards when it is hit by something really powerfull, regardless of whether the shields hold or not.
By your example, if you hit the shield with a ping-pong ball, the ship would explode because it doesn't move.
And you can counter energy with energy. That's exactly what the shields do...
Um, that is not what I said. In fact I did not say any of those things. I didn't say the ship explodes because it doesn't move, I said the shield generators are destroyed because the ship's overall mass doesn't accelerate quick enough.
I'll explain it more. When the ship's shields are hit with the SMAC round, momentum is transferred to the shields from the round. The shields are generated at a source, which is obviously the shield generators themselves. So there is momentum transfer through the shields to the generators, and thus to the rest of the ship as a whole.
The ship in this case cannot be looked at as a contiguous system. It has many parts to it which are all connected together by a variety of load bearing structures. (Screws, bolts, girders etc) What I am thinking is that it can basically be looked at as "Shield generators + general ship mass". The inertia of the generators is significantly smaller than the inertia of the general ship mass, therefore they would experience a greater acceleration than the rest of the ship due to the momentum transfer. (A changing momentum implies a force)
So what I said was that the momentum transfer is so great, the resultant force so large that the shield generators would probably be torn from their mountings, especially when we consider that Covenant shields are compartmentalised. (It was mentioned in Ghosts of Onyx) Small sections probably with their own generators. If any of these get hit then that patch of shielding is just gone completely, regardless if the power output of the shield is actually enough to "dissipate" the energy of the MAC round.
Shields are not some wall that completely protects the ship until they get depleted, or at least they shouldn't be. If they did exist, then their function would probably be to simply redistribute the force over as many points as possible (The generators) thus lessening the overall damage to the ship. The advantage of shields over a hull however is that they can regenerate; hulls cannot. They also don't seem to yield under pressure, instead only giving way when they run out of power; hulls just crumple and break in the spot that they are hit, and this also means that all the force is delivered to one location whereas shields can spread it out. Several wrecked generators is still better than a MAC round going straight through, but in this case the SMAC round might still have enough energy to keep on going after the shields in that area are gone.
Posted by: Xd00999
I'm not complaining about the fiction, I'm just making an observation that might make the UNSC's so called "primitive" accelerator technology actually better than the Covenant's (And maybe even Forerunners eventually, if the energy of their MAC weaponry could ever get higher) plasma weapons. Plasma weapons might deplete shields faster than projectile weaponry (Perhaps due to it transferring more of its energy to the shield than a projectile, though I wouldn't be too sure about that), but projectile weapons would reach a certain energy where they can punch right through regardless of how powerful the shields were. To combat energy weapons, more powerful shields. To combat projectile weapons, better ship structural design, stronger materials, more shield generators to distribute more force.
Forerunner construction materials are incredibly strong, so a SMAC would likely just bounce off of their shields in the same way that a MAC bounces off of Covenant shields. And Precursor materials are apparently invulnerable to conventional damage, so they render both types of weaponry useless in the end.
[Edited on 06.15.2012 10:46 AM PDT]