Leaky Shields (SEIV)
From SEWiki
Just like armor, shields in stock SE4 are a magic wall that blocks all damage
until depleted. Just like armor, however, you can mod the shields to be "Leaky".
Leaky shields will typically absorb an average of 50% of the damage from normal
weapons, although this can vary from 0% to 100% depending on the implementation
details (See below).
Leaky shields provide a nice alternative to the all-or-nothing stock shield system. Combined with leaky armor, you will get ships that will occasionally take critical damage right from the first hit if they are particularly unlucky. Backup internals become very important, and combat will tend to involve many ships doing the best they can with a handful of damaged components each.
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Mechanics
The "shield generation from damage" ability is the core of the leaky shields effect. Each time a non-armor-skipping weapon hits the hull of a ship, all of the SGFD ability points are used to boost the shield points of the damaged ship. SGFD will add a number of shield points equal to the lowest of:
(A) the hull damage sustained from this hit (shield damage does not count)
-OR-
(B) the total SGFD ability points from all undamaged components on the damaged ship.
Note: The hull damage is NOT negated, and the ship will be left with some shields remaining AND some components destroyed or partially damaged. However, any partial damage will be added to the next hit and may trigger the SGFD ability again.
Implementation
Shield generators will be altered to have two abilities instead of just one. They will need both "Shield Generation From Damage" AND "Shield Generation". You may optionally replace the latter with "Phased Shield Generation" if you want phased weapons to participate in the leaky shields effect instead of skipping completely.
The value1 amounts of both abilities should typically be set to the same number. The shield generation amount must be equal or greater than the SGFD amount. If you set the shield generation amount higher than the SGFD amount, you will introduce a small amount of stock-like "solid shield" effect for the first few hits. Once the excess shield points are depleted, the "leaky shield" effect will take over from the "solid shield" effect
The actual value amounts of the leaky shield abilities will depend on many factors, including the size of the shield component, the weapons and mounts available to use against it, the size of the hull, and the armor system. Values of 1-3 ability points per kT of size is a good starting value, but will certainly need play testing to find appropriate values for your mod.
Be sure to adjust the descriptions to match the new effects of your shield generators!
Qualitative Effects
There are a number of different effects that you will see when using Leaky Shields. Unless otherwise noted, these effects are seen when averaged over multiple hits from the same weapon
1) If a ship takes individual hits with damage greater than twice the number of leaky shield points, then the leaky shields will act like emissive armor ability. They will reduce the damage sustained from each hit by an amount equal to the count of leaky shield points. This emissive style protection will be multiplied or divided by 2 or 4 if the weapon uses the quad/double/half/quarter to shields damage types.
2) If a ship takes individual hits with damage less than twice the number of leaky shield points, then the following applies:
Damage Type Average Damage to Hull/Armor Quarter To Shields 20% of normal Half To Shields 33% of normal Normal 50% of normal Phased 50% or 100% of normal Double To Shields 67% of normal Quad To Shields 80% of normal Skips Shields/Armor 100% of normal Only "X" 100% of normal
3) If the damage applied to the hull is not sufficient to destroy components, then the partial damage left over will be applied to the next hit. The partial damage must pass through the shields again, and the shields will get a second chance to block about half of it (for normal damage weapons, see chart for others). In effect, the first shot has just been blocked 75% by the shields instead of 50%. With sufficiently high-hitpoint armor/internals (2x the weapon's damage per hit) and enough leaky shield generation (2x the weapon's damage per hit again), the shield will be able to block 100%!
If you are using leaky armor, it is fairly easy to have enough shield/armor points to cause this, but since the armor is leaky, the weapons will occasionally hit a shield generator instead of the leaky armor, and the system will eventually collapse as the shields are destroyed.
