Starships without energy shields.

Your fledging civilization needs to develop a way to defend its ships against certain types of energy weapons from science fiction. You would like to have the ability to absorb,nullify,deflect, the pummeling as much as possible. You would like the system to be as light, compact, efficient as possible, and replaceable without a major overhaul.

The caveat is: You may not use scifi force fields. No bubbles of pink magic may protect your ship.

Realistic manipulation of any combination of energy, plasma, and matter, combined with sensory and information is acceptable. In essence, you can make plasma windows, magnetic fields, masers, lasers, armor, superconductive skin,etc.

Here are your hazards. Your system can be made specific to each hazard.
1 Galaxy class phaser blast. Assume neutrino decay theory if you want.
1 Ha'tak staff canon blast.
1 ISD turbolaser blast.
1 blast from a giant laser, as big as you think you can defend from
1 Hit from a ship mounted HALO universe MAC.
1 Hit from a Mass Effect ship mounted rail gun.
1 Hit from a Demarchy railgun.
1 Hit from a photon torpedo
1 Hit from a Mark 9 gatebuster
1 full broudside from the Galactica.

Your system does not need to be ideal in every circumstance, for instance a full galactica broadside might be defended against from long range only.

Theoretically, might it be possible to deploy a cloud of [something] (metal shavings, some specialized particles, whatever) around a ship to reduce the potency of energy weapons? They'd be dangerous against a mobile ship and need to be dispersed before moving again, but in theory it shouldn't be that difficult to have some fore-mounted system to blow a path through the cloud. If done, about how effective might the cloud be against such energy weapons?

Plasma-based shielding might help against the lower-end weapons, or if you project it a few thousand meters away from the hull and make the hull entirely out of CNTs and similarly tough materials it might even protect against the more powerful ones.

Not sure how such a shield would interact with a phaser blast, since phasers are pure handwavium.

It also wouldn't protect against the giant laser if it was a Xaser or Graser.

For similar reasons, it also wouldn't protect very well against the Mark 9 or a photon torpedo, since those release their energy mostly in the form of X-rays and Gamma Rays, respectively, which would penetrate the plasma. However, both of those can be shot down with point defenses, and if the shield is projected sufficiently far away enough (though there'd be significant technological challenges with doing that, to say the least) they may be forced to detonate far away enough that the energy that impacts on the ship is negligble.

So, to wit; CNT-based armor, Plasma Shields, ub4h-1337-h4x0r point defenses.

The plasma shield should in particular be useful against kinetic weapons, if you can get it to stack itself in a few dozen layers or so (which, again, is going to be a pretty difficult technical challenge) the energy from the kinetic weapons should be more-or-less rendered entirely useless.

Against beam weapons they'd be fairly ineffective. The first few microseconds they might absorb some of the beam's power, but after that they're just thrown clear away from the beam's path. Plus, whatever metal bits are thrown into space need to be really sturdy in order to decrease power by any noticeable amount. Factor in that these bits and pieces needs to be carried with the ship, and that they'd effectively be used up after a single use... That's just before someone designs weapons specifically meant to deal with such defences (i.e. a single low-yield explosive to scatter the swarm, followed by energy weapon strikes).

They'd also be fairly useless against projectile weapons.

Didn't think they'd be too effective, but was one of the few things I could think of that didn't entail dramatically increasing armor and / or trying to find some sort of material particularly reflective / deflective of incoming attacks.

They could potentially be more effective against energy pulse weapons. The kinds that fire pulses around the nanosecond/microsecond region in terms of duration. Even just a small piece of metal would be able to adsorb a lot of energy because the beam is so short in duration. From what I recall of the death ray site it would even continue sucking up energy for some time after it's been turned into literal plasma.

Interesting. So it could be a way to force the target to use continuous beams rather than pulsed beams, which would reduce armor penetration?

Depends on how smart the enemy is, I suppose. I mean this problem is easily countered by weapons that fire a low power beam to clear the debris away and then directly after a high-yield pulse to damage the armor on the vessel.

So basically only if the enemy is incompetent, or are using blackboxed technology of some sort.

Hmm. I can work with that.

Okay, without classic energy shielding, what can you do?

Magically tough materials that can somehow resist nuclear bomb level and technobabble forces being thrown at you.

Structural Integrity field generators that somehow increase the strength of your armor to again resist all that firepower. Best used in conjunction with the magically tough materials.

But if you a want REALISTIC means of resisting sci fi power? Sheer. Bloody. Mass. No material you have can reasonably resist Sci Fi firepower unless you pile on lots and lots of it. We're talking so much material that even Trek's NDF effect phasers will take a while to NDF away all your armor, which given that they can burrow through a planetary crust in seconds is going to be ALOT of material unless you discover you have an NDF resistant material you can make in quantity.

Can your civilization make a moon sized battleship?

Well, spaced armor and whipple shields in multiple layers would probably be a good way to increase durability without increasing mass radically. I think that's a good start, but I'm sure you could expand on this idea quite a lot and add other systems to work in tandem with it. If your ship has a lot of water (for cooling or just drinking) that needs to be stored, then put it in the layers between the armored plates, and it'd act as a sort of ablating mass. Yeah your ship would lose water if the outer hull was punctured, but if you're being fired on and the hull is rupturing, then I think water supply would be a lesser priority when compared to the crew surviving.

An active protection system that intercepts the projectile before it can impact the hull. Such a system would have to either have an energy similar to the impacting weapon or break up a solid piece of tungsten. A laser could vaporize the projectile but then you get super-fast plasma against your hull. I'm thinking it's best to "slap" aside the projectile, altering its course so it doesn't hit your ship, rather than try to stop or destroy it. Obviously such a system is far from foolproof.

These are delivered via slow, easily intercepted missiles. So intercept them with missiles of your own, railguns, lasers, anything. I'm thinking the APS system described above would be a little overkill but it could work. If you're mounting anti-fighter weaponry, then that would probably work. The yield of a Mark IX is so high that I don't think there's any reasonable way to defend against it should it actually detonate. Any attempt to counter the gatebuster must be with the intention of disabling it, detonating it prematurely, or causing a fizzle.

These are a lot harder to intercept as they are travelling at FTL. Which means by the time you see it, it's already hit. If you have FTL sensors, though, it should be possible to track the torpedoes, though I'm not sure what you could actually hit them with. I seem to remember photon torpedoes having a fairly low yield, albeit one still comparable to a strategic nuclear warhead.

For some of those weapons something along the lines of Eath Alliances interceptor grid or if your ships already have artificial gravity/anti gravity (Trek/Wars/Gate style not EA Omega style) then....

The biggest danger I think comes from the NDF effects of the phaser beam. Unless you have NDF resistant materials (which Trek uses), armor that can easily resist DEW multi-megaton turbolaser or staff cannon shots or relativistic slugs is going to get cut through like butter by the phaser's NDF effects.

I mean, I've already cited a starship phaser's ability to burrow a km wide through a planetary crust in seconds. That's hardly something you can do with a turbo-laser or staff cannon which deposits their energy mostly on the surface.

Would Homeworld style armor work? I.E tons of it? Don't have the exact details on me at the moment (brother using the computer that has the PDF manual).

Never played Homeworld, so I couldn't tell you.

Homeworld armor would work for everything except for the Phaser if there was enough of it.
IIRC The armor is a layer of ablative armor over a thick layer of (flexible!) Mono-molecular macro crystal.
Here it is

I wonder if the metal shard idea from earlier can be enhanced by using a powerful electromagnetic field to hold the shard in place and/or to concentrate it at the point of impact?

Quantum-dot programmable-matter skin, provided quantum-dot technology is versatile enough to create near-perfectly-indestructible materials or near-perfect reflectors. Or at least versatile enough to create metamaterials capable of diffracting energy beams and matter around the ship.

I can't believe no one's mentioned it yet....

Polarize the Hull Plating!

I always took that as using something like a proto-structural field integrity generator being used specifically to enhance hull strength. Which is an option I mentioned in my first post here.

What about conductive material (perhaps just strips or tubes of it) running throughout the hull that channel the energy into capacitors which are then ejected from the ship when they reach their limit?

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann anyone?

I'm surprised no one mentioned gravity control to force all enemy projectiles aside.

Probably because that would count as a forcefield?


Anyhow, short of using a thickness of armor best quantified as 'moon-sized' or some srs bsns scifi unobtainium, there's no real protection against an ICS-level turbolaser blast. Demarchist railguns have no explicit abilities but given they're thousand-mile long nuclear-powered railguns and fire 'tank-sized' slugs, they probably pack a heck of a wallop too.

Well, depending on the precise nature of a Turbolaser blast, it may be possible to intercept them at some range with some sort of point defense - if you could interpose some sort of object between you and the bolt, the bolt would impact the object and possibly waste all of its energy on it (again, depends on the precise nature of the turbolaser).

Of course, that's just a defense against "a" turbolaser blast. If you're actually going up against an ICS-level ISD, you'll be meeting several dozen of them per second.