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Captain Seafort wrote:

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Given the lack of visible damage, most likely the shield. Plus, the entire Rebel fleet turned away drastically to avoid hitting the DSII shield, so I tihnk it's reasonable to infer that hitting active shields is a bad thing.

We can do more than infer. From the novel:

RotJ, p168 wrote:Three flanking X-wings nicked the invisible deflector shield, spinning out of control, exploding in flames along the shield surface.

Or you know, the fact that that they specifically sent a commando team to take it down? They wouldn't have bothered if you could just fly through it. And that they specifically had to lower a bit for the shuttle to go through.

I'm kind of shocked there's a question here.

Though, they could and did fly through the DS1 shield. I'm figuring there are multiple kinds of shields and the Endor one was 'nothing gets through' kind of one. I was going to say maybe the trade off was it was double-blind and nothing gets out either but the superlaser clearly could.

Applying that same logic to vulnerable bridge windows would also make sense. Though I wonder if the oscillator is armored in the same sense as AT-AT walkers, in which it is a semi-active system that partially deflects rather than purely absorbing the energy.

That is actually the most likely explanation of how they work. Why else would Han repeatedly talk about angling the deflector shield? He is probably changing the shield geometry so that the incoming fire literally deflects off it. From a purely physics point of view, deflecting incoming energy or mass is always going to be easier than trying to stop it in it's tracks.

Crazedwraith wrote:I'm kind of shocked there's a question here.

Blame Brian Young. For years he's been using one instance of velocity-dependant permeability, in which it was explicitly stated that that characteristic was a design feature to improve the mobility of a shielded ground-contact vehicle, to claim that all shields are similarly permeable unless otherwise stated.

Kind of related question: Why were the rebels able to simply fly to the DS1 in ANH, but had to break off due to the shield being up around the DS2 in RotJ? Was there no large theater shield in the first instance? There was mention of a magnetic field, but I figured that was either due to jamming or perhaps the DS1 was just dumping out huge amounts of Em as a waste product...

Or maybe that WAS the shield and they managed to penetrate it due to shield-on-shield interaction. 'We're passing through the magnetic field, set deflectors to double front.' That's always been my interpretation anyway.
Alternatively, the main shields of the DS1 were ray shields while the one protecting the DS2 was particle/both. Speculation: Ray shields you can physically pass through and live (if you're shielded yourself). Particle shields: you go splat.

Crazedwraith wrote:

Captain Seafort wrote:

Eternal_Freedom wrote:Given the lack of visible damage, most likely the shield. Plus, the entire Rebel fleet turned away drastically to avoid hitting the DSII shield, so I tihnk it's reasonable to infer that hitting active shields is a bad thing.

We can do more than infer. From the novel:

RotJ, p168 wrote:Three flanking X-wings nicked the invisible deflector shield, spinning out of control, exploding in flames along the shield surface.

Or you know, the fact that that they specifically sent a commando team to take it down? They wouldn't have bothered if you could just fly through it. And that they specifically had to lower a bit for the shuttle to go through.

I'm kind of shocked there's a question here.

Though, they could and did fly through the DS1 shield. I'm figuring there are multiple kinds of shields and the Endor one was 'nothing gets through' kind of one. I was going to say maybe the trade off was it was double-blind and nothing gets out either but the superlaser clearly could.

A more reasonable conclusion is that it is a power and efficiency problem. The Second Death Star required a truly massive shielding facility powered by its own separate reactor. Perhaps a capital ship would require shields that are not economical to keep attacking fighters out. Given that their turbolasers and defending fighters do a perfectly adequate job against enemy fighters, it isn't worth it to waste energy against fighters on the off chance they can get through. That would lead to you dying even faster against enemy capital ships, which are the largest threat regardless.

Neocronlord's point is an important one. That fighters seem capable of damaging capital ships that aren't already being obliterated by opposing turbolaser fire, meaning their shields are still active. There must be some reason why. Though there is the alternative that fighters are instead hitting weak points in shielding rather than flying through it directly. That could also be the case in many scenarios.

Captain Seafort wrote: Blame Brian Young. For years he's been using one instance of velocity-dependant permeability, in which it was explicitly stated that that characteristic was a design feature to improve the mobility of a shielded ground-contact vehicle, to claim that all shields are similarly permeable unless otherwise stated.

Though there is the problem that we see other cases in which the same thing appears to occur, with several cases in Clone Wars in which it appears to be happening to some degree. It would also nicely explain the case of Executor's destruction as well as the fact that anyone bothers to actually build and deploy starfighters in major fleet battles in a manner that suggests that are at least somewhat effective.

Though I would argue that it only works properly when the shields are already weakened to some degree in the majority of cases. Notice that battle droids only tried walking through the Gungan shields after bombarding it first and seeing it noticeably falter, with the droid commander apparently ordering a cease fire once the shields had been suffeciently weakened for a ground attack. While that is not the case against the first Death Star, or Hoth or Droidika shields, those are likely weaker at the seams due to the way they operate. The First Death Star has notably weaker defenses, Hoth had rerouted power to oppose an Imperial bombardment rather than a ground assault(given that Reikan ordered preperations for one immediately), and droidika shields are relatively weak due to size limitations.

Batman wrote:Or maybe that WAS the shield and they managed to penetrate it due to shield-on-shield interaction. 'We're passing through the magnetic field, set deflectors to double front.' That's always been my interpretation anyway.
Alternatively, the main shields of the DS1 were ray shields while the one protecting the DS2 was particle/both. Speculation: Ray shields you can physically pass through and live (if you're shielded yourself). Particle shields: you go splat.

I would also suggest that this is the key to how fighters can occasionally pass through shields, by using their own shields to fool the system into letting them pass through. Remember how theater shields work? People can pass through them because of ground contact, fooling the sensors into treating the person as part of the ground. Presumably starfighters can do the same thing against capital ships in the right circumstances.

Or it is just an efficiency problem. The first Death Star never expected a fighter attack to be a serious threat, and so build a cheaper shield grid to allow more power to be rerouted to charging the superlaser. Many capital ships could similarly do the same thing.

Adam Reynolds wrote:A more reasonable conclusion is that it is a power and efficiency problem. The Second Death Star required a truly massive shielding facility powered by its own separate reactor. Perhaps a capital ship would require shields that are not economical to keep attacking fighters out. Given that their turbolasers and defending fighters do a perfectly adequate job against enemy fighters, it isn't worth it to waste energy against fighters on the off chance they can get through. That would lead to you dying even faster against enemy capital ships, which are the largest threat regardless.

This could explain the size difference between the first and second Death Stars. Perhaps the second one is larger in order to accommodate planetary-grade shield generators that would make the battlestation truly unassailable to any attack even after it left the protection of Endor.

What 'truly massive' shielding facility? Compared to the Death Star itself that facility was tiny. Unless you know about some supermassive underground installations that would take up a large fraction of the DS that curiously don't get mentioned in the movie?

Batman wrote:What 'truly massive' shielding facility? Compared to the Death Star itself that facility was tiny. Unless you know about some supermassive underground installations that would take up a large fraction of the DS that curiously don't get mentioned in the movie?

Are you talking to me or are you hallucinating that the Joker is talking to you again?

Either way, I agree with you. However, the shield generator station seemed mostly underground and the electrified machinery in the background seemed like a cavernous tunnel of some sort. That tunnel may have extended for kilometers under the surface for all we know.

I was talking to Adam Reynolds actually. The shield generator facility we saw on Endor may have been humongous by modern world standards, but compared to the Death Stars (even if we accept Disney's idiotic 120/160 km sizes) it was microscopic. They could probably park it in an unoccupied storeroom somewhere. That's how freaking large the Death Stars are.

Why is 120/160 idiotic? I thought 120 was accepted by everyone for the DS1 only the size of the DS2 was controversial. Even then, I don't see why 160 is so bad.

I always assumed the DS1 to be 160km (IIRC its diameter is supposed to be 100x the length of an ISD) while the DS2 was at least 200-320km, the extra size going for a larger reactor, more fleet support facilities, and fuel.

Galvatron wrote:Why is 120/160 idiotic? I thought 120 was accepted by everyone for the DS1 only the size of the DS2 was controversial. Even then, I don't see why 160 is so bad.

This has been done to death. Movie visuals say 160/900 km.
Irrelevant to the topic at hand as even the 120/160km DSes could easily fit the shield facility as seen on Endor.

And would somebody please please PLEASE fix the thread title?

Batman wrote:And would somebody please please PLEASE fix the thread title?

I thought Shelds was short for Sheldons, since we're basically a bunch of Sheldons talking about Star Wars technical minutiae.

Why so serious?

Galvatron wrote:Why is 120/160 idiotic? I thought 120 was accepted by everyone for the DS1 only the size of the DS2 was controversial. Even then, I don't see why 160 is so bad.

Well, according to a late-production drawing by Ralph McQuarrie released on the (defunct) fanclub Hyperspace on the OS, the first Death Star was intended to be 92 miles (148 kilometers) in diameter with the equatorial trench being one mile in height.

Batman wrote:I was talking to Adam Reynolds actually. The shield generator facility we saw on Endor may have been humongous by modern world standards, but compared to the Death Stars (even if we accept Disney's idiotic 120/160 km sizes) it was microscopic. They could probably park it in an unoccupied storeroom somewhere. That's how freaking large the Death Stars are.

According to the old ITW book, it was an underground facility taking up 70 km. That wouldn't fit in a storeroom. Presumably that size was mostly taken up by facilities dedicated to dealing with waste energy, something the Death Star is not nearly as capable of given the exhaust port problem. Being on a planet it would also be much easier to absorb the momentum of things like collisions as well as having the possibility of dumping waste energy into the planet in some sense. While that would not exactly be a good thing environmentally, I don't think the Empire cares.

Anyway, I also meant massive relative to Star Destroyers more than to the Death Star. The first Death Star likely had weaker shields because so much of its energy production was dedicated to charging the superlaser. The second Death Star being bigger would actually mean a lower ratio of surface area to total volume, making dealing with waste heat even more problematic.

I was talking about the parts we actually saw in RotJ.

And since when is Wars limited to conventional radiators to deal with waste heat?

I always thought the question of waste would be moot given the gaping hole that leads strait to the reactor. Any solution they'd make for the exhaust port problem was most likely not implemented yet by the time of the big kaboom.

Waste heat isn't the same thing as waste.

Esquire wrote:Waste heat isn't the same thing as waste.

What ever it is that was going out of that exhaust port I think we can conclude that it should also be able to evacuate through the opening twas large enough to accommodate a dogfight.

ray shields were established in the SWTCW episode "the box" to be lethal to almost any biological organism with one exception. as for particle shields and concussion shields, there is no mention of concussion shields in current canon at all with the exception of the ICS, same with particle shields. there is a mention of thermal shields in SWTCW "cat and mouse" that deflected (proton?) torpedoes. in any case, almost every cap ship shield seen has been vulnerable to projectiles like torpedoes. the only 2 exceptions that I can think of is admiral trench's ship and the droid control ship in TPM.

texanmarauder wrote:ray shields were established in the SWTCW episode "the box" to be lethal to almost any biological organism with one exception. as for particle shields and concussion shields, there is no mention of concussion shields in current canon at all with the exception of the ICS, same with particle shields. there is a mention of thermal shields in SWTCW "cat and mouse" that deflected (proton?) torpedoes. in any case, almost every cap ship shield seen has been vulnerable to projectiles like torpedoes. the only 2 exceptions that I can think of is admiral trench's ship and the droid control ship in TPM.

If capital ships were simply that vulnerable to torpedoes, why would anyone ever use turbolasers?

The vulnerability is not to missiles directly, it is to starfighters that can bypass the primary outer shields.

Adam Reynolds wrote:The vulnerability is not to missiles directly, it is to starfighters that can bypass the primary outer shields.

There's not really any difference between starfighters carrying torpedoes and torpedoes if they need to get super close to exploit gaps in shields except that one has a more flexible guidance system and is less payload efficient. If small craft/warheads really could routinely bypass shields unaided by heavy capital gunnery, then droid fighters would be more useful strapped to seismic charges and kamikaze'd into key components.

Who says that's how they do it? For all we know the fighters use their own shields to cancel out the capital ship's ones to pass through. Have fun trying to put shield generators on something the size of a proton torpedo