We got a comment on our game Wingman I wanted to address. In the game, the player has a sheild capable of blocking incoming shots towards their ship while the ship is unshielded. The question is, why didn't they just put the shield on the ship? I KNOW this question is bothering everyone, so I wanted to address it here.

You can play it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/wingman

The reason that the spacesuit is shielded and the ship is not comes down to power consumption. Lets say that it takes 1 PU (Power Unit, the standard unit of energy in the far future) to create a 1 square meter shield. The equation for the area of a sphere is A=4πr2, so a spherical shield around the player with a radius of 1 meter would take 12.57 power units. The ship is significantly bigger and would take a spherical shield with a 5 meter radius, which unfortunately would consume 314.16 power units. As you can clearly see, projecting the larger shields becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of energy consumed, especially when the ship's power generator also has to supply power for the thrusters and the jump to lightspeed.

We could get around this by just producing the shield when the ship is about to be hit, but unfortunately shield technology doesn't have an instant on feature and it takes some time for the disruption field to be generated so the instant on solution just won't work. In the same way, the disrution field has to be generated around a central point which prevents just producing the shield along certain defensive arcs. Tre'vaar Technologies supposedly has a new disruption field generator utilizing the sinusoidal resonance of Etherium focused through a miniaturized black hole that would solve some of these problems, but scientists are divided if this is possible. Some believe that it will not work, while the others belive it will briefly, but will then result in the destruction of the universe.

So now everyone can rest easy knowing the scientific accuracy of the game about a space pirate being pursued to his lightspeed jump point by enemies.

Thank you for your time.

(@stames I'm just picking on your comment that was clearly made in jest :grin: I appreciate the comments and feedback, but I like giving specific answers to questions that were made in jest and don't really require a response)