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.
