Tech advice for my story, please

[Korto]

I'm going to post this here, as I would appreciate some people more knowledgeable about weapons and tactical engagements running an eye over it to make sure it makes sense. The complete story up to this point is in User Fiction if anyone's interested.

Ship of Cards (X)
It was almost time to leave for the big match, a poker match that, win or lose, I lose, since my employer has instructed his men that after the game I’m to be taken somewhere and killed. You know, I’m sure that’s not Award conditions.
Fortunately, Old Nick’s PA, Lin Yan, has slipped word to my crew about what’s going on. Unfortunately, the last she spoke to them they had no plan about what to do about it.
I’m bundled into a car, and we go off for a ride in the country. Leaving the colonised area, the native vegetation quickly takes over; thin tangled struts holding up thin and hard shell-like domes of dappled reddish grey; it reminds me of home, despite there being no similarity to Botany’s bluish cotton-ball tufts as large as your head dangling from gossamer threads from translucent white trunks.
I’m getting maudlin. Happens when I’m being taken somewhere by people who plan to kill me.

A gate silently opens to let us in, and the difference is jarring. Lush green grass and Earth weeping willows. Someone has money.
The house is large and elegant, the architect had achieved eclectic life while avoiding garish vulgarity; carved vines wound around columns, gargoyles grimaced down upon us below while cherubs peeked out from hiding with looks ranging from surprise to impish glee. It wasn’t the best example of Tikan-Rococo I’d seen, I’ve seen ship bridges where, no matter how familiar you were with it, there was always something new to see, another sculpted figure, a face, or hinted story in a sidelong glance, but this was good none the less. It showed taste.
The car’s hum died as it powered down and we got out, stepping onto white crushed gravel. Two large men dressed in sombre black were walking towards us from the house. Security types. I could see the needle pistols under their coats.
“Mr Nicholas? Mr Nicholas is...”
The words were interrupted by a nearby thunderous boom, and I had already started to run while the guards were reaching for their guns and turning towards the noise, and then the whole world went sparkling, hissing, white.
Wite-Out (tm), opaque to most known scanning; radar, infra-red, supersonic, and Zarrin’s favourite smoke bomb. In a flat run I was out of the obscuring cloud, and eyes streaming, running for cover and freedom. Behind me I could hear the ear-splitting crack of hypersonic needle rounds as someone returned fire.
A rapid booming beat of a bass drum, and more billowing white clouds appeared, as if in response there was a prolonged crack that sounded like all the trees in an Earth redwood forest were snapped like dry twigs.
A heavy needler? That’s military issue! What the hell had I gotten myself into? How quickly can I get myself out of it?
Another cloud of Wite-Out stopped the heavy fire, and skimming swiftly towards me in a cloud of dust was a ute I didn’t recognise but with two occupants I did.
“In! In!”, screamed John, but it was advice I scarcely needed as I wrenched open the door and piled into the cabin. The ute lurched momentarily as the vertical thrusters compensated for the added weight.
“Welcome home!”, shouted Anya from the driver’s seat, “Now we pick up Zarrin!”
“I laughed “You’re my three musketeers!”
Anya caught the referance and smiled, “All for one, and one for all.”

Notes - A Needler uses a rail-gun to fire an armour-steel needle at supersonic velocities. A pistol fires the lightest and slowest, a heavy needler (equivalent to a machine gun) fires the fastest and heaviest (depending upon the model, of course).

This weapon was developed to deal with the combination of armour and force-field. The armour is made out of a material (ceramic steel composite, aka "compo") that if, for instance, it was made into a suit of all-covering (head to toe) combat armour it would be less encumbering then modern battle armour and provide more protection then modern apcs (it can protect against all practical 21st century sidearms, you need things like rpgs to penetrate).
The force field absorbs incoming energy over a certain threshold intensity (eg, a pistol bullet would have sufficient kinetic energy to be affected), but works best when the energy transfer is spread over time or area. That is, 1 MJ over one second or 1 sq centimetre would do significantly more damage then 2 MJ over three seconds or 3 sq centimetres.
The needler attempts to pack as much Ke into as fine a needle point as possible to destroy the field and penetrate the armour.
And despite being called "Needles", they're more like slim darts.

The weapon Zarrin is using is pretty non-controversial, I think. It functions as a magazine-fed grenade launcher, able to take a wide variety of different ammunition.

[madd0ct0r]

if you're handwaving an 'abosrob KE forcefield' the rest is fine

[Korto]

I'll use that as an excuse to provide more information.
I'm trying to keep as much real physics as I can, dumping it when it gets in the way of what I want.

I'm using force fields (in this case, called the Alkembri field) because I want to have melee combat being an important part of war. Not all-powerful, it'll be horses for courses, so if it's open terrain, guns rule, if it's close and personal keep your power-sword handy (or whatever. I'm probably kidding about power-swords. Probably)

The Alkembri field absorbs "free energy", which is energy as we usually think of it; kinetic, heat, electromagnetic, etc. It doesn't absorb "bound" energy, such as potential energy (gravitational, chemical, etc).
It absorbs the vector of the energy which is directly inbound (perpendicular to) the plane of the field. This incidentally means it is possible to fire out of the field without trouble.
It wont absorb energy of an intensity below a certain threshold. This threshold is adjustable up or down, referred to as "more in tune" and "more out of tune" respectively. The more "out of tune" the field is, the less energy intense an attack needs to be before it'll be blocked. There are problems with an "out of tune" field though.

Momentum is conserved, and is transmitted equally to all force field generators in the array (typically hundreds). These generators are typically embedded into the rear of the armour or other suitable plate (for instance, a common infantry armour is flexible scale worn over tough plastic plates. The generators are embedded inside the plastic plates), and are designed to withstand heavy shock.

The field extends out a distance, depending upon the surface area of the field. For instance, a field around a man may extend a couple of centimetres, while around a starship it extends for metres. It doesn't absorb all the energy of an attack instantly, but saps it away increasingly quickly as the field depth is penetrated.

When an attack hits and energy is absorbed, it forms a "hot spot" in the field, which is then conducted evenly through the field and radiated away. A field however can only deal with a certain maximum energy contour, so if there is too great an energy contour the field naturally spreads the incoming energy out and draws energy from the power supply into the surrounding area to reduce the contour. A field's ability to do this is proportional to its level of "tuning".
Energy radiates outwards from the field as electromagnetic, evenly in all directions, as a black-body radiator.

This leads to the three ways to destroy a field:
1) Spontaneous Cold Failure (aka Brittle Fail)
Brittle Fail is a spontaneous collapse of the field when struck. The risk of this increases with:
* The “coldness” of the field (a field with no suspended energy is "cold", and becomes warmer when it's absorbed energy)
* The lack of “tune” of the field (One reason why a field is kept as tuned as possible)
* The "pressure" of the attack (amount of power over area)
What causes brittle fail is not understood, although it's quite rare.

2) Sustained Peak Feedback Failure (aka Burnout)
Shield burnout occurs when a field is kept at an overly high temperature, and the field generators literally burn out. The point this happens is well known by the manufacturers and there will normally be a display showing the user the overall shield temperature.
Sometimes a single powerful hit will not be able to spread fast enough and the local generators burn out from the energy contour, leaving the field intact elsewhere. Other times, since the field naturally spreads the energy, the whole field is under heavy stress and localised failure causes cascade failure.

3) Power Exhaustion (aka oh fuck, someone lend me a battery)
This is simply when the field's energy supply runs out, and so the field collapses. The largest energy drain of a running field is energy drawn to even out contours, which then radiates away.


I believe this field would also protect very nicely from explosions, the over-pressure, shrapnel, and the like. I would be interested in hearing of easy ways this field (combined with the armour) can be defeated at range, as that's what I'm trying to not have. It should take sustained heavy fire to take someone down.

[Jub]

So, if I'm reading this right, the shield basically turns incoming energy into heat. What's the KE like on the type of gun that would drop a decently made and tuned shield through sheer brute force and how much less energy does that take than sustained fire from a normal infantry weapon? I ask because depending on the energy involved flame based weapons might come back in a big way, especially if a shield can help cover the range gap between a guy armed with a rifle and a guy armed with a flame thrower; though that might be under your range threshold for being concerned about one hit kills.

At range it seems like you'd have two main options heavy, fast, and slim or tiny, fast and lots close together. Things like metal storm would fit the later and I could see people carrying computer aided multibarrel weapons and trying to unload a tube into people for a potential one hit kill. Going simpler you'd see less full auto and more burst weapons, like those Russian rifles that can put two or three shots down range before recoil kicks in.

Thinking outside the box you might also see other more interesting weapons. Soime top of mind ideas are things like gas grenades that have a binary explosive designed to drift in through the shield one part then the other and go boom inside the protected zone or a dust designed to foul heatsinks and force early shutdown. You might also see more conventional chemical weapons forcing each side to fight totally buttoned down. Not sure if any of those are as practical as I think they might be but top of mind they seem like avenues I'd try if I was facing them.

[Simon_Jester]

I'll use that as an excuse to provide more information.
I'm trying to keep as much real physics as I can, dumping it when it gets in the way of what I want.

I'm using force fields (in this case, called the Alkembri field) because I want to have melee combat being an important part of war. Not all-powerful, it'll be horses for courses, so if it's open terrain, guns rule, if it's close and personal keep your power-sword handy (or whatever. I'm probably kidding about power-swords. Probably)

The Alkembri field absorbs "free energy", which is energy as we usually think of it; kinetic, heat, electromagnetic, etc. It doesn't absorb "bound" energy, such as potential energy (gravitational, chemical, etc).
It absorbs the vector of the energy which is directly inbound (perpendicular to) the plane of the field.

Nitpick to make your vocabulary neater follows.

"Energy" does not have a vector. Perhaps it would be best to say that the Langston Alkembri Field* 'damps' two things. One, it damps motion perpendicular to the plane of the field. Or only inbound motion, though it might be interesting to require that the field 'flicker' off whenever you want to shoot out through it.

That explains the damping of kinetic projectiles' energy. It also explains damping heat in the sense that the Field will tend to drain a lot of heat from any objects moving around inside its zone of effect, including molecules. Especially if the damping effect is more dramatic for higher per-particle energies, it would thus tend to stop something like molten metal from coming through at its full terrible heat.

It also damps electromagnetic fields parallel to the plane of the Field, which makes it opaque to electromagnetic waves- since if the wave is traveling "up," then the fields that compose the wave point "left" or "right." Think of waves created by plucking a taut horizontal string: the waves travel along the string to the left or right, but the motion of the string is up-and-down.

The question of "where does the energy go" is nontrivial and beyond the scope of this reply.

*You are not the first to think of it.

This incidentally means it is possible to fire out of the field without trouble.

Directionality is a separate issue, we can worry about that later.

It wont absorb energy of an intensity below a certain threshold. This threshold is adjustable up or down, referred to as "more in tune" and "more out of tune" respectively. The more "out of tune" the field is, the less energy intense an attack needs to be before it'll be blocked. There are problems with an "out of tune" field though...

Among other things, air molecules and pistol bullets travel at roughly the same speed... A Field which seriously damps the velocity of an incoming projectile below about 500 m/s will become increasingly hard for air to get through, which is bad enough. But if it costs energy to make the field damp something, it's even worse, because your Field is permanently left trying to damp out collisions with the air, and acting as a sort of very expensive refrigerator.

Then again, if your material science is good enough you don't need to block things traveling at 500 m/s, because unless somebody does something ridiculous like lob a ten-kilo cannonball at an individual infantryman, the armor will stop it.

On a side-note, a very hard-held version of the Field would be an interesting way to achieve cryogenic refrigeration, although you might have limits on what you can do with it because things like electric currents don't behave normally within the Field.

This leads to the three ways to destroy a field:
1) Spontaneous Cold Failure (aka Brittle Fail)
Brittle Fail is a spontaneous collapse of the field when struck. The risk of this increases with:
* The “coldness” of the field (a field with no suspended energy is "cold", and becomes warmer when it's absorbed energy)
* The lack of “tune” of the field (One reason why a field is kept as tuned as possible)
* The "pressure" of the attack (amount of power over area)
What causes brittle fail is not understood, although it's quite rare.

Could you outline a set of conditions under which the Field might actually 'fail brittle?' Your description is too abstract for me.

I believe this field would also protect very nicely from explosions, the over-pressure, shrapnel, and the like. I would be interested in hearing of easy ways this field (combined with the armour) can be defeated at range, as that's what I'm trying to not have. It should take sustained heavy fire to take someone down.

Well, the obvious way to do it is with very massive projectiles that are not blocked by the Field, assuming the Field is not cranked up so high that it starts deflecting air molecules. "Slow blade passes" like from Dune, in other words, except that a Napoleonic cannonball may count as a slow blade. Just as well, since you probably don't want goofy choreographed knife fights from Dune.

To make the projectile effective at penetrating armor you'd probably do something clever with explosives, and hope that the effects of an explosion detonating inside the zone of effect of the Field will either get through, or at least burn out the Field generator by creating a very steep energy gradient in that area.

The typical armor piercing weapon for artillery would be one of the 'explosive' types like HEAT and HESH. Not because that's a magic hard counter to the Field, but because it's the least bad solution to the problem.

Beam weapons would rely on either raw energy transfer, on pulsing your weapon so that it locally overwhelms the Field's ability to conduct incoming energy away from the point of contact.*, or getting a very narrow spot size for your beam to focus on to achieve the same result.

*Say, the Field overloads at an energy density of 100 kJ per square centimeter, and conducts away 100 kJ per millisecond. Landing 200 kJ over a period of a second is not a burnthrough because by the time the second 100 kJ arrives, the first 100 kJ has long since been conducted away. Land the same 200 kJ in a microsecond and BOOM.

**Say, you land 100 kJ on one square millimeter of the armor; you get a localized failure, though it may not do a lot of good depending on how the field reacts to failure. Does it pop like a soap bubble, or do you get an unhelpful result equivalent to drilling a 1-mm hole in a steel plate, which has basically no effect on the plate's strength?
________________

Your real problem is bringing back melee weapons in an environment where material science is so good. I know I couldn't swing a battleaxe hard enough to put it through the kind of armor you're describing...

[madd0ct0r]

incendiary bullets or bigger flare-slugs could be a way to force hot overloads, particularly with your initial description, since they'd fall slower in the field too. Petrol bombs would look very pretty.

and hey! if you get a glancing hit the side of the projectile in the field slows down, reorintating the bullet towards the person! = Homing bullets!

[lPeregrine]

Two more things that would probably be considered as counters:

1) Exploit conservation of momentum and just hit the field hard enough to rip the generators out of the armor. Obviously this at least shuts down the field, and potentially rips them out of the armor and through the person wearing it (a hit from the back would send the back-mounted generators straight into your vital organs). And of course with larger weapons the blunt-force impact becomes a big problem even if the structure survives. You could have a grenade that aims for maximum blast wave to stun the person and knock them down, and then stab them to death while they're helpless.

2) Two-stage rounds designed to cause a local failure and then slip the second shot through the gap. If you want to avoid this you'd have to make sure that the size of a local failure is smaller than the accuracy of the second shot, so getting a hit through the shield requires too much luck to make the idea practical.

Of course for large-scale battlefield use chemical weapons would be common (at least in the absence of political factors) since the field won't do anything to stop a slowly drifting cloud of poisonous or corrosive gas. But since you're not trying to make them immune to guns at long range that's probably not too much of a problem, in a close-range fight where sword and shield troops are useful you probably don't want to be using chemical weapons.

[Korto]

First important thing - The field starts from the field generators and radiates out. As the field generators are underneath (embedded into the back of) the armour, this means that when a projectile hits the armour it is still within the field, and as the field's power increases at an escalating rate as it is penetrated, the projectile would not even have reached the strongest part yet (the field it has so far experienced could even be insignificant). I see this as just an unavoidable fact of the way it works, and not deliberate on the manufacturers part.
If it causes too much trouble, obviously I could alter it.

What's the KE like on the type of gun that would drop a decently made and tuned shield through sheer brute force and how much less energy does that take than sustained fire from a normal infantry weapon?

I had avoided thinking too much about the actual kE and muzzle velocities, etc, given I lack the knowledge to avoid making a mess of it, but it's something that does have to be done. So I'm going to make some guesses from wikipedia and my arse, and maybe we can make some sense of it.
It seems some reasonable averages for muzzle velocity and bullet weight for modern weapons are:
pistol: 300m/s, 6.6g -> kE 0.3 kJ
Assault rifle: 930m/s, 10g -> kE 4.3 kJ
heavy machine gun: 1000m/s, 40g -> kE 21 kJ
Now, I've described the needle rounds as "hypersonic", but reading wiki on railguns makes me lean towards a needlegun has a muzzle velocity perhaps 3 to 4 times higher then a modern weapon of similar use, with a bullet normally half the mass. Heavy needlers however typically have a even higher muzzle velocity and much lighter bullet then a modern HMG
Needle pistol: 1000m/s, 3g -> kE 1.5 kJ
Needle rifle: 3000m/s, 5g -> kE 22.5 kJ
Heavy Needler : 5000m/s, 10g -> kE 125kJ
If we say armour comes in 3 grades for simplicity (when really it would come in a bewildering array), they would be:
1) Militia/Police - scale vest over the top of plastic plates containing the field generators. Due to the limited armour protection, the field has to be quite untuned, it will protect from pistol fire, but quickly fails against rifles.
2) Infantryman - armour protection similar to today (including inserts); the field can survive 10 to 15 rifle shots over a five-second period, but a heavy needler can sometimes (25% maybe) punch right through with a single shot, and 3 to 5 will cause burn-out (at least localised to the hit areas).
3) Elite heavy armour - This looks like a futuristic suit of gothic plate mail, and incorporates the best and most expensive materials and technology. It would take the combined, lengthy, sustained fire of a squad to bring him down with rifles (and normally this is through power exhaustion), or scores of rounds from a heavy needler (one-hit penetrations are extremely unlikely). These suits are extremely expensive and only practical for specialist work, otherwise tanks are cheaper.

An attack is stopped by a combination of dispersing the energy (this is separate to the conducting the heat, and is akin to the way light is scattered upon hitting a translucent surface), and pumping energy into the surrounding field. The amount that needs to be pumped depends upon how localised the attack is (the more pin-point, the more energy needed, while for attacks such as broad explosions no extra energy is needed). For needle-pointed attacks such as needle guns, assume normally four times more energy is needed to stop the attack as the attack contains. This is affected by tuning, a highly tuned field needs much less energy then a low-tuned one.

At range it seems like you'd have two main options heavy, fast, and slim or tiny, fast and lots close together. Things like metal storm would fit the later and I could see people carrying computer aided multibarrel weapons and trying to unload a tube into people for a potential one hit kill. Going simpler you'd see less full auto and more burst weapons, like those Russian rifles that can put two or three shots down range before recoil kicks in.

This seems reasonable. Although it is in one view an inefficient use of energy as one attack doing 125kJ is more powerful then 10 attacks doing 20kJ, it could be far easier to create the 10 attacks at 20 kJ.

As for chemical attacks, being space-travelling civilisations they are not unfamiliar with totally contained suits. While it would give militia-grade forces serious problems, I see it only being an inconvenience for standard troops, and elites are in totally enclosed suits as a matter of course anyway.


Simon Jester:
Nitpick accepted, although if you want you can come over and do my daughter's hair. She's riven with the damned things right now. However, when I'm visualising it, I see a laser beam and the path of a bullet, so I'm vectoring from that. Yes, I have magic eyes and I can see laser beams without them hitting me right in the eye.
Notice my continual use of the word "contour"? That's because yesterday, for the life of me, I couldn't remember the fucking word 'gradient'! It's annoying when that happens.
I'm aware of Dune, and I even had a mention of it in my post before I decided it was too wordy as it was and deleted it. However, MY fields don't blow up when hit by laser beams!

A Field which seriously damps the velocity of an incoming projectile below about 500 m/s will become increasingly hard for air to get through, which is bad enough. But if it costs energy to make the field damp something, it's even worse, because your Field is permanently left trying to damp out collisions with the air, and acting as a sort of very expensive refrigerator.

I had never considered that. It's true though that for the good armour, much of the lower velocity stuff doesn't have to be blocked, and maybe the militia stuff only protects the torso where the armour is, meaning the field can be more tuned and it also wont stop breathing.
I wonder how it would work as a civilian refrigeration unit?

Could you outline a set of conditions under which the Field might actually 'fail brittle?

A field most usually brittle fails when cold (ie, is not holding any energy within the field), is very untuned (set to stop very low velocity attacks), and is hit by a very powerful concentrated attack. For example, if you were to switch on a field set to stop thrown rocks and then shoot it with a heavy needler, it will very likely brittle-fail, and the fact that if it doesn't it will certainly burn out is besides the point. The difference in this case between brittle-fail and burn out is that brittle-fail simultaneously fries the entire shield, while in the example given it's likely only the local generators would die (as they weren't able to spread the load in time to others), and brittle-fail can even happen when a military-grade field is single-shot with a needle-pistol, but it would never burn out. Theoretically, even a huge star ship's field could brittle-fail from a needle-pistol round; of course, theoretically I could walk towards a door and quantum tunnel through it, if you get my point.
No-one knows why the fields brittle-fail. Force fields utilise an area of physics called by laymen "Sub-quantum physics" (until I can come up with a better name for it), and no-one of the known races, living or dead, understand it. They use it for force fields, they use it for interstellar travel, but they don't pretend to understand it, and it does some weird shit.

I'm satisfied if it takes heavy weaponry to take these guys down quickly. Yes, a cannonball should pass straight through, and then even if it wont penetrate the armour, the concussion should kill or maim, but if people have to carry around personal cannons, that could be inconvenient in house-to-house.

Does it pop like a soap bubble, or do you get an unhelpful result equivalent to drilling a 1-mm hole in a steel plate, which has basically no effect on the plate's strength?

On burn-through, if the field is overall cool it will only be the local generators that fail. If the field is overall red-lining then the shock of the failure will normally cause the others to cascade-fail. So in the case of a single-shot penetration (heavy needler into a militia-man), it will cause a hole in the field, but the surrounding field will be relatively fine (some damage may have been done to surrounding generators causing loss of performance).

Your real problem is bringing back melee weapons in an environment where material science is so good. I know I couldn't swing a battleaxe hard enough to put it through the kind of armor you're describing...

Humans, yes. Humans massively prefer guns. There is another race called the Tai'Qu who are about 50x the strength of a human, and who are really good at and enjoy hand-to-hand combat. At that strength, the sheer concussion of their blows (if the weapon doesn't penetrate) count as lethal attacks even against themselves. In response to the Tai'Qu, human weapon manufacturers are trying to come up with powered melee weapons (drills, power-claws, etc). They're still working on it.

By the way, Zarrin in the story above is Tai'Qu. They have nothing against guns, as such, and they'll use what gets the job done.

madd0ct0r

incendiary bullets or bigger flare-slugs could be a way to force hot overloads, particularly with your initial description, since they'd fall slower in the field too. Petrol bombs would look very pretty.

and hey! if you get a glancing hit the side of the projectile in the field slows down, reorintating the bullet towards the person! = Homing bullets!

I hadn't considered the effect of fire weapons. At the moment, I have nothing.
You know, it would cause the projectile to curl in! Assuming competent armour, I don't see it having much effect, but amusing none the less.

lPeregrine

Two more things that would probably be considered as counters:

1) Exploit conservation of momentum and just hit the field hard enough to rip the generators out of the armor. Obviously this at least shuts down the field, and potentially rips them out of the armor and through the person wearing it (a hit from the back would send the back-mounted generators straight into your vital organs). And of course with larger weapons the blunt-force impact becomes a big problem even if the structure survives. You could have a grenade that aims for maximum blast wave to stun the person and knock them down, and then stab them to death while they're helpless.

2) Two-stage rounds designed to cause a local failure and then slip the second shot through the gap. If you want to avoid this you'd have to make sure that the size of a local failure is smaller than the accuracy of the second shot, so getting a hit through the shield requires too much luck to make the idea practical.

Of course for large-scale battlefield use chemical weapons would be common (at least in the absence of political factors) since the field won't do anything to stop a slowly drifting cloud of poisonous or corrosive gas. But since you're not trying to make them immune to guns at long range that's probably not too much of a problem, in a close-range fight where sword and shield troops are useful you probably don't want to be using chemical weapons.

1) Momentum is one way through the field, but I suspect that the generators could be bedded in firmly enough so that anything capable of ripping them loose would kill the wearer from concussion anyway. Of course, just because it can be made strong enough, doesn't mean it is, particularly on cheaper equipment.
2) I like this idea, and I like your counter. I may use both, making it again something that "cheaper equipment" has issues about.
The other races don't give a damn about the gentle sensibilities of humans, and gasses aren't out of bounds, but against a competent foe there are countermeasures, countered easily enough in many cases to make it a complete waste of time and resources.

The Tai'Qu will not use any weapon that causes mass environmental damage (and will wage bitter regime-change war against anyone who does), the Annites would glass a world for the laughs once they got what they wanted from it, the Kerridan will do whatever is the most efficient to achieve their long-term goals. Which usually means not pissing off their trade-partners the humans without good cause.


All this is work (resumed) on some stuff from before. At that point named "The Terran Confederaton", now renamed "The Terran Accord" (because every man and his dog apparently has a Terran Confederation)
Technology of the Terran Confederation
Aliens of the Terran Confederation

Fuck this is a long post. While I was typing it, I apparently got timed out. Glad I copied and pasted before trying to submit.

[Jub]

I'd like to get your take on a what a binary dust cloud type explosive might do if it was within the field when it went off. Obviously the shield isn't a shell type, but I'd be interested to see what sort of effects you might envision and how the field strength would shape the explosion.

[Korto]

I'm picturing the victim being surrounded by a dust cloud that simultaneously explodes all around him. If that's the case then:
If the armour is sealed so no dust can get in, a complete encompassing explosion would affect the entire field equally so no risk of burn-out from energy gradients. The only risk there is so much energy is absorbed as to cause the generators just burn out from the field temperature. Judging from the previous post, a standard infantryman's field can take 200 to 300 kJ at one time.
Implosion force would be resisted by the field, and the momentum conveyed to the generators would be cancelled out as they are being acted upon on all sides*. All in all, probably ineffective. The explosion would still occur normally in an outwards direction.

If the armour is unsealed, and dust gets inside, then you may have the "interesting" experience on an explosion occurring inside your armour, or even inside your lungs, which probably isn't a good thing.

*Except possibly his feet, which could cause a force imbalance directing the momentum down. Maybe a powerful enough explosion surrounding him could squash him like a pancake?

[Jub]

I see flamethrowers and petrochemical firehoses being useful then, they aren't anything overly long in range but getting doused with a liter of gas and getting lit up would down a field and starve the soldier of oxygen. Worst case it simply allows for less bullets to down a hit soldier. I could see military units having a machine gun equivalent, a flame thrower, and then normal weapons for close in combat and heavy battle rifles would be issued to long ranged units. I also see WP grenades seeing a big comeback.

That is if it's easier to overheat the shields than to break them under sustained fire.

[Simon_Jester]

2) Two-stage rounds designed to cause a local failure and then slip the second shot through the gap. If you want to avoid this you'd have to make sure that the size of a local failure is smaller than the accuracy of the second shot, so getting a hit through the shield requires too much luck to make the idea practical.

Indeeds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem-charge

Of course for large-scale battlefield use chemical weapons would be common (at least in the absence of political factors) since the field won't do anything to stop a slowly drifting cloud of poisonous or corrosive gas. But since you're not trying to make them immune to guns at long range that's probably not too much of a problem, in a close-range fight where sword and shield troops are useful you probably don't want to be using chemical weapons.

Although you might see certain forces using gas and wearing masks as a matter of routine, and (as in World War II) people might routinely carry chemical warfare protective equipment, at considerable cost, even though the enemy never actually uses it. Because you never know, they might.

Notice my continual use of the word "contour"? That's because yesterday, for the life of me, I couldn't remember the fucking word 'gradient'! It's annoying when that happens.
I'm aware of Dune, and I even had a mention of it in my post before I decided it was too wordy as it was and deleted it. However, MY fields don't blow up when hit by laser beams!

Obviously you are not using enough laser.

A Field which seriously damps the velocity of an incoming projectile below about 500 m/s will become increasingly hard for air to get through, which is bad enough. But if it costs energy to make the field damp something, it's even worse, because your Field is permanently left trying to damp out collisions with the air, and acting as a sort of very expensive refrigerator.

I had never considered that. It's true though that for the good armour, much of the lower velocity stuff doesn't have to be blocked, and maybe the militia stuff only protects the torso where the armour is, meaning the field can be more tuned and it also wont stop breathing.

Very few people ever bother to think about this, because they don't remember the part of high school chemistry where someone told them the root mean square velocity of an air molecule. I do.

I wonder how it would work as a civilian refrigeration unit?

The field is basically Maxwell's demon, so it could certainly do the job. Cost-effectiveness will depend on details such as power requirements.

Could you outline a set of conditions under which the Field might actually 'fail brittle?

A field most usually brittle fails when cold (ie, is not holding any energy within the field), is very untuned (set to stop very low velocity attacks), and is hit by a very powerful concentrated attack...

How does this interact with my observation that a field set to drain energy from things with a velocity under ~300-500 meters per second will be constantly having to absorb energy from incoming air molecules?

No-one knows why the fields brittle-fail. Force fields utilise an area of physics called by laymen "Sub-quantum physics" (until I can come up with a better name for it), and no-one of the known races, living or dead, understand it. They use it for force fields, they use it for interstellar travel, but they don't pretend to understand it, and it does some weird shit.

If it was me, it would be "sub-etheric," but I'm nostalgic for the Golden Age of SF. The real poser you now have to answer, though, is:

If all these precisely tuned and calibrated machines work on an unknown set of physical principles, who designed them? And how, when building a new type of Field generator or interstellar drive, do the designers know the machine will actually work as intended?

Your real problem is bringing back melee weapons in an environment where material science is so good. I know I couldn't swing a battleaxe hard enough to put it through the kind of armor you're describing...

Humans, yes. Humans massively prefer guns. There is another race called the Tai'Qu who are about 50x the strength of a human, and who are really good at and enjoy hand-to-hand combat. At that strength, the sheer concussion of their blows (if the weapon doesn't penetrate) count as lethal attacks even against themselves. In response to the Tai'Qu, human weapon manufacturers are trying to come up with powered melee weapons (drills, power-claws, etc). They're still working on it.

How physically large and strange are the Taiqu? If they are approximately human-sized and so massively strong, you get to represent them doing bizarre things like catapulting themselves across the room from the recoil force of their own blows. They would also tend to wear improbable thicknesses of protective armor, subject only to the limitation of their need to bend their arms and legs.

[I see no reason to put an apostrophe in there. The grammatical purpose for apostrophes in words like that is to mark a gap between syllables where it isn't obvious one should exist, and I can't think of ANY way to pronounce "Taiqu" other than "Tie-coo."

You know, it would cause the projectile to curl in! Assuming competent armour, I don't see it having much effect, but amusing none the less.

Actually yes, this would be a serious problem for armor design, and could make it rather difficult to do things like slope vehicle armor effectively.

The thing that mitigates it is that the force exerted on an incoming round, being so asymmetric, will tend to deform or break up the round as it comes in, which basically wrecks its armor-penetrating qualities. So a glancing shot would tend to do this weird nose-dive into the armor plate and then go "thunk" harmlessly against the surface (if it is low-velocity relative to its own structural strength, like a pistol bullet). Sort of like tossing magnets at a steel plate at similar angles- if you get close the magnet won't bounce off but won't hit very hard either.

If the round is some kind of hypervelocity thing like a needler weapon, the needle will be torn to pieces on entering the field and dissolve into a spray of confetti.

The other races don't give a damn about the gentle sensibilities of humans, and gasses aren't out of bounds, but against a competent foe there are countermeasures, countered easily enough in many cases to make it a complete waste of time and resources.

Not necessarily. Sometimes, forcing the enemy to wear gas masks is an advantage that more than justifies making your own troops wear them. To take an extreme example... suppose you are a Taiqu general, and you are told "if we do XYZ, then both we and the enemy will have to wear 100-kilogram protective suits to survive on the battlefield."

Since 100 kilograms is a much smaller burden for you than it is for them... good deal!

[Feel free to use that idea, actually]

The Tai'Qu will not use any weapon that causes mass environmental damage (and will wage bitter regime-change war against anyone who does), the Annites would glass a world for the laughs once they got what they wanted from it, the Kerridan will do whatever is the most efficient to achieve their long-term goals. Which usually means not pissing off their trade-partners the humans without good cause.

The Tai'Qu also laugh at anyone who claims that environment suits are cumbersome.

[Korto]

I see flamethrowers and petrochemical firehoses being useful then, they aren't anything overly long in range but getting doused with a liter of gas and getting lit up would down a field and starve the soldier of oxygen. Worst case it simply allows for less bullets to down a hit soldier. I could see military units having a machine gun equivalent, a flame thrower, and then normal weapons for close in combat and heavy battle rifles would be issued to long ranged units. I also see WP grenades seeing a big comeback.

That is if it's easier to overheat the shields than to break them under sustained fire.

I had a big thought last night. For all this time, I've been viewing the energy absorbed as "suspended" within the field, floating there in some kind of magical way I was determined to never explain (because I couldn't). However, as said earlier, the physical armour is actually within the field, and within the strongest part. What if it was the armour itself (and the air that is within the rest of the field) that was the heat sink? That then gives an explicable and derivable number for the heat sink capacity, if you then treat the surface of the armour as the radiator then the rate that heat is lost is also derivable. If the field spreads the energy load over an area (which I've already said it does), then the kJ can be directly applied to the armour for an effect.
For instance, assuming a suit of armour 30kg in weight (assuming it covers the entire body, as composite, it would be 3mm thick, and a heat capacity of 0.64 kJ/kg), on a 22kJ hit (needle rifle) this would raise the temperature of the armour 2.8 million C on a 1mm spot, 278C for a 100mm diametre spot, and 1C over the entire suit.
If hit by a heavy needler (125 kJ); 16M C for 1mm spot, 1600C over 100mm, and 7C over the entire suit.

For the moment I'm leaning towards this is a good idea, and use the 100mm spread (from a needle-point) as being a good "standard" for a military field on a decently-equipped infantryman. Low-tuned will spread less, high-tuned spread more.
The air would contribute a negligible amount, but may provide a lovely glow, but while the solid armour is in the most powerful part of the field, the bulk of the field is in empty air. What if a good proportion of the energy was dumped in the air? For instance, what if 10kJ was dumped in a 10cm x 1cm cone? According to my calculations, the temperature would increase by over 300,000C. That seems a trifle warm. Toasty, even.
I'm going to have to give some thought to how that would work. It does halve the immediate energy input to the solid armour, but the resultant plasma would feed some back.
Would the plasma actually provide a protective effect, like reactive armour?

Simon Jester
I remembered a detail that was said, but we both forgot in the talk about power drain from stopping air molecules, and that is the field only has to provide it's own power to soften overly-steep energy gradients in the field. As air is presumably hitting the entire field equally, there would be no imbalance and no need for extra power. I don't see even a strong wind making any difference (a 100mph wind is 44m/s).
But this brings up a problem, which you alluded to by calling it a Maxwell's Demon. I've created a perpetual motion machine, something I have been fighting to keep out of my technology. If there's no real power cost for refrigeration, you can run it, make a cold spot, turn it off and use the heat difference. Rinse and repeat.
Well, I refuse to have such a device. I wont say they don't belong in SF, but such a thing would cause a monumentally different society then what I have. So, there has to be a cost.
One idea is that there is a cost for shifting the heat, full stop, just like any modern heat exchange.
Another is that there's only a cost if the effect is taken advantage of, for instance as a refrigerator, but not when the effect is wasted (for instance the air drifting into the field, and drifting back out); which would then lead to a mention of scientists pulling their hair out trying to work out "How does it know?". The reason for this way would be if the power drain from doing it all the time makes it to much a stretch for belief.

If all these precisely tuned and calibrated machines work on an unknown set of physical principles, who designed them? And how, when building a new type of Field generator or interstellar drive, do the designers know the machine will actually work as intended?

I'm thinking they believe they understand some of it, and otherwise it's a lot of experimentation, trial and error, and tinkering. Whenever, however, they feel they've come up with a theory to explain, they've found the theory's predictions have failed.
Looking for an analogy, it may be like a horse breeder centuries years ago who knew how to create a warhorse, but had no idea how it really, biologically, worked. Or how we haven't known about genetic evolution until the last century, but that hasn't stopped us using it for millions of years.
There are many, many, separate groups across the galaxy all trying whatever they can for the last few centuries. It's not surprising they've gotten some results, although on the whole science has plateaued. In fact, the basic discoveries were all made by the Tai'Qu long ago, and later separately by the other races (as they're needed for interstellar travel).

How physically large and strange are the Taiqu? If they are approximately human-sized and so massively strong, you get to represent them doing bizarre things like catapulting themselves across the room from the recoil force of their own blows. They would also tend to wear improbable thicknesses of protective armor, subject only to the limitation of their need to bend their arms and legs.

A male Tai'Qu somewhat resembles (to a human mind, trying to find some way to describe them) a gorilla, except hairier (and the "hairs" are feathered). They measure a metre across the shoulders, and if they stood upright they're about three metres tall, although they're normally hunched at under 2m. A normal specimen weighs 600 to 700 kilos, although they have been known to top a tonne.
Strength-wise, they are very strong in short-term strength, but their endurance is proportionally far less. They evolved as ambush hunters in the jungle, and also mate selection was by single combat. Endurance was not important. The armour thickness they can wear (as they have a lot more SA to cover) is only a little more than a human. They're exceedingly tough and resilient, but have a much higher metabolic rate.
Incidentally, they're also capable of crouching down to less than half a metre high, remaining in that position for hours, and springing forth suddenly with terrifying speed and power (but not when wearing battle armour).

[I see no reason to put an apostrophe in there. The grammatical purpose for apostrophes in words like that is to mark a gap between syllables where it isn't obvious one should exist, and I can't think of ANY way to pronounce "Taiqu" other than "Tie-coo."

Captain Chewbacca agrees with you. I'll give you the same answer I gave him. Because I like it. (Also, I'm thinking it may mark a rough, guttural bark or something like that)

Not necessarily. Sometimes, forcing the enemy to wear gas masks is an advantage that more than justifies making your own troops wear them. To take an extreme example... suppose you are a Taiqu general, and you are told "if we do XYZ, then both we and the enemy will have to wear 100-kilogram protective suits to survive on the battlefield."

And you're right, except when you're wrong. To take it from one extreme to the other, militia would have to be provided suits and masks, and it would be a serious problem. Elite marines may fight in fully sealed armour that double as space-suits, and whether or not you use gas is all the same to them. Anyone who has a fully sealed field probably has fully sealed armour, and so nbc protection from there is relatively simple.
But there is a wide range of force quality.

-----------------------------------
One thing no one has wondered is how, if the field stops incoming energy, anyone can see while wearing it? Obviously if the field doesn't cover the eyes, this isn't a problem, but if it does? I do have a couple of ideas.
1) The field doesn't stop incident energy beneath a certain amplitude (depending upon frequency), so normal light levels pass through, while dangerous levels are blocked. This however strikes me as a bit "magical", and so I'd prefer to leave such things to Anya's "magic suit" (as it gets wryly called in-story)
2) Tiny cameras on the suit pick up the light that manages to pass though obliquely, and computers reconstruct that into a visual that's projected inside the helmet. This allows for a 3D image (by a separate projection for each eye), and the inclusion of various extras such as a targeting spot for the gun, low-light vision, IFF colouration of observed targets, etc. This allows the helmet to be made out of armour plate, same as the rest of it, although a flip-up visor in case of loss of picture would probably be a common feature.

It's late. That's all for now.

[Sea Skimmer]

Do remember that just sealing a suit does not give you a functional space suit. A space suit needs to be able to function in a vacuum, which means it needs to be able to be flexible while actually pressurized, instead of just blowing up like a balloon as a pilot's pressure suit does, and it needs a very effective thermal regulation system. Also everything used in it needs to be resistant to problems like lubricants being freeze dried. Doable in sci fi, sure no problem, but the complication exists and should be kept in mind.

Likewise on NBC warfare gear, that isn't so simple on a flexible suit as declaring an air proof seal. Your trying to stop corrosive liquids which can penetrate into the surface of a polished steel plate, a slightly harder goal. Also if you do have a true air and liquid seal, the guy inside cooks alive, which means you need a powered thermal regulation system once again. This is why real life NBC warfare gear is permeable to a certain amount of air and water vapor, but impregnated with activated charcoal which will absorb any chemical agents with larger molecules trying to pass through. It also helps control contamination in general should for example the person be wounded. Even then the things are a sweatbox.

[Korto]

I'll accept that as a gentle reproof that NBC protection isn't necessarily quite as simple as I seem to think it is.
While it still seems reasonable that elite marines (by which I don't mean "U.S. Marines!" but soldiers who travel about in space ships and fight in space and on planets) would have fully sealed, armoured, space suits, for anyone not in that particular niche, I may well be glossing over too much. I know for fact I hadn't considered the problem of cooling, for one thing, or corrosives.

On the subject of space suits, they mostly use skin-tight elastic suits (like what we're working on at the moment). The only mention of temperature control I noticed was transpiration through the fabric, and they're having trouble with finger movement with the gloves, but I think it's reasonable to assume they've come up with something by hundreds of years in the future.
A cooling idea could be a heat-conductive mesh throughout the suit (particularly in hot-spots such as head and neck) that leads to a heat exchanger on the back. It could also act as a heater, but that wouldn't often be a problem, me thinks.
Added features like armour and electronics (and so on) could then be built on around the basic unit.

Possibly the suits use memory-fabrics, making taking them on and off easier, and enabling them to fit a size range instead of having to be made to each unique individual.

[Jub]

I could see the bodysuit being tailored to people, you take a quick scan of the intended user and then fabricate them from a 3D printer. This bodysuit would likely deal with protecting from vacuum (or NBC depending on where it will be used), have the capillaries for the cooling unit to make use of, and have a breathing filter face mask. Then you'd attach the shield unit which could have a cooling unit and/or oxygen tanks attached. The op most layer is the actual armor which, like real suits of plate, could be layered over the other parts and clip to hard points woven into the body suit. The outer layer and generator would be reusable, but the body suit could be peeled off and tossed into a recycling unit after each use instead of cleaning it. This might have the benefit of allowing the designers to make them better in the short but more prone to failure if used for too long. As for corrosives and the like perhaps some sort of spray on applique could be used before each battle. Short duration, but it can be washed off and changed as conditions change.

Does any of that seem like it might work/fit?

[lPeregrine]

I'll accept that as a gentle reproof that NBC protection isn't necessarily quite as simple as I seem to think it is.
While it still seems reasonable that elite marines (by which I don't mean "U.S. Marines!" but soldiers who travel about in space ships and fight in space and on planets) would have fully sealed, armoured, space suits, for anyone not in that particular niche, I may well be glossing over too much. I know for fact I hadn't considered the problem of cooling, for one thing, or corrosives.

Probably the best way to deal with it is to consider whether NBC weapons are even a factor in your story. For example, in the scene in the OP the rich guy probably isn't going to be spraying clouds of corrosive gas all over his expensive estate. And if the action goes inside they certainly aren't going to be using NBC weapons when a conventional gun will get the job done. You can just dodge the issue entirely and say "NBC gear exists and is issued when appropriate" as long as your story never gets to a scale where you'd have a major war and accept the collateral damage.

[Simon_Jester]

Strength-wise, they are very strong in short-term strength, but their endurance is proportionally far less. They evolved as ambush hunters in the jungle, and also mate selection was by single combat. Endurance was not important. The armour thickness they can wear (as they have a lot more SA to cover) is only a little more than a human. They're exceedingly tough and resilient, but have a much higher metabolic rate.

I find it kind of hard to imagine muscles that are physically capable of dozens of times more exertion than a human's, but which can be worn out by carrying loads comparable to what a human carries on 'standby load.' If so, they'd find their own body weight physically very exhausting.

At the very least, carrying 100-200 kilos of equipment should be relatively no more exhausting to them than carrying 20 kilos of equipment is to us, because they physically weigh like 5-10 times more than we do. Really it should be more than that, but not necessarily a lot more.

Also, properly designed powered hardware would greatly reduce the endurance problem for them. Sort of like those carrying frames they're working on now- just reducing the amount of muscular effort you have to put in to routinely lift one leg and put it down, that sort of thing.

[I see no reason to put an apostrophe in there. The grammatical purpose for apostrophes in words like that is to mark a gap between syllables where it isn't obvious one should exist, and I can't think of ANY way to pronounce "Taiqu" other than "Tie-coo."

Captain Chewbacca agrees with you. I'll give you the same answer I gave him. Because I like it. (Also, I'm thinking it may mark a rough, guttural bark or something like that)

Since a Wookiee is more like a Taiqu than you are, maybe you should listen.

More generally, if that's a bark or something it should be something like Tai!Qu, to denote a sound which cannot be represented in the Latin alphabet, like the !Kung.

Not necessarily. Sometimes, forcing the enemy to wear gas masks is an advantage that more than justifies making your own troops wear them. To take an extreme example... suppose you are a Taiqu general, and you are told "if we do XYZ, then both we and the enemy will have to wear 100-kilogram protective suits to survive on the battlefield."

And you're right, except when you're wrong. To take it from one extreme to the other, militia would have to be provided suits and masks, and it would be a serious problem. Elite marines may fight in fully sealed armour that double as space-suits, and whether or not you use gas is all the same to them. Anyone who has a fully sealed field probably has fully sealed armour, and so nbc protection from there is relatively simple.
But there is a wide range of force quality.

Well yes- but the main obstacle to successful deployment of NBC gear is bulk (and that protection against high-end lethal agents requires MORE bulk, and more random obstacles to operational deployment like decontamination procedures).

Personally, I think you'd be likely to see low-end gas weapons deployed relatively frequently by certain entities, certain races or organizations, which perceive themselves to be at an advantage by doing so. Either because they naturally have equipment that makes them immune to chemical warfare, or because they suffer less inconvenience from having to wear a 50-kilo rubberized suit than their enemies.

You might also see someone taking advantage of biochemical differences: what is nerve gas to the Tai!Qu might be harmless or at most mildly unpleasant to us, and vice versa.

1) The field doesn't stop incident energy beneath a certain amplitude (depending upon frequency), so normal light levels pass through, while dangerous levels are blocked. This however strikes me as a bit "magical", and so I'd prefer to leave such things to Anya's "magic suit" (as it gets wryly called in-story)

Appropriate.

2) Tiny cameras on the suit pick up the light that manages to pass though obliquely, and computers reconstruct that into a visual that's projected inside the helmet.

Better option: suit has extendable "eye-stalks" that can poke up through the field, and which are specially shielded and designed to transmit signals along a cable through the field. This allows the wearer to see, arguably grants more tactical flexibility than the real eyeball would, probably demands less computer power, can be made redundant and easily replaced (unplug cable attachment point on helmet, plug in new camera, good to go)... and allows you to dramatically "blind" characters in combat very effectively, but temporarily.

---

On the subject of space suits, they mostly use skin-tight elastic suits (like what we're working on at the moment). The only mention of temperature control I noticed was transpiration through the fabric, and they're having trouble with finger movement with the gloves, but I think it's reasonable to assume they've come up with something by hundreds of years in the future.
A cooling idea could be a heat-conductive mesh throughout the suit (particularly in hot-spots such as head and neck) that leads to a heat exchanger on the back. It could also act as a heater, but that wouldn't often be a problem, me thinks.
Added features like armour and electronics (and so on) could then be built on around the basic unit.

Slabbing on armor plate over an existing biosuit would not be too hard- or at least, no harder than it would be on a normal human body. You don't get perfect articulation, but one of the big advantages of these personal Field generators is that they make it a lot harder to exploit small-area weak spots in armor plating. You arguably don't even need to armor the joints, if the Field generator is cranked up high enough- a bullet that would have hit you in the elbow has its energies absorbed by the field and deposited into the armor covering the upper and lower arms, and/or hits a pad of flexible but bulletproof material to stop any remaining penetration.

However, such a suit provides poor or no protection against chemical agents (biological and nuclear, better). You can bulk it up with absorbants and so on, but it's still a serious problem.

Of course, there is a huge range of "poison gas," from the toxic crap that penetrates steel plating and lingers for months, down through inhalants that you can basically stop by soaking a rag in the appropriate chemical counteragent and breathing through it. A chemical-savvy force might well choose to use some of these, but not others, depending on the circumstances.

[Me2005]

One thing no one has wondered is how, if the field stops incoming energy, anyone can see while wearing it? Obviously if the field doesn't cover the eyes, this isn't a problem, but if it does? I do have a couple of ideas.

I thought about this when considering another force-field/shield design, and came up with an interesting use of the 'problem'. Your field blocks/absorbs all incoming energy, so a method to see out needs to be devised. However, flip the function of the field and it blocks all [/i]outgoing[/i] energy. You can see just fine, but no one can see/detect you (though I was devising it for use in space, on a planet you might appear a a black blur or a shadow).

The trouble is that you need to drop the thing to fire (weapons that penetrate regular shields from without penetrate this one from within, so you might find assassins using arrows/swords exclusively), you need a heat sink to keep from liquefying everything within the field (giving a determinate time limit on it's use), and the user can't use a regular shield (since that would neutralize both) so they are extremely vulnerable.

Edited to add that I like that you're using/accepting the implications given to you, and how well you appear to have thought this out.

[Korto]

I could see the bodysuit being tailored to people, you take a quick scan of the intended user and then fabricate them from a 3D printer. This bodysuit would likely deal with protecting from vacuum (or NBC depending on where it will be used), have the capillaries for the cooling unit to make use of, and have a breathing filter face mask. Then you'd attach the shield unit which could have a cooling unit and/or oxygen tanks attached. The op most layer is the actual armor which, like real suits of plate, could be layered over the other parts and clip to hard points woven into the body suit. The outer layer and generator would be reusable, but the body suit could be peeled off and tossed into a recycling unit after each use instead of cleaning it. This might have the benefit of allowing the designers to make them better in the short but more prone to failure if used for too long. As for corrosives and the like perhaps some sort of spray on applique could be used before each battle. Short duration, but it can be washed off and changed as conditions change.

Does any of that seem like it might work/fit?

It all sounds reasonable, and the idea of cheap temporary ship-suits being printed out may be also be a "common practise".
There's an overall "thing" (fashion/status) where things are individually styled and crafted to fit a person; mass-produced, all-identical products are looked down upon as low quality, even when this is not true, and therefore, this tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Suits printed off a common pattern would be looked down upon, but suits custom individually aesthetically designed and then printed out would be fine.
The manufacturing process you put there I'll copy and paste into my notes. I don't know if the description would ever pop up in a story, but it helps me get descriptive if I know what I'm describing.

With possibly hundreds of earth colonies (a lot of them not even started by countries, but instead companies, groups, and even wealthy individuals), and an untold number of Tai'qu colonies (there's very few Kerridan colonies, and they're highly homogeneous anyway), there would be so many different variations on the themes of weapons, armour, money, customs, software, etc, that whatever you come up with and say "What about this way of doing it?" I'll probably answer "Thank-you, that's a good idea, they'll be using that somewhere"
Simon's eye-stalks v my oblique cameras would be an example of this. Both methods would be used, and others. Others may flicker the field on and off to see what's going on (with the risk of a shot going clear through while the field is down), although that I haven't decided whether it's possible to flicker the field in such a way.

Probably the best way to deal with it is to consider whether NBC weapons are even a factor in your story. For example, in the scene in the OP the rich guy probably isn't going to be spraying clouds of corrosive gas all over his expensive estate. And if the action goes inside they certainly aren't going to be using NBC weapons when a conventional gun will get the job done. You can just dodge the issue entirely and say "NBC gear exists and is issued when appropriate" as long as your story never gets to a scale where you'd have a major war and accept the collateral damage.

It's true that NBC is out of the scope of the current story (although the Wite-Out did have a minor eye-irritant side effect), at least so far, but there may be other stories where it becomes important. I have one in mind where a war between two small colonies on the same continent (pretty close together, really) has degenerated into a long-running series of jungle skirmishes.

I find it kind of hard to imagine muscles that are physically capable of dozens of times more exertion than a human's, but which can be worn out by carrying loads comparable to what a human carries on 'standby load.' If so, they'd find their own body weight physically very exhausting.

There may have been a small misunderstanding here. I meant their long-term strength falls far short of their short-term strength. Long-term, they can carry a little more, proportionally (by cross-sectional area), then a human, but by weight a bit less (I just ran a few hypothetical numbers and came up with 75% of a human). Still, if we say 40kg carry-weight for a human, and a Tai'Qu is 6-7 times the weight of a human, then that still has him carrying 200kg.
As a comparison, an elephant, according to one site, weighs 5000kg, and can carry (I'm assuming long distance) 500kg of logs. The Tai'qu does quite well in comparison there.
As for the endurance aspect, well it's been noted that due to our evolutionary niche, we humans have very high endurance compared to other animals. Think of cheetahs v gazelles, where the cheetah is faster, but the gazelle has more endurance. Tai'Qu, as I said, were an ambush hunter. They never needed to evolve the endurance we take for granted.

More generally, if that's a bark or something it should be something like Tai!Qu, to denote a sound which cannot be represented in the Latin alphabet, like the !Kung.

Look, as I said, I like the apostrophe, it looks a little exotic, and your idea of an exclamation mark is... actually not a bad one. It may well get the idea across better. Tai!Qu. Hmmm... Possibly.

Better option: suit has extendable "eye-stalks" that can poke up through the field, and which are specially shielded and designed to transmit signals along a cable through the field. This allows the wearer to see, arguably grants more tactical flexibility than the real eyeball would, probably demands less computer power, can be made redundant and easily replaced (unplug cable attachment point on helmet, plug in new camera, good to go)... and allows you to dramatically "blind" characters in combat very effectively, but temporarily.

I'm not sure if that would be better or not. I could imagine the stalks being vulnerable to attack, and possibly creating weak-spots in the field, unless the field passes through it which then opens up questions about electrical and light signals can travel through the field (I'm thinking not directly). But as I said above, I'll use it, and mine, and others. Different manufacturers, different solutions.
Eye-stalks... I'm seeing a gap in the field where the stalk plugs in (as the field would interrupt the signal), but often the stalk itself is armoured and shielded, and some have a sharp bend or dog-leg to avoid a fluke attack coming right down the stalk. They wouldn't have to be very long, as the field only extends out a cm or so. If there's a plasma flare every time there's a hit, then the cameras may need to be protected, perhaps recessed inside the antennae stalk, which would then reduce field of view, needing more antennae to get a good view.
Radio and so forth could be picked up through the same antennae. ECM often makes radio worthless, but "often" is not "always", and isn't even necessarily "half the time".

You arguably don't even need to armor the joints, if the Field generator is cranked up high enough- a bullet that would have hit you in the elbow has its energies absorbed by the field and deposited into the armor covering the upper and lower arms, and/or hits a pad of flexible but bulletproof material to stop any remaining penetration.

You would have to make some kind of provision for the joints, because, thinking about it, the field will stop affecting a projectile at the point the projectile's velocity drops below the critical limit. Therefore, you still have something travelling at lethal velocities, which is where the armour comes into play. But all armour has to be a balance of protection v practicality, so I can imagine this solution being used. It give me scope to describe differences between cheap, mid-range, and expensive armours.

I thought about this when considering another force-field/shield design, and came up with an interesting use of the 'problem'. Your field blocks/absorbs all incoming energy, so a method to see out needs to be devised. However, flip the function of the field and it blocks all outgoing energy. You can see just fine, but no one can see/detect you (though I was devising it for use in space, on a planet you might appear a a black blur or a shadow).

Stealth in space is a bit of a bastard, and even with a bit of handwavium it requires careful thinking through to try to address all the problems. My field flipped, as described, would cause a visual effect somewhat similar, I think, to a black hole. Black in the centre and distortion around the edges, but in the black of space you may get away with it as long as you don't outline yourself by flying in front of something large and lit. I have considered something of the like, but using on "torpedoes", stealthed missiles, where the risk of being hit is more acceptable.
Another problem is if your drive leaves a trail, it'll be outside your field and create a great big glowing arrow right at you.

[MrDakka]

Others may flicker the field on and off to see what's going on (with the risk of a shot going clear through while the field is down), although that I haven't decided whether it's possible to flicker the field in such a way.

Modulate that shield frequency!