a little confused about shields and auto repair units

I was playing survival for the first time, and I noticed something I did not expect to see. Well, two somethings:

  1. Though my shield units were undamaged, my shields stop regenerating… for no reason I could see. Is this a bug? This occurred when I was at half shields (approx) on several occasions and always once I hit zero shields.

  2. Though my repair units were at separate times undamaged and damaged (but not destroyed), nothing on my ship was being repaired. None of the red units became less red and the green bar did not move. Am I misunderstanding what the repair unit does? Before anyone asks, I was not using the dedicated armor repair units.

I’ve seen the shield thing a couple of times. No idea how to reproduce it.

Also when shields are down, but the ship stops taking damage and the shield units are undamaged, do shields ever restore themselves?

Repair units have a limited number of points that they can repair. Is it possible that you ran out of repair juice? You can see this by selecting the whip and looking at the repair module. It will have a white bar in the lower half of it.

I don’t believe shields can come back up once they’re down, regardless of damage state.

Didn’t know about the cap on repairs… that makes them less useful in survival.

I have heard about the fact that once shields are gone, they don’t come back. If that is a designer choice, I fail to see the logic in it. That still leaves the times I have been at half shields and they stop recharging.

When a module is entirely destroyed, a repair module cannot fix bring it back. Only partially damaged modules can be repaired. I’m not sure if this describes all of the issue you saw, but it may cover part of it.

If you have more than one shield module they will sometimes fail independently of each other. I’m not sure exactly what causes it to happen, but it is not uncommon. Perhaps each hit is assigned to a shield at random, and if the luck goes against you one unit will take the brunt of a heavy volley and crash before the other. The shield that stayed up can regenerate later in the battle, but the one that went down will stay off for good. In the same way you’ll sometimes see a ship with three shield modules at one or two thirds of it’s maximum shield strength.

Point 2 makes sense. I still wonder why they don’t regenerate from scratch if the unit is still functioning though. As to point 1, no that wasn’t the issue. things that were partially damaged where not being repaired even though my repair units where undamaged or only partially damaged.

Most of the answers are already here.
Repair units have supplies (the white bar under them) and when they run out, they switch off, regardless of their repair state.
Shield modules take damage independently as hits occur. A single blast is distributed over a maximum of four shield modules, as I recall, and it is entirely possible depending on the size of the impacts for one module to be totally knocked out before others. Thus you can have your shields reduced to a max strength of 50% or less.
This is a design decision, because it allows attackers to gradually make some effective permanent impact on highly shielded ships, rather than it being essential to muster complete shield-flattening forces in one place and time in order to achieve anything.

The last thing to give-in on a shield generator module is its positronic flux-capacitor. Once that is fused, there is no repairing that. Didn’t they teach this at galactic engineering school?

lol

Basic Galactic Engineering should realise its better for the shield generator to shut itself down before it fails, allowing it to be repowered later in the battle. They never hard of Fail Safe?
(/sarcam)

I agree with the design decision behind this. Shield boats are hard enough to take down sometimes as it is.

let me guess:
it takes 1.21 Gigawatt delivered at 88 MPh to fuse the flux capacitator?

hmm… I missed the DMC logo on my cruisers… I´m gonna check again…

Apparently the logo reads “ACME”

ah… ACME. that explains a lot of the stuff which goes boom! if only we had a coyote class frigate…

God yes. Cliff! Coyote class Frigate please :stuck_out_tongue:

yeah, and call the first one in your Fleet Wile E. !
or, to be more in line with the flux cap. thingie: what about a new DMC class Cruiser, where the First one is named “HMS Emmet Brown!” with a MR Fusion-Beam ! and… whoops… I´m sorry I get carried away with this stuff…

hmm… what does “on topic” mean btw? :slight_smile:
Oh yes, shields and stuff… :wink: