Order Details:
Basically this order is for Shields to go offline at a certain percentage and then re-activated when they’ve recharged to a certain amount.
Why this may be useful:
Having your shield go all the way down to 0 is detrimental because they don’t always come back up or don’t get the time to recharge properly under heavy fire. This allows ships captains to divide up the incoming damage between the shields and armor.
The drawback:
Having your shields down comes with obvious implications since you will then be vulnerable to anti-armor weapons and the underlying modules may be damaged significantly if you lower them unwisely.
Hypothesis:
I’m not sure if we’re all in agreement on this but my personal experience and some other board members suggest that either all shields or all armor is a more effective defense than a balanced mix.
The idea is not to eliminate the all shields or all armor configurations entirely but find a way to make a balanced mix more strategically significant and not less than optimal choice.
Essentially, your shields would “fail” after taking less damage than normal (i.e., a nonzero percentage of shield strength left); in exchange, the shield would (theoretically) recharge between “failures” more quickly, since it’s recharging from less damage? Is that about right?
If so, then actually I could see how that might work very well for certain ship styles but maybe not for others; a new order would be the sensible place to implement this idea.
Assuming for the moment that I haven’t interpreted everything you said exactly backwards (wouldn’t be the first time).
what about this:
shields go down normally, then after a certain time (determined by the shield itself) if the ship doesn’t take damage it goes up again.
It has benefits to ships that utilize multiple shields or one shield module and armor.
In regards to bluebreaker
That is how normally shields work but if the actual module is taken down in some circumstances it does not return which i’ve observed during gameplay and is also mentioned under the “Dodgy Shields” section in the game manual.
You sacrifice overall shield hp by a percentage to avoid the possibility of a total shield failure.
I really do like this idea; the only wrinkle I can think of is for ships with multiple shield arcs. Does each generator follow the order separately, or is the percentage of damage measured against the overall strength of the shields?
A valid concern, which you might be able to mitigate by capping the “recharge” percentage at maybe 50% (i.e., preserve no more than 50% of the shield strength by a forced shutdown).
It would simply be an option. And I suspect there is probably something we have overlooked that would make it a good either/or kind of decision, where you use the Recharge order to save your shields some damage, but at the expense of … something else, I don’t know. Maybe you have to use a particular kind of shield generator in order for it to work this way?