I just read an interesting post that included the idea of weapons you can’t shoot out through your own shield.
Got me to thinking about old time SFB, six-sided shields, and the concept of dropping a shield to use a transporter to do some things I don’t want to bring up here.
I.
But going the other way, it would be an interesting special power, probably one associated with a new faction, to “tunnel through” enemy shields with a special weapon, the shield hole opener. This would be on the same order as an EMP / distruptor, but for a section of an enemy’s shield (dropping an enemy’s shield entirely sounds like a balance nightmare to me).
The “hole” would allow fire to pass through unblocked by the shield and have some incredibly Gratuitous graphics that vary with the shield type.
As an additional weirdness factor, the rest of the shield could go UP in power/effectiveness for the duration of the hole through the shield.
Some clever people would have to figure out the ideal size of such a hole and how long it should be open to make it both attractive as an option (ever outfit a Tribe vessel and not use any of the Tribe’s special kinetic weapons? I knew it!) and not unbalancing in the GSB world in general.
Of course, using such a weapon, no matter how the details work out, would require a tasteful and perceptive selection of other weapons shooting from the same vector to take advantage of the hole. . .
II. Another Faction-Specific Wrinkle
And this leads me to a way to make a faction use this “shield tunneling” device on their own shields–slightly different than the “drop your own shields to fire” concept from another thread. This mystery faction, which has clearly mastered the physics behind shield technology to a level far beyond mere Feds or Alliance or Tribe and whatnot, can buy specialized shields that have a “hole” in them all the time through which some special weapon (needs a hole opened–not the same as in I.) shoots. The rest of the shield would be more effective than an equivalent shield without a hole in it–the, uh, polarized protons of the shield matrix are more densely compacted by the hyper-specialized field emitters this faction uses, yeah, that’s the ticket–but of course enemy fire coming through the hole wouldn’t be stopped by the shield at all.
I think it would look cool to see the “hole” zip around the edge of the shield as the special weapon whatsit shoots at different targets. . .
III. The killer combo, of course, would be the hole-opener weapon coupled with the “needs a hole opened” weapon (probably a beam of some kind) weapon, so one can shoot a weapon through a cool-looking hole in one’s own shields and then through a hole you’ve made in someone else’s shield. Bwahaha.
Of course, it may be really hard to determine where such “holes” are in GSB code, and this whole concept may be relegated to the “yeah, but who codes it?” dustbin. If so, oh well. 
RC