This guide explains the changes to Defense Shields and how to set them up. A mod for Space Engineers.
Defense Shield Basics: What parts do what
Hello, Engineers. Seems there is some confusion on how the update to shields works, so here’s some visual aids. The Control block controls your shield emitters, all settings for the shield are on that and the emitters will not work without them. There can only be one active control block on each shielded grid (you may have more than one as backups, but only one will work to operate shields).
You may have more than one emitter, however, each emitter over 1 serves as a backup/standby emitter and does not increase shield hp. The emitters must also be on the hull(outside) of your ships/stations. The emitters need line of sight to work, if they aren’t out in the open they will fail to operate.
The Control block slider for recharge rate works like this: slide to the right for a higher recharge rate, slide to left more HP. The higher recharge rate, the lower your HP will be, the opposite is true for more HP lower charge rate.
The new icon on your screen on the bottom left is your shield status.
The green hashes on left are how fast your shield is regenning, the red hashes on the right are how much dps your shield is receiving. The inner set of hashes show you your shield charged percentage at 10% increments.
To give your shield more power you will need more power production. More power = potential higher recharge rate and HP. Also, increasing the size of your shield will weaken it unless you add more power generation to the grid.
The shield modulator allows you to set which type of damage your shield is better at defending against. when you access the modulator on the terminal you will see a slider that sets it to either energy or balistic protection percentages. The modulator also has a password/frequency button where you set the password/frequency of your shields so that ships can pass through each others shields.
As for the Damage Enhancer block does two things:
1) it will convert defensive shield energy into a plasma shield to burn through enemy grids. This will require an extreme amount of power and the shield will provide no defense against weapons fire when enabled. Which basically is Ramming Mode
2) It will operate in a similar fashion but against voxels, but due to the extreme temperature caused by burning through voxels it will exponentially use more power the larger the shield is, so for all practical purposes the size of these shields will be small.
The Shield Air Pressurizer only works on station(static) grids, it has to be connected to the same grid the shield emitter is on and be connected to a source of ice. If shield goes down, all air in the shield will be lost.