Shield usage

This manual doesn't explore all possible shield settings, that is what the workshop guide is for. This manual is mostly about shield strengths.

How to make your shield better is the most common question for those going after NPCs or other players. You can know defense shields from some time ago, the more integrity you had, the higher was your shield cap. The more power you had, the more HP your shield had until your shield cap was reached. Easy.

Now it doesn't work like that. Shield has 4 main variables that have to be taken into account when designing your ships.

Ship's Size
The bigger your ships size, the higher your shield cap will be. In general, the more of the space your ship occupies, the higher the max shield strength is. Ship's size also affects the size of the shield bubble, the bigger the shield bubble is, the more power it requires to produce shield HP. Meaning larger ships need more power to produce the same shield HP as smaller ships.

Ship's Power
The more power your ship produces, the higher the shield HP can be (until your cap is reached). Having too much power can be detrimental however. It is also good practice to manually define how much power of your ship the shield can actually use. Since most energy weapons require power to recharge, having shield that gets as much as it can can lead to weapons not recharging properly.

Power Density
This is a theoretical value based on the power produced / ship's size. In theory, if your ship would be comprised of only vanilla large reactors, it would have a power density of 1. Having power dense ships is not efficient. Optimal power density for maximum power efficiency is 0.45. Everything above leads to additional power being calculated as "less" than it actually is. This basically means, bigger ships are better at power efficiency. Smaller ships will quickly increase their power density if you just add more power blocks to increase shield strength.

Block Density
Block density basically means how well is your ship packed together. In theory, if your ship is just a slab of armor blocks, it would have block density of 1. If your block density decreases below threshold (which is 0.35) it will have negative impact on your shield cap (reducing the shield cap) defined by your ship's size. Holes in your ship are basically what reduces the block density, large hangar bays (internal holes), or some wings or shapes on the outside of your ship (making it seem bigger than the hull actually is).

Hardness
Hardness is a Czech Chillout custom feature. It basically means flat damage reduction from incoming fire by the same percentage that is your current hardness. It can be increased by adding Gardinium Reactors on your ship. Every Gardinium Reactor will increase shield hardness, but the addition will be smaller with each subsequent one.

Summary
We can summarize the above into several points that can be contradictory, so it is up to you which shield strengths you want to follow in your design, bearing the weaknesses.

- Bigger ship means higher shield cap maximums

- Smaller ship means cheaper power generation (not as much power is required to reach the optimal power density)

- Bigger ships require more power but are usually power efficient, they are usually not that power dense

- Smaller ships require less power but are not power efficient, they usually are power dense

- Tiered/modded reactors are really power dense blocks, you don't need as many tiered reactors to reach optimal power density

- Cheaper/vanilla reactors may be sufficient for some designs due to their low power density

- Don't rely on shields alone, armor and defensive weapons are important part of your ship's protection