Presumably, if Edont were going to consider some sort of dampening field tech, he wouldn't be asking about other ways to reduce damage. But yeah, if he wants dampening fields, the problem goes away.
I don't think it's productive to over-relate the details of technological development. Enough to move the story along, sure. But a book that has a sub plot of everything that happened in the Manhattan Project/Tube Alloys would be absurdly long and booooooring.
I read that Niven and Pournelle were influenced by Doc Smith. Iirc from "Mote in God's Eye", their Langston shield formed in a sphere around the generator and absorbed energy (even kinetic energy from small particles), gradually glowing as it absorbed more, going from its base black to red, orange, yellow, through to violet, before collapsing - which would usually result in the destruction of the ship from the released energies. Once deployed, though, any sensors would have to move outside of the shield to work. Good book, that.
They could "poke a sensor through the shield", IIRC. It would get shot off quickly in battle, but they did this the first time they dove into a sun, I think.
Actually I wanted to talk armor for spaceships. The physical stuff, that is either the hull itself or put on the hull. The first answer was probaly inserious, but a diamond-sort of coating can indeed be a protection against some weapon effects, even that I did not understand why valency electrons were specially mentioned there (to make it intransparent? reflective? Metals are reflective because of the freely moving electrons, I think) Unfortunately the thread deviated from the topic soon, went into force fields and the question if and how shock waves can kill humans, how fluids can protect against g-forces. I feel guilty for the derailment of the thread because I actually replied to the off-topic points, and not being able to return the discussion the actual point, even if I mentioned it a few times that these points were not those that I wanted to discuss. Due to my inability of dealing with the responses, I finally decided to drop out and ignore the thread. Today I felt brave enough to look into it again, and I wanted to at least write this message. Even though there were plenty of misunderstandings, I still want to say thanks to the contributors. In another forum where I had asked the very same question, I got exactly one response. My own idea of space battleship armor will be a sandwich structure. On the outer side a ceramic coating or ceramic tiles to help against laser and heat effect weapons. Maybe, if the technology allows, make it a ceramic-fiber compound, so that the tiles do not break from impact of projectiles as easily, or, that the shards are held together by the fibers and still give a bit of protection against subsequent attacks with heat based weapons. Below that, a layer of foamed metal, to absorb kinetic energy. Then a honecomb sandwich structure, top and bottom layers metal, flexible, rubber-sort cell walls and the cells filled with SiO2 powder. This is meant to further reduce and damp shock and heat effects that hit the outer hull. Finally strong sheet metal and on the inside, an layer of heat-insulation. That is mostly to have a inner surface that reflects some heat radiation, which is good to make the crew feel comfortable near the ships hull.
if they have got to such a level, the ability to counter mass could be an electrical force field. the question is can they counter no-mass ? mass-less weapons... eg unifield field cannon which collapses the shield in on its self so they are destroyed by their own force field. sub-space field shifter lasers which de-polarises atomic bonds making things fall apart on an atomic level. EM field rebound harmonic jammers which creates a wall against inbound fields creating a event horizon as a shield
The idea of shields is a product of star wars style dogfights, which works for movies but would not happen in space. The best protection would be stealth or mass. You could hollow out nickel-iron asteroid and use that for a ship.
It all revolves around what you are defending against. Energy weapons, kinetic kill weapons, high explosives, something we haven't thought of yet. The war of offense vs. defense is as old as armored warships.
Hmmm.... Perhaps any energy armor is about recontructing the atomic structure of the armor in the first place . So that it can change the armor . Hence malleable .
they doing that already almost its called reactive armour. but the kinda new ability to put electrical currents through fabrics is quite interesting. it uses an opposing force to push back at the energy, changing an atomic structure is a whole new level of science they are not yet at. if soeone throws an empty alloy can out the window of their space ship & you run over it, your dead.
Hmmm... I got the idea from a Russian UFO technology , from the program , Ancient aliens , or UFO Files . What they found was material that would change depending on temp. . From one element to another . Quite extraordinary .
Ancient aliens does not tend to dwell on the physical material science side of things too much. it was probably a diffierent program. Russians LOVE conspiracy theorys(they make sport out of them for fun & hobby) and alternate theorys. The word "Element" was probably not being used scientifically. i have read/seen some stuff about such like reports. extremely light yet extremely hard, things that burst into flames things that never rust or decay. things that seem to have hardness and then flexibility dependant on how it is held or an electrical charge being put through it. keep in mind a material that changes with temperature may be good in some specific circumstances. if you are not able to dictate the temperature of the material then its properties are only reactive and then must be supported by pro-active materials.
In general, armor for a space battleship would be prohibitively heavy/dense - in the absence of air friction, there is little to prevent accelerating large tungsten slugs to high relativistic speeds (besides power concerns) - it would take a lot of armor to ablate that kind of hit. Then you factor in energy weapons, exotic particles (ala the Rapid Nadion Particle effect in Star Trek, that allows a handheld Phaser to vaporize several metric tons of rock in a single shot), and other such things (quantum singularity launcher, for example) and armor because a non-option. Add in the need for returns to shipyards for repairs/replacement (especially after high-speed maneuvers, as random space detritus ablates the frontal armor away) and it becomes a logistical nightmare. Better protection would be offered by shields, which are limited purely by the ability to dissipate heat and/or available energy. Better still - not being hit in the first place. Given that, in space, combat would probably take place across distances far beyond visual range (which would make Sci-Fi combat quite boring, hence why everything is "knife fighting" in such shows)... yeah.
In The Mote In God's Eye shields could be overloaded when the thermal storage capacity* was exceeded. That left me wondering why they couldn't beam that heat off the ship some how. And the Brownies made the shield expand at need, so there was less of limit with regard to how much heat it could take at localized hot spots. (They did mention that flying into a star with that system would be very bad indeed.) I also recall that the monodimensional Galactic Patrol and Boskone warhips had multiple shields, each one perhaps square in power to the one outboard of it. *From memory...
