Particle Shield

This is a Particle Shield generator for point-defence, offline protection, and area control. When activated it will create a sphere within which all friendly (owned or faction share) grids will be immune from projectile and missile damage, and whose perimeter is instantly deadly to non-friendly grids.

The shield takes ten seconds to fully deploy, with its radius expanding in 10% increments every second. It can be set from 100m to 50km radius, and requires an appropriate amount of power for the range setting. A 50km radius (100km diameter) shield will consume a whopping 10GW of power (that's about 34 large generators) so theater defence is possible, but rather thirsty!!!

If the sphere looks green, you can transit the shield wall safely and, once inside, be impervious to projectile or missile weapons. If it's orange, it would be a bad idea to fly into it. Enemies outside cockpits will be instantly killed, ships will dissolve.

If set to a large radius, let's say 10km, the activation phase's 1km-per-second expansion may skip the shield wall past a luckily-positioned enemy without actually destroying them. An enemy may also use their jump drive to enter your shield bubble. Their weapons, however, will be ineffective against your builds, whilst their grids will remain totally destructible. If you're trapped in someone else's particle shield you would want to hope you have a jump drive...

It's a great big block as you'd expect, no there are no plans for small grid versions. Set one on your capital ship that's just big enough to protect you, or mine up uranium like there's no tomorrow and surround a whole planet with one. Heaps fun watching AI fly into it too.

UPDATE: Now there's a Version II of this block, with a few modifications which make it a little more defeatable. It's over at http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=934395209

MAINTENANCE NOTE: The 1.181 update which brought multithreaded physics to the game, also brought massive performance drops on my systems. The continuous stream of minor updates and hotfixes since has done nothing to improve performance over 1.180.600, and have solved less issues than they have caused. My own server has been reverted (via subscribing to the 1.180 Beta) to the stable, smooth and enjoyable experience SE gave me back then, and as this mod works well with this reversion I have no plans to keep it maintained for broken later versions. Please don't use comments below to engage in criticism of the game, and the best of luck to the Keen developers who hopefully will eventually give us the SE experience we all hope for. I'll continue to read comments and respond when I can. Apologies if this decision affects your enjoyment of the game.