Particle Shield V2

*** Unfortunately I no longer have time to tweak or update any of my SE mods; in fact I'm on a complete SE break. As always, 100% of my work is totally free to share/change/republish, any other author whose content is inside my mods should be consulted separately. Hope the community is still enjoying the game and modders can benefit from my dodgy work! ***

This is a Particle Shield generator for point-defence, offline protection, and area control. When activated it will create a sphere whose perimeter blocks incoming damage, and is instantly deadly to non-friendly grids and players.

The shield radius is configurable via slider, in the range 500m to 70km, and power consumption is relative to the radius. You will need about 50 large reactors to power a planet-sized shield! When turned on, the shield will begin to energize, expanding at around 1km per second (in 500m jumps.)

Missiles, meteors, and non-friendly grids and players will be destroyed upon contact with the shield wall, but friendly players and grids can pass through. Note the block must be set to "Share With Faction" or "No Share" for it to block grids. Due to the way the engine handles bullets I can't actually delete them as they pass through the shield wall, but any that do won't cause any damage.

You can tell whether the shield is safe because it will appear green; it automatically looks orange if it's going to damage your ship and kill you.

There are a few balancing factors apart from the power use: * The generator sits at the edge of the shield and is therefore able to be damaged. * Whilst it can be built on a ship (large grid only!) any movement by the ship will cause it to turn off. * At this point enemies may also use jump drives to bypass the shield wall. I'm planning on making this configurable.

The V1 version of this block at http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=931309474 has the generator at the centre of the sphere, and makes any friendly grids inside immune to missile and bullet damage (even if enemies jump inside, they can't damage your builds.) I created this one for those who believe V1 was too OP, but the plan is to maintain both versions :)

Please let me know how it works for you!

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.