Mr. Brown,
In episode 2, Vlad and Deliza have a discussion about the Falcon where they mention two types of shielding: ablative and reflective. What are the uses for the two types? Are ablative shields the kind used by the refitted Celestia to rob Jung railgun rounds of most of their kinetic energy? Are reflective shields the kind of shields used to protect against ship-mounted energy weapons?
Pretty much, yes. Ablative shields use similar technology to the mass-cancelling fields used for linear FTL travel. The shields remove kinetic energy from physical objects, be they projectiles fired from a weapon or some other object in space, before they strike the hull, thus preventing damage. Reflective shielding is designed to reflect energy away from the point of impact in all directions. The energy is spread evenly across the exterior face of the shield, allowing it to reflect away along the entire surface rather than reflecting inversely to its angle of incidence. (Which could cause reflections of energy that may strike and damage something else.) Again, it doesn't matter if that energy is fired by a weapon, or naturally occurring. It works either way.
The most similar features of either shielding systems are:
1) They both fail if they are asked to handle more energy than they can deal with. Dumping too much energy into a shield causes it to overload, feedback into the emitters, and cause them to fail, causing the shield to collapse.
2) They both provide protection crucial not only to surviving battle, but also to surviving the rigors of space itself, for which was their primary design.
Side note: It was during an attempt to improve upon such shielding that a method of dimensional shifting that when applied to an object in motion, caused that object to instantly transition between two distant points. (The Jump drive.)
