Name: Quick Deploy Hardlight Barricades, Q.D.H.B, ‘Cuties,’ ‘Lightstrips.’ Description: Quick Deploy Hardlight Barricades are most commonly designed as a long reinforced strip, between two and four feet in length. Inside, they house a bulky power cell and a photonic hardlight projector. . . Other varieties exist, such as half-dome shields projected out of a more round device. Abilities: - Hardlight Barricade: When deployed, generates a stationary shield of photonic hardlight. These shields are typically waist-high, as taller shields use more power to maintain, making them more fragile. - - They can stand up to a moderate amount of kinetic force, or a significantly larger amount of plasma before shattering. Lasers are the exception, as they penetrate through the shield without damaging it. Conditional Abilities: - Are you mad?: Replacing the projector’s power cell with a Dense Electron Battery will allow it to take more punishment, at the risk of it detonating if the projector is damaged. Limitations: - One-Use: Once the shield is destroyed, the lightstrip’s battery is spent. Outside of combat, the battery can be replaced easily. Inside combat it is a process that takes four turns. Conditional Limitations: - I See You: The shield isn’t entirely opaque, meaning it serves as poor visual cover. How does it work: Hardlight Barricades are a relatively mundane use of photonic hardlight, consisting of a single projector and a bulky power cell. Flavor text: Wherever there is technology, there is military technology. Militias all over the galaxy have been known to experiment with hardlight shields of all kinds. Referenced Technologies: Photonic Hardlight Attainability: Open Tags: [Civilian] Category: Tools
Pending. Stylish way to establish a barricade. Just needs a few pieces of clarification: is the shield projected the same length as the projector (ie, 4 feet) or is it larger? How big are the semi-domes, generally, and do they have the same waist-high general use? When made 'taller,' how much 'weaker' are they?
The intended purpose of this app is to give vague but meaningful balance guidelines for hardlight barricades, rather than specifications for one specialized kind of hardlight barricade. I think explicitly defining sizes or durability would get in the way of that goal, as in practice there are countless ways to assemble this technology that would function differently in specifics but follow the general pattern.
Vague but meaningful guidelines are for wiki pages. A tech app should answer specific questions and serve as a reference tool for roleplay where it's used. The size can be given in broad terms (from a hallway to a street, with sufficient projectors and batteries) but the durability should be given in explicit terms to provide expectations for the roleplay where it is used. For reference, consider the following reference for personal shields. "Personal-use shield belts can only absorb a certain amount of damage before shattering and running out of charge. Handguns can break a shield in around 3-5 shots, with the upper and lower end depending on caliber and whether the shield is Plasma or Hardlight. Shotguns can break them in 1-2 shots, due to having wide spreads that consume large amounts of power to protect against. Submachine guns take 3-5 shots, and Rifles take 1-3, allowing one to protect themselves against a standard three-round-burst. Sniper rifles tend to shatter shields in one shot, and anything heavier than that, such as railguns, tanks and heavy ordnance have too much force for personal shield belts to deal with." Are these intended to be stronger than personal hardlight shields? If so, by how much? It's a projected barrier, but cover can only take so much punishment before it fails.
