Dominion Shielding

## Pocket Shield

Pocket shielding is the oldest and most essential type of shielding in use. It is fairly simple, projecting a malformed gateway around the target that enshroudes them in a portal the Void. Anything entering the shield will be erased from existence making the protection fairly absolute. However as one would expect the target is incapable of interacting or observing with anything while the shield is active, making it useful as an active defense only. All FTL capable spacecraft field one, not only as a handy defense against oncoming attacks but also to protect the spacecraft from self-destruction when its Cassiel field breaks unexpectedly. The survival rate of spacecraft would be much lower as having to decelerate to relativistic speeds to drop the Cassiel field without being vaporized is not a luxury afforded to those in combat.

## Force Shields

Force shields are a dynamic field of electromagnetism that suspends a wall of charged compound particles. The strength of the electromagnetic field depends on the output of the emitter allowing the shield to be easily variable in strength. These shields provide practical 'always on' protection but can be broken.

The most common way to break a force shield is to apply enough pressure to overcome the electromagnetic field holding the hadrons together, this will cause the hadrons to fall out of place in a domino effect and drop the shield completely. The second way is to brute force the hadrons by overcoming their binding energy.

For very powerful emitters, this may be easier than overcoming the field and will punch a hole straight through, however it won't drop the shield completely unless the hole is large enough and it will be repaired when the shield recycles.

This is countered by layering the shield which is something afforded to larger objects that can support multiple emitters.

These shields are invisible until they are struck hard enough which will reveal a visible distortion effect as the field affects the photons nearby.

One useful feature of force shields is that the charge of the particles can be changed as necessary, this allows the shield to protect perfectly against antimatter (but becomes dangerous to anything else touching it)

## Gap Fields

Gap fields are wide range shields that consist of a Cassiel field sandwiched in a layered force shield. The idea is whatever is able to force it's way through the outer force shield will enter the Cassiel field, immediately overload it and explode into a plasma which will be easily deflected by the underlying force shield, this is a bit like an ablative shield system. The top layer is to protect the Cassiel field from weaker impacts.

Gap shields naturally have a much larger energy cost than force shields and will be forced to discharge for a long time if confinement is broken on both sides. They are used on a large scale only.

## ECMF

Electromagnetic Countemeasure Field. A field projected by all Dominion craft. Controlled by a powerful embedded computer system, it works as a stealth system and shielding system against unidentified electromagnetic waves from touching the hull.

These fields can also be found in vehicles and infantry battlesuits as well.

The field can make the ship appear permeable to low powered sensors (and is exponentially more effective at longer ranges) and cloak the visual and thermal signature of the ship. This functionality is effectively always on as stealth is ALWAYS useful.

It's nowhere near powerful enough to block DEWs but it can block ionising radiation weaponry, nonlocal hacking and jamming attempts, mind control waves and more. Anything EM based that isn't a high powered weapon will be absorbed by the field which surrounds the hull, spaced only a couple of meters.

The energy consumption of the field is rather high and it's cost prohibitive and unnecessary to make it larger than near hull hugging. The field also needs somewhere to dump the large quantities of waste heat it produces, luckily Dominion heat exchange technology is advanced enough to trap and convert most of the heat into useable energy.

## CEF

Devised by the Humanus Federation according to historical data and refined by the Dominion, the conceptual enforcement field is a staple defense against any anomalous weaponry extraplanar enemies may attempt to use.

CEFs use a gateway device to encode the target volume of space in a pocket plane with normal physical laws and project it as a hologram into realspace.

This "overwrites" the original nature of the target, effectively obscuring it from reality itself and makes it extremely resistant to external change, such as from travelling into a space with different physical laws. Such a process is quite energy intensive and the stronger the influence realspace has on the target (say a God is trying to warp the target) the more strain on the system. A stressed CEF will shunt lots of unpleasant flux into realspace, potentially destroying the target being protected, the hologram may also end up distorting and warp the target in unpredictable ways. Eventually an overloaded CEF will break completely, rendering the target fully vulnerable.

CEFs thusly are extremely useful for fighting and containing extraplanars and powerful reality warping psychics, as well as providing insurance for any cross-real travellers.

One of the useful eccentricities of CEFs is their violent reaction to NLFs (no limits fallacies). Whilst very rare, violent feedback has been shown to erase anything considered an NLF (i.e truly infinite energy) to the laws of reality on contact with any CEF :)

This quirk has likely saved the Dominion from utter destruction several times but it's hard to say for sure.