Kinetic barriers

Kinetic barriers, colloquially called shields, were the primary defense against the mass accelerator weapons that dominated galactic warfare. Whether mounted on a starship or built into a soldier's suit of armor, the basic principle was the same: repulsive mass effect fields, generated from element zero and projected by tiny emitters, deflected small objects travelling at high velocity. The same dark-energy technology behind faster-than-light drives and the omni-tool thus shielded combatants from the slugs that small arms and shipboard guns hurled at lethal speed.

How kinetic barriers worked#

A kinetic barrier was a repulsive mass effect field projected from tiny emitters. The field safely deflected small objects moving at rapid velocity, affording protection against bullets and other dangerous projectiles. Crucially, the barrier reacted only to objects travelling above a certain speed, so a protected individual could still sit down in a chair or be touched by another person without knocking anything away. On a starship the same emitters scaled up to shield the hull against incoming fire.

This defense had a sharply defined limit. Kinetic barriers stopped kinetic impacts and nothing else, offering no protection at all against extremes of temperature, toxins, or radiation. Each emitter also drew on a finite power cell. A barrier deflected projectiles only so long as there was enough energy left in that cell, so concentrated or sustained fire could overwhelm and collapse it, a vulnerability that mattered as much for a single soldier as for a warship under bombardment.

Kinetic barriers and personal armor#

On an individual, the kinetic barrier was the outermost element of a layered defensive system. A combat hard-suit used a dual-layer base of fabric armor with kinetic padding, reinforced in rigid areas such as the chest and shins with sheets of lightweight ablative ceramic, all sealed against vacuum and hostile atmospheres. Over this the barrier emitters generated the deflecting shield, detecting objects incoming at high speed and turning them aside as long as their power cells held out.

The most advanced hard-suits extended this into what was sometimes described as a triple canopy of protection: the kinetic barrier first, then the traditional sealed armor and ceramic plates beneath it, and finally a self-repair system run by microframe computers woven through the fabric. That system sealed tears with sterile medi-gel to plug holes that could prove fatal in vacuum or toxic environments. Some technically minded soldiers added still further measures atop the standard barrier, such as tech armor, which trapped a disruptive warp effect between two low-yield kinetic barriers, or a fortification field that used magnetic currents to immobilize incoming metal.

Mass accelerators and the arms race#

Kinetic barriers existed in constant tension with the weapons they were built to stop. A mass accelerator propelled a solid metal slug using precisely controlled electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, the slug designed to squash or shatter on impact so it transferred its energy to the target rather than punching cleanly through. Element zero transformed these weapons: a slug lightened by a mass effect field could be accelerated to velocities once thought impossible, to the point that a paint chip at sufficient speed could strike with the force of a nuclear weapon, limited mainly by the recoil such impacts produced.

This drove a continuous contest between projectile and shield. In an age of kinetic barriers, the geth concluded after analysing their own combat logs that firefights were most often won by whichever side put the most rounds downrange the fastest, yet weapons had to be fired slower or vented to manage waste heat. Their solution, detachable heat sinks called thermal clips, was soon adopted by organic militaries as well, leaving the battlefields of the galaxy littered with spent clips even as kinetic barriers continued to turn aside the fire they enabled.