A field guide to deflector shield harmonics
Harmonic tuning is treated as arcane knowledge held by one person on the crew. It is not arcane. Here is the whole of it.
On most ships, exactly one person understands the shield harmonics panel, and when that person transfers off, the ship runs whatever settings were left behind for the next several years. This is a bad way to operate a safety system, so here is the entire subject, compressed.
What a harmonic is
A deflector shield is a standing field. Like anything standing, it has a frequency. Anything arriving at the hull is either absorbed by that field or passes through it, and which one happens depends on how the arriving energy's frequency relates to the field's.
That is the whole concept. Everything else is bookkeeping.
The three numbers that matter
Base frequency. Where your field sits. Higher base frequencies absorb energetic particle impacts better; lower ones handle broad-spectrum radiation better. Most hulls run mid-band and should.
Rotation rate. How often the field shifts frequency. Rotation exists because anything that adapts to your frequency has to keep re-adapting. The DSG-4400 rotates every 340 ms.
Channel separation. How far apart your ray and particle channels sit. Too close and a single event degrades both. Too far and you have gaps in coverage. The correct answer is a function of your emitter count, and the generator calculates it — but only if you have told it how many emitters you actually have fitted.
The three mistakes
- Setting rotation to zero to "stabilise" the field. The field is not unstable. Rotation looks like noise on the readout and is not. Crews turn it off to make the display calm and turn their shield into a fixed target.
- Running channels at the same frequency. This produces a beautiful number on the aggregate readout because both channels reinforce. It also means one event takes both.
- Never re-running the emitter survey after hull work. Add a sensor pod, weld a patch, fit a comm relay — the field geometry changed. The generator does not know unless you tell it.
A workable standing procedure
- Re-run the emitter survey after any hull modification, without exception.
- Leave rotation on automatic. Always.
- Check channel separation quarterly; it drifts as emitters age at different rates.
- Log your base frequency and review it when your operating region changes. A ship that moves from inner-system freight to deep survey should not be running inner-system settings.
Reading the degradation report
When a shield degrades gracefully it will tell you which stage it is in. Stage 1 is loss of margin — everything works, the reserve is gone. Stage 2 is loss of a channel. Stage 3 is reduced sphere coverage, and the report will name the sector. A ship at Stage 3 with the gap facing the thing it is worried about is in a much worse position than the aggregate percentage suggests. Read the sector, not the number.