Our group run shields as soak and below is how we run it.

Any ship with shields has shield points instead of Setback dice applied to their attackers. The shield points are calculated by adding the ships Strain Threshold to its Silhouette, and are ablative. The ship will automatically regain shields at a rate equal to the defence rating for that quadrant as long as the shields are still up. Additionally the ships crew can attempt to reinforce the shields integrity by making a Mechanics roll versus a difficulty based on the current state of the shields. If the ship has lost less than half its shield points then the difficulty is Easy, if it has lost more than half but the shields are still up then the difficulty is Average, and if the shields have been collapsed then the difficulty is Hard. Each success on this roll restores the ships defence in shield points.

Due to the fact of shields are soak in these rules we ignore Armour. The reason for the calculation we use is to stop shields becoming OP. I did a few basic runs using varying the calculations with multiplications of Defence as well as others but no other versions worked. For freighters their shields were too low but for capital ships their shields become way to high, which would just make space combat pointless as it would then become a question of big guns, bigger shields. I tried to work the system so that it achieves something close to the movies.

Star Wars is the kind of fictional universe where you really shouldn't stop too long to think about how things ought to work in detail.

That is true enough but sometimes you need to find a way that works better than the system provided. I dislike the shield/defense system because it doesn't feel like Star wars.

Star Wars is the kind of fictional universe where you really shouldn't stop too long to think about how things ought to work in detail.

That's a tricky thing to say, though.

Taken a bit further than the scope of the discussion here, why bother to have different stats for different ships of the same class? (Or stats at all for that matter.)

It's really a spectrum of detail, with the fans of the movies who never progressed beyond that at one end, and really, us here in the RPG camp at the extreme opposite end, where we know all the histories of all the creatures that get a minimum of 2 seconds of on screen time, the technical specs of the ships that are flying around, the manufacturers of the components of those ships, and the histories of those same companies. Ours is a hobby of attention to detail...so while some areas may be deemed "too nitty-gritty" to some, that nitty-gritty is essentially why we're all here.

Tricky, I guess, but right now, with the new canon, a lot of that history seems to have gone right out the window - which means that even FFG, with their licence, ends up flailing at times. For example, the AoR rulebook states that Kenobi and Luke were the only known Force-Users allied with the Alliance at the time of the destruction of the Death Star. Rebels, however, have three of them running around at the establishment of alliance military power, just five years before...and somehow, I don't think they're going to kill off the kid protagonist of a kid's show to comply with FFGs statement (Ahsoka, I suspect, might buy it for the effect at some point). Also, people have so different opinions on what feels like Star Wars. Take armour. It doesn't seem to do all that much good for the people wearing it in the shows and movies and is barely worn by the heroes except as a fashion choice or more frequently, to hide their identity. But it is pretty important in the game, especially for combat-oriented careers and there are specializations that optimize it. Likewise, funny gadgets and tech modification is a big part of the game, with hard points and the like. That's not really the case in most of the movies and shows. The Force Users in FaD seem a far cry from even trainee Force Users in the canon - even someone barely into Padawanhood can deflect blaster bolts far more effectively than high-level FaD characters - whose specializations might not make them Jedi, but which definitely are based on Jedi canon, including the names of the lightsaber forms they can learn.

It all boils down to SW being a very cinematic universe, not one well-suited for getting to technical and spesific. FFG is supplying us with material that encourages us to get highly technical and spesific, though, which is the tricky part. Perhaps that design decicion was not the best one, but it's the one we've got. So I think the smart move is to use what you think works, fudge it and not think too much about rules matching canon, as many of the posters here already are doing.

Fudging it is well and good, and sometimes the best way to go. But in the case of certain aspects either mismatching to the point of losing the feel of the setting or becoming OP sometimes you need to go into the details more closely. Also, for some of us it is half the fun.

That is true enough but sometimes you need to find a way that works better than the system provided. I dislike the shield/defense system because it doesn't feel like Star wars.

Exactly, setback dice and shifting them a bit from one arc to another doesn't remotely convey the way they are referenced in the media.

Our group run shields as soak and below is how we run it.

Any ship with shields has shield points instead of Setback dice applied to their attackers. The shield points are calculated by adding the ships Strain Threshold to its Silhouette, and are ablative. The ship will automatically regain shields at a rate equal to the defence rating for that quadrant as long as the shields are still up. Additionally the ships crew can attempt to reinforce the shields integrity by making a Mechanics roll versus a difficulty based on the current state of the shields. If the ship has lost less than half its shield points then the difficulty is Easy, if it has lost more than half but the shields are still up then the difficulty is Average, and if the shields have been collapsed then the difficulty is Hard. Each success on this roll restores the ships defence in shield points.

Due to the fact of shields are soak in these rules we ignore Armour. The reason for the calculation we use is to stop shields becoming OP. I did a few basic runs using varying the calculations with multiplications of Defence as well as others but no other versions worked. For freighters their shields were too low but for capital ships their shields become way to high, which would just make space combat pointless as it would then become a question of big guns, bigger shields. I tried to work the system so that it achieves something close to the movies.

So when you say they regenerate the defense value for that quadrant? Your saying that a Ship with a defense rating of 1 regenerates on 1 point per round, correct?

Seems like shields would still go down, and stay down, really fast.. 1 or 2 hits for most ships.

You've got to be very careful with any changes. When you compare the raw stats, you come to one conclusion but then you see how Talents affect things and changes you made based on the raw stats or what your characters could do when they were right out of the gate suddenly create serious balance issues.

Put a very experienced pilot in the cockpit and see what the Millennium Falcon could do rather than simply looking at the stats of a YT 1300 (with appropriate addons and mods) and saying, "That ship couldn't withstand firepower of that magnitude!"

It isn't the shields alone. It's shields + Tricky Target + Defensive Driving + Master Pilot + Brilliant Evasion... or some other talents I could likely be forgetting all contributing to what we see.

FWIW, I think this is BRILLIANT game design. We see, in the movies, far different results when things happen to the main characters. We call it Plot Armor when we're snarky. Joe Stormtrooper is in the vicinity of a blaster and he dies with a Wilhelm Scream. Leia gets shot on theblind side while distracted and needs a band-aid. But Talents very accurately produce the levels of plot armor that the main characters, namely the PC's, need in a tabletop RPG.

A YT1300 will have 19 shield points and regen 1 per round per quadrant. A TIE fighter inflicts 6 plus successes damage. So, without anyone trying to boost the shields the YT1300 can take up to three hits before they start taking any Hull damage (assuming a single success on a hit). If other crewmembers start trying to boost the shields then the ship will gain 1 shield point, plus one per success on the mechanics roll.

Also, I do have rules for switching shield points between quadrants, so theoretically the crew could boost shields by using power from another quadrant.

At the moment we are still working on the rules so you could always increase the number regenerated, but I would not increase it too much otherwise you could easily end up with shields which no one can get through, leaving combat a frustrating boring slog fest. If I do decide to boost the amount the shields are regenerating I would either double the defense or add in the ships armour, meaning a YT1300 would regen 4 points per round per quadrant if armour is included. This would mean that the ship could take four or five hits before taking hull damage.

I have crunched some numbers on the above proposed system, and I like it.

Granted, ive pitted my groups YT-1300 with a Targetting computer (2 upgrades, with Ag 2 gunners - But only using one of them)

Vs a TIE and a Z95 with Ag3 pilots in groups of 3.

DISCOUNTING Repairs and losses on the Minions side, my combats go from 4 rounds to 6-7 before someone is defeated.

It does mean going 1 on 1 with a Corvette VERY VERY VERY hard, if not impossible... but I would expect that.

I didnt even look at SDs. But I would run that in a totally different way.

I have no looked at Capitol class combat, as it is unlikely to ever come up in a game, and again, I would use a different system to narrate that.

I would suggest the following changes:

KEEP Armour. It counts as normal soak once shields are lost.

Redirect Shields: Easy mechanics check, each success allows you to move a point of shields from one zone to another.

Keep Angle Deflectors as it is, to adjust how shields are regenerated.

Boost Shields becomes a Mechanics Check, but the ship suffers strain equal to points being put in shields (Since a mechanic can recover strain at will) (Specific to freighters).

I have not done a huge in depth study, so there is probably holes in my workings too.

There are a number of times we see in the movies where the physics of things don't conform to what we'd actually see in reality. I tend to just use the phrase "Star Wars Physics" to describe something that seems like it should work differently. It's a good catch all.

On the flip side of that, there is a need to understand the science fiction technology of things sometimes so it makes sense to our tiny little minds, lol. With that in mind:

A fully functional shield system that opposes anything from entering at all would create an opaque bubble around a person or ship as even light itself wouldn't be able to penetrate it. Since that's not very useful (You'd be invulnerable, but permanently blind, def, and unable to touch anything), shields are modulated at different frequencies (settings) for specific uses. And because someone will eventually ask: Since they're designed for specific purposes, field generators can't generally swap modulations. In fact, they're specifically designed to NOT be able to swap modulations for safety and security reasons.

That's your explanation for how shields work. Simple in explanation and infinitely complex in application.

Consider light versus sound. Both are electromagnetic waves, but on totally different frequency bands.

Air is a primary medium through which sound is transmitted. Take the air away, and now the sound stops.

Air attenuates light somewhat over distances. Take the air away, and that impedance is eliminated and light can travel unhindered.

The mechanisms through which you generate or stop sound don’t necessarily have much impact on light, and vice-versa — glass can make a decent sound insulator, but can also be a transmission medium for light.

That’s just one example. There are many such.

Consider light versus sound. Both are electromagnetic waves, but on totally different frequency bands.

Sound waves aren't electromagnetic... they're mechanical. Sound is nowhere on the electromagnetic spectrum. The fun stuff in the example still applies well-enough, though so I haven't COMPLETELY pissed in your corn flakes... I hope.