Particle Shield

A vital piece of technology for protecting the soft and squishy organic CPUs at the heart of remote equipment operating in hostile environments. The intense power requirements for operating any particle shield of useful strength severely limits the minimum size of a chassis that can support it. Particle shields do not protect against all threats equally, and must be tuned to offer more effective protection against certain damage types at the expense of weaker protection against others.
Like all pieces of highly advanced and complex technology, a particle shield requires its own sub-CPU to regulate the dynamic power draw and the unstable emission fields. In the case of wetware failure, the particle shield will shut itself down until the CPU can be replaced.

Device Tuning

Directionality

All particle shields can only protect the machine they are mounted on in a limited arc. A particle shield emitter can be rotated so that its arc can face the direction of an incoming threat, but cannot protect from threats not covered by its arc. The smaller the angle of the arc, the greater the amount of protection it can offer.
An "Omnidirectional" particle shield protects the entire machine it is mounted on, but can only do so relatively weakly. This class of particle shield is best employed against weak environmental effects, such as dust and hail storms or radiation, when more specialised forms of environmental insulation cannot be installed on a chassis.

Range

A particle shield is always projected a certain distance away from its emitter. Increasing the distance requires exponentially more emitter power for the same level of protection, but can be used to cover other objects within its arc. Particle shields cannot protect against any threat already within its arc.

Damage Type

All particle shields are tuned to suppress specific types of damage, which can be roughly divided into the three main categories of Kinetic, Radiative, and Ionic. Tuning a particle shield to resist one damage category will make it weaker against the other two types. Tuning to resist two damage categories is possible, but the particle shield will resist all damage types significantly more weakly than two highly tuned particle shields with the same combined power requirement.

Heat Flux

Particle shields produce significant amounts of heat flux while in operation. As the power output of the emitter increases, the amount of heat flux it produces increases exponentially. A particle shield works more efficiently the cooler it runs, and will shut itself down if it overheats. Coolant flow can be tuned, but the effectiveness of coolant is dependent on other components attached to the chassis.

Layering

Some emitters support layering, where the same emitter produces two particle shield arcs at the same time. The two layers are spaced some distant apart in space, and while both layers combined are weaker than a single particle shield of equivalent power, a layered particle shield offers increased protection against certain kinetic threats, such as objects fragmenting on contact with the outer layer.

Damage Mitigation

Particle shields mitigate incoming threats in two distinct ways. These are Disruption and Deflection. Disruption directly bleeds energy away from threats that strike the arc of the particle shield, reducing damage at the expense of spikes in heat flux that must be removed by the cooling system. Deflection instead alters the trajectory of an incoming threat away from the chassis the emitter is mounted on at the expense of heat flux. At sufficiently shallow angles, a threat may be reflected off of the particle shield.