A shield battery in the Freelancer universe is shown as a large, cylinder shaped item, which is a part of the ship's inner equipment, as such, we can presume it is not detached from the ship.
As such, we can presume that the battery itself, upon resupplying, is recharged, rather than replaced, and the 300$ is spent for the recharging, rather than buying new batteries. Because even if we buy half the batteries the ship can hold or even none, the handling of the ship does not change, thus there is no added or lost mass, leaving us to understand that a single shield battery is only a part of an integral energy system.
This leads to the question, if the ship's internal core is enough to sustain power for weapons, which is drained and then restored and is also used to keep shields active, would it be possible for the same system to be able to actually recharge the emptied batteries when the ship is ''idle''.
Since we already see that the ship's core output is greater than its consumption in non-combat, non-cruise situations, could this be used to restore depleted shield batteries in non combat situations?
After a battle, the ship either moves to safety or jumps away from the danger and simply has to stay immobile in order to divert all of the excess power to recharging the shield batteries.
We can discuss the speed of the recharge, but my suggestion is to make it depend on the core size and the u/s it puts out. In other words, if we look at a bomber powerplant:
The recharge of a ROC bomber is 1,722 u/s (Let's think that it is the excess power)
In other words it is 5 shield batteries a second. In other words, it means that a fully batless bomber would replenish its 85 battieries in mere 17 seconds.
Perhaps that is a bit too much, and taking into account that bomber and snub fights last long enough as it is, perhaps we can give the benefit of the doubt and say that for some reason, they cannot recharge their batteries, because of the supernova antimatter cannon.
An Eagle VHF, on the other hand, has 63 batteries and a power output of 1100 only regenerates three batteries per second, giving it a total recharge time of 21 seconds...again, that is a bit too much.
What about capital ships, tho?
Liberty Dread has a power output of 260,000 u/s, which means almost 900 batteries per second. Even worse.
So the idea itself is nice, if it was a fixed number per minute. About 5 per minute for snubs, 150 for battleships. In other words, for a battleship (1600 bots) to regain full shield bots without docking, it would need around 10 minutes of standing completely still, while a snub would take around 12, because of the much smaller core.
This would also allow Nomads to regenerate the microorganisms that they use as shields.
Repair ships would also be balanced out, removing their shield battery count only to have enough for themselves, while giving more room for bots, so we do not have repair ships with class 6 shields olololing around, hunting codes.
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