Lit Personal energy shields in KOTOR only show up in the game.

Is it safe to say that they are basically just game mechanics, not something to take seriously as a technolgy that can be aplied to frontline sentient soldiers?

 

It was explained that later Blaster models could just blow through them and that shields would often malfunction killing the wearer in rather gruesome fashion.

 

No, they're quite canon, and the in-universe means to justify why everyone's running around with swords again:

"I know it's really none of my business, but you look like someone who might need to purchase one of those new energy shields. They're the latest thing, you know. Very high tech. Oh, okay. Well then, you might be interested in knowing I have one for sale. It isn't cheap, but it could be the difference between life and death.When you use one it surrounds you with a radiant aura-particle mesh that absorbs blaster bolts. Pretty handy in a fight. The shield even protects against lightsabers, or so I hear. The shields aren't perfect, of course. They can only absorb so much energy damage before they burn out, and ion blasters will take your basic dueling shield down pretty quick. And they aren't any good at all against a simple vibroblade. That's why the Sith and the Republic are training their troops in hand-to-hand and melee combat. I've heard rumors of the Echani using shields like this, but I never saw anything like them around here. Not until the Sith came. Where they discovered the technology is anybody's guess. The shields are too rare and too expensive to hand out to an entire army, but a shielded strike team can take out a whole battalion of soliders armed with conventional blasters. It gave the Sith a huge edge in the early battles, but it wasn't long before the Republic was able to copy the technology and come up with energy shields of their own. Now both sides are scrambling to come up with new weapons to slice right through the shields, but until they do you're going to see melee combat coming back to the forefront in this war." -- Some Twi'lek on Taris (I removed all of the protagonist's interjections)

 

In SWTOR they realised that it was silly an just went with the usual RPG combat aproach.

 

Still, I remember personal shields being mentioned in the intro for the Colicoid Flashpoint as an example of high-tech equipment the Colicoids are offering, so they might not be part of the gameplay, but are still in use.

 

Tanks in Swtor use personal shields.

 

I guess if you look at game mechanics, Kyle Katarn uses one because there are both health packs and shield boosters to heal you.

But if you look at canon, it was explained that personal energy shields were found to cause major radiation poison and/or cancer. Read Outbound Flight; they explain that no infantry troops use droideka shields because the radiation killed them. So maybe they didn't realize it when they were made in KOTOR, and this was discovered later (when the galaxy wasn't at war and those who used shields didn't die in battle anyway, and lived long enough to show signs of the poisoning). Then by the time of Kyle Katarn they'd discovered a way to build them without radiation poisoning (kind of like they used to make car fuel with lead and then they changed it to unleaded).

 

oh stormies...

 

Bah. Their rep is undeserved. They're only bad at shooting the main characters, and they'd been outright told to let them escape from the Death Star I.

 

Well at least the Legion the Emperor sent to Endor seemed to be pretty good shoots, just the 501st Vader keeps around seem to be outright terrible.

 

It's almost as they were merely civilians wearing home-made armor for show and charities!

 

Indeed, and actually, they are rarely shown shooting at all. During the Battle of the Endor shield bunker Stormtroopers shoot a grand total of five times, if I remember correctly, and never at an Ewok.

 

My opinion on this is that canon and continuity really shouldn't come in to play here. The shields in KOTOR are just part of the game. As Ulicus said, they had a good, logic based reason for including them, but they still don't really mesh with the Star Wars galaxy as we know it, but that's okay, it's a video game.

When you think of Star Wars, you don't think of people wearing personal shields, because they don't in the movies. Or hardly anything else. You can make up explanations to explain this absence, but it just doesn't mesh well.

 

"You don't think of it when thinking of the movies" is an argument that would discard a huge chunk of the EU. I don't see any reason that personal shields existing in the past should be taken out of continuity.

 

If a bit of tech from the games cropped up in the films or tv shows I'd be cool with it. But look at KOTOR adavancement. The characters become Christmas trees of magic-tech items.

 

I didn't say it should be taken out of continuity, I kinda meant the opposite. I meant that people should ignore any feelings of discontinuity with the movies and the rest of the universe, because it's a video game. People should give the game some slack instead of asking why Luke or Han or whoever, whenever, wherever didn't use personal shields. Personal energy shields hardly appear anywhere but games, they aren't in the vast majority of books and comics, so there are a lot of instances where one could ask that question. And they don't just appear in the past, they appear in the Rise of the Empire, the Rebellion and the New Republic era.

What I also mean is that I don't think personal energy shields should become the norm because they're not in the movies and I don't think it reflects the reality of the movies. The same could be said of transporters and time travel. It can be fit into continuity, but with the idea that it should be used sparingly.

That's my take. I mean, I don't really care what is and what isn't really Star Wars, but that's how I feel about shields in KOTOR. That's how I felt when I first played it, I just told myself that it was video game. I don't even care about continuity or canon, because imo it simply doesn't exist for the Star Wars franchise. There is no continuity, there's a ton of discontinuity, and even movie canon isn't sacred, which defeats the purpose.

 

I dig this idea, should roll with it as an explanation. Blasters got better, sheilds got worse.

 

In 'The Courtship of Princess Leia' Prince Isolder use a personal energy shield and is described with some weaknesses, to quote –
"Personal shielding tended to provide minimal protection, because you couldn't get a power source strong enough to deflect enemy fire and still last for more than a moment. The second danger came from the shield itself: the energy shield got so hot that the wielders risked frying themselves if they accidentally touched it."

 

They kinda seem like something that would just be a fad, some company cooks them up to say... protect VIPs from assassination or something, then people notice that you can carve through them with a sword and then they get prolific because of a newfound interest in swordfighting due to nostalgia, like the use of cavalry in WW1.

Then the blaster companies are all like "Okay, party's over" and start making anti-shield blasters. I'd imagine there'd be corporate dust-ups between those that make shields and those that make blasters with them trying to one-up eachother while lots of soldiers get killed in the process.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if the military brass hated shields, because they encourage troops to charge into blasterfire like morons.