I'm experimenting with creating highly-shielded exploratory vessels.
Ever since exobiology become a thing, planetary landing become much more frequent. However, over multiple jumps, multiple landings, mistakes are bound to happen to even the most cautious commanders. As a result, you have the risk of losing hull integrity from crashing lithobraking.
Shield can act as shock absorber, so it's nice to have more than bare minimum shielding. However, I ran into trouble in determining how much lithobraking damage shield. At first I just assume I could just go 0.5*mass*(velocity)^2 and convert the number to megajoules and compare with shielding. However the number simply didn't line up to what I observed – The kinetic energy won't break the shield despite being a few order of magnitude higher than shield rating.
So…maybe I've been doing the math wrong, but regardless, does anyone know how to guesstimate how much shielding would be necessary to absorb damage from lithobraking.
More specifically, assuming top speed without boost, with 4 pips to SYS and 2 pips to ENG, would , or , or , or even be safe for lithobraking?
