User blog:Captain rudder guy Kevin1/The appearance of shields and their implications on role play and the ROE.

Alright, anyone who has paid attention to the Human vs Protoss battles, you will have noticed the deployment of a shield like device by the UAC. Now, because of some semantics and technicalities, it hasn't yet been banned or retconned away. Now, recently in the discord chats, various other methods for sheilds are being batted around. So the question becomes, what should the wiki's policy be on shield type technology. The current position the RoE takes is that they are not allowed, but is insufficiently vague about what a shield is. While attempts have been made to bring the issue up on chat and discord, it still seems to be insufficiently addressed. So, we will address it here.

Firstly: How do we define a shield? Since the RoE is extremely vague, this should be defined much more closely. It becomes impossible to enforce rules on shields and shield like devices if they can escape that category based on semantics.

Secondly: What should the current rules on shields be? Do we continue the unilateral ban on them? If so, what actions should be taken to retcon past events where shields were used. Or, if we do decide to allow shields, what forms do they take? Are certain shields allowed while others are not? What kind of damage absorption and power consumption limits will there be? Can shields provide perfect protection, or will they be nerfed to allow them to be disabled during combat?

Thirdly: What kind of tech pre-requisites are needed of shields are allowed? Do pre-existing techs need to be developed, or can shields be developed off the cuff without any preceding research? Also, how long should research take on shields?

These questions, along with many more, must be answered before technology like this can be allowed to continue. Please, conduct yourselves civilly in the comments. This is supposed to be a (relatively) calm and reasonable debate, don't let it devolve into flame wars.