Ships with multiple S2 shields seem to have power issues compared with ships with a single larger shield: they consume much more power but perform much worse. In the past, you said that the Redeemer's six S2s should provide a regeneration advantage over a single S3, but currently they don't work this way, as the S2 shields have much worse shield regeneration.
TL;DRAgreed that multiple small shields currently underperform; the engineering update will change shields substantially, with only two active at once and everything rebalanced, so current comparisons won't hold and the gap should shrink.
That is very true. So we are in this in-between stage of the current system and engineering. And I talked with Torsten yesterday to make sure I say the right thing here, so hopefully I don't misconstrue it. But with the engineering update, there's going to be quite a large change in how shields and other components function. And essentially, if you have a ship that has more than two shields, you will only ever have two available at a time active. So that means that if one of them goes down, your third one will come online to take its place. If that one goes down, the fourth one comes online, fifth, sixth, whatever. So in terms of power consumption, obviously that changes things drastically, because you're only having to power two, but you have this larger backup pool of shield generators. So in terms of size 2 versus size 3, all the sizes will have changes done. Every single item is rebalanced with engineering. All the values you see now are not going to be the same as they are when engineering drops. So you can't really accurately compare six S2s now to, say, one size 3 coming in the future. But that difference will be a lot less with the engineering update.