With the information procured from a Reverend, we were finally able to break the mystery of the craft-mounted energy fields. They're able to project or dissipate all sorts of energies, making them useful in both attack and defense. As it turns out, they're just a partial implementation of ship-mounted shields of the Stellar Empire. Such real shields regenerate fast (usually .25% per second), but require bulky machinery. However I think we can devise some simpler, hybrid shields for our own ships, lacking that sort of regeneration, but small enough for their frames. To regenerate them, our ship would have to spend 1 hour undergoing maintenance.