Was the colony shielded from orbital bombardment/attack?

Certainly looks like the Urns where hitting some kind of invisible shield, maybe the Gold Device on the top of the Cathedral Building produced this?   But indeed it looked like a kind of defense mechanism, a very questionable one at that.. as it appears to have done little to prevent the bombardment

You would think there would be Security Protocols in place, and Wayne Haagg did suggest the Scorpion type ship was some kind of Border Control.

We can only assume the City Security had noticed the Juggernaught and lack of communication or becoming suspicious with the Juggernaught, they then sent out the Docking Ship to intercept.

Or maybe this is just regular procedure, we can see the Hanger had began to open up to allow the Juggernaught to enter, so the Hanger either opened up automatically after detecting the Juggernaught at a certain distance, or some communication from the Juggernaught activated the Hanger.

Wayne Haagg had also spoke about the Docking Ship and Juggernaught had a Dust Up (a confrontation) which resulted in both ships crashing.

It certainly does look like the city was protected by an invisible shield. The urns upon hitting the shield were seemingly destroyed, but the black goo wasn't affected by the shield and passed through it. When one of the Engineers saw that he yelled:

"RRRRUUUUNNNNNNNNN"

Planet 4 Engineers weren't prepared for such attack, nor did they see it coming.

It appeared to be some sort of shield that the goo ate through- another detail to nit pick. IDK if it is referenced in novels or anywhere else.

I don't think there was. it just seemed to me like the urns explode due to a change in pressure perhaps or maybe some form of time delay, mixing the 2 liquids inside. there didn't seem to be any other defences other than the cloaking of the planet and the scorpion ship. but I may be wrong. im not gna waste my time watching it again or reading the book again. but u def would think that if this was the homeworld of the engineers then, with their level of tech, there would have been more or at least better defences put in place to protect themselves.

I don't think there was any time of shield that the payload hit. Maybe the turbulence of deploying the payload causes it to erupt/detonate when dropped? Clearly David activated the procedure for deploying it so imo it just detonated/deployed at a certain height. Prometheus clearly stated that the ampules needed to be stored at a certain tempature or they become extremely unstable. I would imagine deploying the URNS/Ampules into the atmosphere changed the ambient tempature thus the activation of the goo.

I agree that there appeared to be a spherical-shaped protection provided by the larger ship. The urns seem to shatter against it and the cloud/swarm made it's way around it.

I also really enjoyed this scene AdamPD. It is hard to understand what we're seeing...I feel that is how an alien environment should look to me.

Had the same idea last year when i noticed how the black goo spreaded on a certain altitude.

http://www.alien-covenant.com/topic/45224

Could be a standard security measure in case they expect ships with deadly payloads.

They had probably some emergency rooms as well near the plaza but could not reach them as the nano particles where already rained down.