I may have mentioned before that unit coherency in wargame rules is a bug bear of mine. It’s simply because rules like this don’t make any real world sense not for modern to future combat anyway. Unit coherency if applied in the real world would simply maximise the number of casualties your own forces would take. Everyone standing within a few feet of each other when the enemy opened up on you with automatic fire would be an extremely bad idea, but I do get why it’s a thing. Try playing a game that uses lots of models without unit coherency and everything quickly becomes unmanageable. So what if we came up with some sort of justification for unit coherency?
The age of energy weapons transformed warfare like the age of the bullet had before. Weapons were light weight with little to no recoil and shots had a practically infinite range with before unseen accuracy. Thick plate armour mounted on heavy vehicles could be penetrated by the lowliest energy pistol. The danger of such weapons was enhanced by developments in enhanced visual detection and microdrone scanning, no corner of the battlefield was unknown. There was no adequate defence against energy weapons until the development of the energy shield.
At first man portable energy shields provided little protection, unlike the energy cells of weapons which were only activated by a trigger pull, shields had to be permanently on to protect a target from attack at any time. This frequently lead to early shields being drained half way through a firefight, often with the vanguard of an attack stalling until those at the rear could advance ahead, turning their shields on just before passing their comrades. This practice known as ‘leapfrogging’ was common until the advent of symbiotic shields.
Symbiotic shield generators were designed to work together, feed off of each other and project a much more powerful shield than a single generator could do on its own. Rather than the spread out battlefields of 20th and 21st century Earth, during this time there was a coalescing of troops on battlefields as multiple soldiers would attempt to combine the protection their shields offered and as the ability to hide from the enemy lessened and groups of infantry became all the more visible, there was a return to more visually striking uniforms rather than the drab greens and greys of the past.
Armour did eventually return as non-energy weapons along with more traditional ballistic weaponry was used to hit heavily shielded targets. Missiles would overheat and explode upon contact with a shield, but in many cases the missile would explode within the shield rather than harmlessly outside. Single man portable shield generators that were effective for longer periods were also eventually developed, however due to the difficulty of their manufacture and cost they were kept for dignitaries, officers and heroes.
Deathzap 
Sounds plausible to me!
That’s nice and works well.
I can immediately say that I’ve always viewed coherency as feeding the necessity to be close to your mates when the shooting starts. You can check they’re unharmed, and don’t need your help, You can roll that grenade when they’re in a better position than you. You can crawl over and administer medical support and hope they’d do the same! You can warn of an approaching threat. You can exchange signals of relief when it’s passed. I tend to view sci fi combat with all its technological advances, as being a genre where raw recruits, poorly equipped, will be bundled into an APC with only their pals to rely on.