Observed behaviour

As seen in the Visual Studio debug output

Exception thrown at 0x00007FFB04D0B699 in pioneer.exe: Microsoft C++ exception: SceneGraph::LoadingError at memory location 0x00000046D10FEAE8.
Exception thrown at 0x00007FFB04D0B699 in pioneer.exe: Microsoft C++ exception: ModelCache::ModelNotFoundException at memory location 0x00000046D10FEE78.

This is caused the missing model file vatakara_shield, and \data\models\ships\malabar\vatakara_shield.dae is missing.
The file needs to have the name vatakara_shield.dae because the lookup is done based on this line in ShipType.cpp:

shieldName = data.value("shield_model", modelName + "_shield");

Expected behaviour

No exception thrown and the file vatakara_shield.dae is loaded

Steps to reproduce

Just load the game, perhaps use the modelviewer to test that the shield works

My pioneer version (and OS):
Off on a branch from the latest Git but very recent, Windows 10

My output.txt (required) and game save (optional, but recommended)
No output.txt supplied because it doesn't log to it so there's nothing to show. I had to debug it via MSVC to gather the above info.