Deflector Shields: The Best Offense Is a Good Defense
Deflector shields in Star Trek are mainly directed toward absorbing fire from hostile ships or deflecting large objects from the path of the ship. However, there are also navigational deflector shields that protect the ship from small objects that might b
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Deflector Shields: The Best Offense Is a Good Defense
Lasers!? Lasers can’t even penetrate our navigation shields. Don’t they know that? —Captain Jean Luc Picard TNG: The Outrageous Okona
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Introduction
When informed that the shields of the USS Defiant were down to 25 % and that one more hit could finish them, Captain Benjamin Sisko of station Deep Space Nine once stated the first rule of fighting. He said, “Then we’ll have to make sure we don’t get hit.” (DS9: Shattered Mirror) Indeed, the best offense is sometimes a good defense; you can’t kill what you can’t hit. Speed of light weapons like phasers are hard to dodge, so it is really a choice of firing first or relying on some defensive technology to keep your ship intact. If you feel you have to fire first, then you better have some big weaponry, and the Enterprise does. While Captain Kirk isn’t completely honest when he tells the immortal Flint that the Enterprise’s weapons are defensive (TOS: Requiem for Methuselah), it is true that their phaser banks and photon torpedoes are almost always fired as a last resort (TNG: Silicon Avatar). Unfortunately, an individual or species you have just met can’t know that your intentions are peaceful. Perhaps the best approach is to have both a good offense and a good defense. No matter how much a boxer might bob and weave to avoid an opponent’s jabs and roundhouse punches, he is going to get hit. It is just as important to minimize the damage of any landing blow; deflect the majority of the energy away from you and you’ll last a lot longer. This is especially true if you find yourself in space. A spacecraft is really nothing more than a bubble of livable environment in an ocean of instant death. The USS Enterprise and other starships are marvels of fictional (so far) engineering, even though they’re basically just a way to carry around a bit of Earth (air, temperature, gravity) as the crew travels from one planet to another. The big drawback—one hit with a phaser or photon torpedo and there goes your confined environment. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 M.E. Lasbury, The Realization of Star Trek Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40914-6_4
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4 Deflector Shields: The Best Offense Is a Good Defense
Boxers use petroleum jelly to reduce friction and minimize the force of landed punches by helping them slide off to the side. Coating a starship in Vaseline isn’t really an option, so even a glancing strike on an unprotected spaceship or space station is a very big deal. Can a submarine, another type of ship with a protected environment, survive a direct torpedo impact? It’s unlikely if the pressure hull is breached to any great degree. The force of the water entering the hole will rip the hull to shreds. The crew might be able to close a hatch in time, but structural damage and the loss of some ship functions will probably doom them. The same is true for a spacecraft; the astronauts must often patch holes in the exterior wall caused by a micrometeoroid with great energy. Thankfully, these are very small
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