Timeline for In Star Trek, would space particles impart drag on the ship, even if moved by the deflector field?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| Feb 6, 2014 at 9:23 | comment | added | Mario | What Star Trek considers shields isn't something physical. It's just showing the effect. Think of magnetism: If you move two magnets close to each other, they'll push each other. With the effect being strong enough, you've got an electromagnetic shield (which I think is also what's usually referred to as "polarized armor"). Of course, the shields in Star Trek are more complex and repell not only magnetic energy. Just don't think of them as some kind of physical shell, which they aren't. That's just how they're presented on screen. | |
| Feb 6, 2014 at 0:27 | comment | added | Lakey | Sandblaster, thanks for the thorough response including an excerpt from the Technical Manual. However, I don't think the deflector array produces the same type of energy field as the shield emitters. Shields are clearly seen in the show to be hard bubbles. When an object hits the shields, it clearly stops (or explodes). This is different from the deflector field which, as you said, doesn't affect objects. | |
| Feb 5, 2014 at 22:48 | comment | added | Mario | "According to the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual, the deflector shields work by bending space around the ship, causing incoming attacks or debris to miss the ship entirely." How does this relate to/interact with attacks that penetrate/ignore shields (e.g. energy weapons using the correct modulation/frequency)? | |
| Feb 5, 2014 at 21:28 | comment | added | DougM | Newtonian physics don't come into play when you're warping space. The deflector field itself may impose some drag, but an individual particle wouldn't add to that drag, since there's no interaction to speak of, | |
| Feb 5, 2014 at 20:52 | comment | added | Sandblaster | @DougM What I'm saying is that creating the spatial distortion in the first place is likely to require some type of force exerted by the shield emitters, which would be accompanied by an equal and opposite force on the ship as per Newton's third law. The nature of this force is never addressed in canon to my knowledge, but since we know that shield damage often causes the ship to shake, I think it seems reasonable to assume that this would be a physical force of some kind. | |
| Feb 5, 2014 at 19:11 | comment | added | DougM | You almost got a +1 for me, but then you brought shields into the equation and leapt to the wrong conclusion. If space is bent, there is no impact, and the effect of a particle diverted by the distortion is identical to the effect of a terrestrial hurricane on an orbiting spacestation. | |
| Feb 5, 2014 at 18:40 | history | answered | Sandblaster | CC BY-SA 3.0 |