Well, if you mean smallest 'visible' nav deflector, that honor would probably fall to the Miranda or Constellation classes, which, I believe have no visible deflector. As for smallest visible, shuttles maybe, but your guess is as good as mine.
What the_andorian said. You know, JDW, I noticed in the photon torpedo thread that you ask question after question with out ever so much as a please or thank you, or even a reason for asking. To quote B'Elanna Torres... "You're rude."
Just to add information not asked for, the smallest nav deflector we have seen has not been aboard a starship. The VOY shuttlecraft (never given a canonical type designation, but sometimes called Type 9 in backstage material even though intended to be Type 12 by designer Sternbach) has a tiny deflector notch on top of the nose, looking pretty much the same as the mothership's auxiliary unit. Timo Saloniemi
He is correct I do believe in one episode of Voyager when the shuttle crash lands they use the deflector, that was attatched to the nose, to help send a signal to voyager, I'm sure what I just posted is not 100% accurate but it is late and I'm tired but it was foremost in my mind. D A N N Y
Some people are like that without the intent of being rude, they just come across that way. Granted, a please and thank you is nice but evidently not necessary to get a response. ¡Muy cumplidos!
probably. I mean, any vessel traveling at warp would have to have a deflector. Could be that theirs was deployed from a forward-facing bay door or something.
I'd assume that the Oberth's deflector was similar to that of the Miranda and Constellation, using emmiters placed around the ship. No visible dish ( that could well be just a big sensor dish, or subspace tranciever,placed between the deflector emmiters to gain additional range or something), but still, the thing has to have a deflector, otherwise a piece of space debris the size of a Cheerio could make a hole in the hull the size of your head.
There's four little windows just forward of the Captain's Yacht on the -D which represents the saucer's deflector. That's the first thing that came to my mind short of small ones we've seen on some shuttles or the missing ones on some ships.
Whether those windows are deflectors (as retconned by documentarists Okuda and Sternbach) or just windows (as intended by designed Probert) remains to be established in canon. But we might well assume that a deflector can be operated without any telltale glow, given that the Miranda and for example Kirk's TOS ship lack such a glow altogether. On the Oberth, there are two obvious locations for a forward-projecting device: the square, lit opening at the bow of the saucer, and the grey dome on top of the lower hull. The latter looks a lot like the "radomes" of the real world, thin radiation-transparent covers shaped to provide protection against external forces such as weather. The three quarter-domes around the Constitution-refit dish, or the two domes on Miranda hull and one on the torp pod, also feature this smooth grey finish that could indicate a radome. Timo Saloniemi
If I may chime in: U.S.S. Voyager had 2 deflector dishes. The large one featured on all Federation ships, and a smaller one on the upper part of the saucer section. It is possible that both have navigational functions (the main one is referred to being a navigational deflector in a Voyager episode where it encounters a Borg cube with 5 children) and that the upper one on the saucer section is one of the smallest we witnessed. At least when it comes to star-ships. Then again, you have even smaller examples of star-ship classes like Sabre whose deflectors are also small. But the absolute smallest would in fact be the one on shuttle-crafts. It's a main deflector dish which means it's also a navigational deflector. For some reason though the writers decided to often use the term 'main deflector dish' instead of 'navigational deflector'
I've never made any friends here postulating this, but nav deflectors should really only be needed for high sublight speed by my take on things. At warp you're in subspace, which is a realm so divorced from our "normal" space that some entities live in subspace domains exclusively (in a TNG episode some out there may remember) and "subspace mines" can be hidden from most 24th century sensors. I'm not comfortable with the warp fields of FTL ships hoovering up space debris as they go except for what ever got hauled into the field as it first formed. A situation where an FTL beam, fired out beyond the local field of an FTL ship, has to interact with matter in normal space seems a little counter-intuitive to me, for what good my intuition is on the subject. Things like EM radiation and gravitational fields still affect ships at warp - I'm sure warping straight into a planetary or stellar grav well ends badly, but by collapsing the warp field before any physical collision. Any on screen scenarios contrary to what I've postulated here would be gladly received - re-thinking this stuff is never a bad thing. As for the size, shape and geometry of any deflector dish/gear, it would understandably vary on different ship series depending on intended mission profiles. The smallest ones would probably be on some probes.
Well, ships at warp have seldom been shown interacting with physical matter - but we do see that even at warp, a ship cannot exactly fly through a planet or a star, and we do hear warp ramming suggested in "BoBW II". Presumably a warp field only takes a ship "so far" into subspace, not "all the way down". Perhaps the higher the field strength, the deeper the immersion, so that a ship at warp 9 might be more transparent to the physical world than a ship at warp 2? Still, there probably remains enough physical interaction that a collision with a micrometeoroid is an equally bad idea at warp 2 and warp 9. FWIW, the "warp streaks" would be nicely explained as being interactions of the warp field and the interstellar dust impacting on it... Timo Saloniemi
Your premise that warp fields don't take ships "all the way down" into subspace does make sense Timo. On considering this, an FTL graviton beam, directed along a subspace trench (as I remember deflector dish operational descriptions), swatting interstellar bits and pieces aside isn't any harder to swallow than most trek tech, although on a related note, I'd have more difficulty accepting that the bussard collectors work at warp speeds. I hadn't heard of the "warp ramming" reference before. Would that be a sort of subspace kinetic energy weapon?
One might argue that this is the only speed at which they can work. That is, they wouldn't have enough hydrogen atoms to suck in unless the ship were moving very fast. Clearly, though, the collectors would have to be much more complex than simple magnets in order to be compatible with warp fields. Perhaps this is why they absolutely have to be mounted in line with the warp coils, preferably at the forward ends of separate nacelles, rather than for example under the hull aircraft air intake style? It's a matter of some debate. I don't think warp ramming is referenced anywhere outside "BoBW", where Riker considers it a last-ditch tactic, and Wesley has some sort of an objection. Perhaps the boy genius was trying to point out that the maneuver cannot possibly work? After all, we have heard that subspace fields reduce the inertial mass of an object (this is probably prerequisite for the operation of impulse engines), and we might suspect that the inertial mass of a ship at warp is also reduced, making ramming futile. Ramming in general is rife with conflict, though: episodes like "The Hunted" (where spacecraft bounce off shields) seem to suggest that kinetic energy is one of the easiest things to repel with shields, yet "Tears of the Prophets" shows that ramming is a valid tactic against shielded vessels after all. Perhaps we are to think that the shields used against the Dominion were extensively modified in order to cope with the exotic phased polaron weapons of the Dominion, and had to sacrifice their ability to repel kinetic attacks? On a related vein, if the navigational deflector can deflect a dust particle at warp 9, it would make comparative sense that it be able to deflect an entire planet at impulse speed. Or at least allow a starship to bore right through one. That is, if there is anything remotely Newtonian about the way ships behave at warp. We are probably missing big pieces of that particular puzzle... Timo Saloniemi
Some good stuff here Timo to help me reconsider my opinions on deflectors and bussard collectors. I like the idea that ships nest deeper into subspace as warp speed increases. Maybe there's a situation analogous to relativity theory where relative velocities never exceed c even if two ships are travelling towards each other at individual velocities that exceed c when added together separately. Perhaps ships become further "disconnected" from normal space as warp speeds increase in such a way that the relative kinetic energy of oncoming matter in the ship's path never exceeds the value equivalent to the ship's sublight velocity (which I assume is conserved in some manor) within the warp field. Therefore bussards work (with a nifty gas density compression effect due to the relative FTL approach rate making them more effective) and deflectors are still required, but you avoid that "beyond infinite mass" situation you get with FTL speeds in relativity theory (if it still applies here at all).
Hey folks! Sorry I haven't been around lately, someting's wrong with my computer! (I borrowed my sisters' for this post.) If someone has a copy of Star Trek The Magazine with the article on the Obreth class starship!? JDW
About the Obreth class starship, I think there was an article in Star Trek The Magazine with schematic drawings of the exterior of the ship! Does anybody have a copy and do the schematics show a navigational deflector? Thanks for the help! JDW