Shields Down!

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Melakon wrote:

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At one point in the final arc, the Breen have a weapon that drains all power from ships. The Klingons are able to develop a defense after a disastrous battle that requires adjusting their engines, but it doesn't work for the Federation and Romulans.

I think he's also referring to earlier episodes like "Favor the Bold"/"Sacrifice of Angels" and "Tears of the Prophets" in which ships are constantly blown up left and right with the Defiant always left relatively intact.

Hell, I think it started with "The Way of the Warrior" where we see Klingon Bird-of-Preys suddenly explode after being hit by a single phaser blast fired from DS9 (the station must have had pretty powerful phaser banks at this point!).

I think it was a variation of the Every Car Is A Pinto trope :
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...eryCarIsAPinto

[Timo]

I think that in the end, all the inconsistency works out as seamless consistency...

In most of the incarnations of Star Trek, shields have explicitly been multilayer affairs: the computer graphics aboard the starships show multiple shield layers, and occasionally even the combat VFX makes it clear that the shields consist of nested shells. An example from "Datalore":

http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x...ore_hd_399.jpg

Now, we could easily argue that we are simply witnessing different levels of penetration. A weak opponent will only manage to light up the outermost bubble shell(s), but a strong one will penetrate all the way down to the skinmost fields.

On the defending side, a starship's outermost shields will take the punishment if they are strong and modern by design and the ship has a capacious power plant to energize them and is allocating power primarily to shields. In combat of the sort we see in DS9, power is probably allocated elsewhere, and the opponents are fairly strong in relative terms; the screencap above is of a rather feeble opponent confronting a modern and large ship that has no other power allocation needs...

Timo Saloniemi