Why Do Federation Ships Go Around With Shields Down Most of the Time?

[Vandervecken]

Are shields ever up during warp? Maybe the two won't function together for some reason, either because there's not enough power for both or because of some field conflict. I would just accept the power issue, though--in my head (of course not canon) I think of the Romulan cloaking device as an extrension of deflector tech, and we all know that is a massive power drain. Deflectors on steroids--so deflectors drain enough to make a difference, just not the stupendous amount of a cloak.

So maybe the choice in hostile territory is between shields or the ability to get away immediately at warp. Given that choice, I'll take the ability to run away.

I would tend to think that it's not that the warp core can't supply the deflectors indefinitiely, but can't generate enough for deflectors + [fill in ultrahigh energy-expensive activity here], and thus it's not worth it to have them up when not really needed.

 

[Marsden]

I seem to recall that the shields were automatic in some stories. That the ship could bring itself to Red Alert if the sensors spotted something that was going to hit it that the deflector couldn't handle.

You recall correctly, but somehow, that wonderful feature of the 23rd century was lost by the 24th and Starfleet blundered into a lot of things without protection.

 

[Paradise City]

It just wears out through cronic overuse. Or destabilises a little, becomes fragile. And you need to be in tip top condition should you run into adversity.

 

[Albertese]

...
It's like how Captain Smith of the Titanic should have slowed down in the ice field, especially considering he'd been amply warned of what was ahead by other ships. He didn't even have the watertight bulkhead doors raised as a precaution. Of course that wouldn't have changed the ship's fate, because of a faulty design, but it might have slowed the ingress of water long enough for the rescue ship to arrive.

Recent research has demonstrated that the Titanic's fate was almost certainly a product of the weather. Extreme cold water from the (I wanna say) Greenland current caused air temperature immediately above the water to drop substantially more than higher up (say, at the crow's nest) which caused a mirage-like visual distortion which raised the apparent horizon to the point where it caused the iceberg to be invisible until it was too late. They only had about half a minute to steer clear and it wasn't long enough and likely wouldn't have been long enough even at slower speeds. Had they hit the berg head on, the damage would have been less severe as the watertight compartments would likely have been up to the task. As it was multiple hits, this caused water to leak into more watertight compartments than could have been dealt with even if all the doors had been closed.

When I was a kid, my dad was a geek about two things: Star Trek and early 20th Century ocean liners (specifically Titanic, Olympic, Lusitania, and Mauritania. We had models in the house of all these ships and a box full of parts he had intended to build as the Britannic but never got around to. He was also going to scratchbuild the Carpathia but only got as far as sculpting the hull.) Anyhow, I've kept up with any Titanic news I hear.


Wait, weren't we talking about deflector shields?

--Alex

 

[Timo]

Are shields ever up during warp?

Pretty often. There's a lot of fighting at warp, too, with both phasers and torpedoes. Sometimes such fighting includes dialogue on the shields, but they're pretty much implicit in all of the fighting anyway - or at least there's never the suggestion that warp fields would protect you from enemy fire.

I think of the Romulan cloaking device as an extrension of deflector tech, and we all know that is a massive power drain.

But we all are probably wrong...

There's no adventure in which the cloak would have been a major power drain. In "Balance of Terror", Spock speculates it might be, but nothing about the episode itself bears that out. In ST4:TVH, the cloak is pretty much the last thing to succumb when power is dwindling - even transporters, which sometimes get fired up by a flashlight battery, go first. And in DS9, we learn that a cloaking device can make itself invisible without being hooked up to any external power source (apart from a putative wireless power net available for everyday purposes inside the ships and stations).

You recall correctly, but somehow, that wonderful feature of the 23rd century was lost by the 24th and Starfleet blundered into a lot of things without protection.

Actually, Picard still has that feature turned on in the early adventures: auto-raising of shields happens in "Arsenal of Freedom".

But such an automated feature is clearly something Picard would want turned off, because he wants to negotiate with his opponents; auto-raising of shields just leads to immediate firefights. Heck, Picard regularly turns off his Tactical Officer, too!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TwoJakes]

There's no adventure in which the cloak would have been a major power drain. In "Balance of Terror", Spock speculates it might be, but nothing about the episode itself bears that out.

Very much the opposite, there's dialog in Balance of Terror about the increased fuel comsumption caused by the use of the cloak.

 

[Timo]

There's no mention of increased fuel consumption as such - just a crew member's choice to let the cloak degrade because he felt the power allocation was unnecessary, and the commander's insistence that invisibility still remained necessary. Later on, fuel running low (for unspecified reasons) is a counterindication (immediately overruled) to using the cloak - but a much more severe counterindication (not overruled!) to firing the plasma weapon, which no doubt is the real power hog, the one that caused the fuel shortage in the first place...

...After all, the Romulans easily can and will run while cloaked, but they can't shoot while cloaked!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

In Star Trek IV, I would imagine they are loosing power quickly for all other systems because they have to keep the cloaking device running at all costs.

 

[Timo]

Might be. But that's not stated in the movie. Instead, an independent reason for power loss is established (time travel ruining the dilithium - a clever one in technobabble terms, because it doesn't affect the ship's energy stores, just the means of tapping into them). And other applications of known low power appear to go first anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TwoJakes]

Commander: We grow visible. Attend the cloaking system.
Romulan: It consumes much power, Commander.

 

[Timo]

Yes, the minion whines. What he does not say is that the cloak would be a leading consumer of power, or that the power consumption would be having a noticeable effect on endurance or other performance. From subsequent events, we discover it was just whining for whining's sake: the Commander sees no merit in letting the cloak take a break - while later on he sees definite merit in not firing the weapons even though firing them might well result in triumph there and then, this time himself quoting power issues.

The cloak isn't on the top of the list of power/fuel consumers, even if it may be close to the top. The things that really cause concern are the guns and the propulsion. Significantly, shields are never mentioned - either by the Romulans, or by the heroes.

Does this silence mean the shields stay down through the entire fight, perhaps supporting the idea that they consume so much power / otherwise hinder combat that they can only be raised at the last second?

Or does this instead mean that raising of shields is a triviality that both sides get out of the way even before the opening credits, after which the shields stay up for the better part of a day?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[TwoJakes]

Romulan: It consumes much power, Commander.

 

[Timo]

Commander: As if I cared.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vandervecken]

If the cloak isn't an energy drain, why can't (the majority of) cloaked ships fire weapons when cloaked? I don't mean advanced ships like the one in STVI or AGT, I mean the ones we usually encounter.

 

[Spot261]

I'm really not sure about that, there's a line in Balance of Terror where Spock speculates about the power drain and suggests they may be unable to fire weapons. That is an hypothesis however by a character who had never encountered a cloaking device before and would surely only apply to weapons that rely on ship's power, not torpedoes which seem to largely be self powered.

 

[TwoJakes]

The BOP in TUC could fire torpedoes, but there's no evidence that it was capable of firing disruptors or "beam weapons" while cloaked. The power availible after demands by the cloak might not have permitted it.

The torpedoes might not have had the BOP give them a powered launch, and simply used their own engine to leave the torpedo tube.

 

[Spot261]

I've theorised about that too, but it seems strange that nowhere else pre Nemesis do we see it happen. Possibly the very fact of being able to track cloaks of that tech level so readily made the question of cloaked combat pointless until the enhancements we saw on the Scimitar made it possible.

 

[Ithekro]

It might have been the need for a large enough power source and refined cloaking capability to allow Scimitar to work as shown. Or that the senor abilities needed required too much mass of the ship to make a good warship until you could build a huge ship to pack in all the sensors needed, the power to run those senors, the cloak, the engines, and have the weapons on board as well.

Maybe the Romulans were going for huge ships in an effort to find this balance, but didn't quite get their until the Dominion War.

 

[Shat Happens]

In the III novelization, the cloaking device was said to cause madness at times:

 

[Timo]

I'm all for the balance thing. Perhaps preheating of death rays is more difficult to mask than spooling up a photon torpedo launcher, but a rash Klingon may prepare or activate his weapons under cloak anyway, where a sly Romulan is afraid of even using a turbolift while cloaked.

in the end, firing while cloaked is rather pointless in Trek, because every weapon glows brightly anyway: you can immediately spot where the fire is coming from. There might well be a bit of afterglow, too, stuff that sticks to the otherwise invisible ship and makes spotting easier a moment after firing (much like the tachyon net disruption thing made the Romulans spottable in "Redemption II"). So most opponents just plain don't bother - they could leave the cloak on, but it would serve no purpose.

Yet why not leave it on, on the grounds that shutting it down will not help any, either? We could argue that the cloak may get hurt if fired at, if it really is a variant of the deflector shields. Better stow it when not in use, then.

Timo Saloniemi