It's irritates me when people say the Enterprise D was taken out buy a 70 yr old Bird Of Prey

Because firing just one beam is

1) basically always done, especially against powerful enemies (multiple beams come to play against midgets, such as the "Conundrum" drones), by our heroes who know their trade better than we do
2) explicitly achieved by commanding "Fire all weapons!"
3) a perfectly valid way to channel the ship's entire weapons output whenever we hear of such things being needed (the heroes don't try to drill through bedrock with multiple beams, say).

Firing two beams apparently just splits the ship's output in two, plus doubles the overhead losses. It might be nice if you want to hurt the enemy in two places, but the heroes never do: apparently there's no tactical value to tickling shields at multiple points simultaneously. Heck, even Kirk's old ship, which always fired two beams, also always pointed both at the same spot!

Timo Saloniemi

 

But power use must be an issue, as otherwise the safest thing would be to run with shields up at all times, except when using the transporter, etc.

 

Not really, when Data was rapidly changing the Shield Frequency when the Borg was tractor beaming them, nobody was worried about Shield Power consumption.
I think it's probably to make a true "Random" function that changes the shield frequency randomly enough to fool the borg.

Making true Random numbers is kinda hard right now when you're trying to counter the Borg who are trying to use their hive mind to figure out Shield Frequency, but if you can change it fast enough and random enough, it can beat them as Data has shown.

I would recommend running with Shields up if possible, you never know what's out there in the randomness of space.

Maybe not at 100% / Full Power, but at least have it up at 33% - 25% strength if you're going to leave it up the whole time.

 

With the processing power of the entire collective at its disposal, I'm sure the Borg would eventually crack that.

You can't run with shields up all the time. That would use too much power.

 

Or foul up the sensors, or something. Heroes don't raise shields even when entering enemy territory at times of war, not until they actually observe an opponent within weapons range. Apparently the penalty for keeping shields up is enormous, then.

Yet when combat shields are raised, nobody starts to count down to point of exhaustion, ever*. Which sort of suggests that the "prevents one from seeing the enemy" rationale might work better than the "consumes fuel" one.

Timo Saloniemi

* The metaphasic shields in "Suspicions" are a different matter, apparently.

 

Right. But I suspect that Geordi and Data would have found a way to reinstall it without a star base, if necessary. Voyager had no other option, so they did it, but we don’t know if it’s standard procedure for an Intrepid class ship.

I don’t remember that ever happen with the D. Anyone does?

You are basically describing the navigational deflectors.

 

MA includes a screencap of it from BoBW.

 

This is all speculative.

1) Except it wasn't done in BoBW, against the most powerful enemy the E-D faced.
2) Speculative. There may be reasons why we saw only a single phaser array fire (optimal targeting) beyond it being the "best" option.
3) Speculative, unless you can cite any dialog to support your claim.

You yourself say that firing multiple beams "apparently" does what you conveniently are arguing that it does.

 

Used up their weapons budget for the month? In all seriousness, they likely blew the budget on the Enterprise-B/Nexus effects, the new Astrometrics lab and the saucer crash, plus the salaries for Stewart and Shatner. They were simply out of cash, and the battle and the Enterprise-D crew's competence were shortchanged because of it.

 

Maybe Our Heroes are given X torpedoes and Y phaser blasts for the year and any overages affect their budget for the following year?

 

Actually, most of the budget was blown on the sailing ship Enterprise scene at the beginning of the film, which was ironic because it served no purpose other than Data coming to the realization that he should install his emotion chip so he can understand humor (after pushing Crusher into the water), something that could have been done in a much cheaper way.

Now you might say that the sailing ship Enterprise scene was for Worf's promotion, and technically it was. But because Worf's promotion had nothing whatsoever to do with the story, and to my knowledge no other officers get promoted by means of a holodeck recreation, the scene was mostly pointless and a huge waste of money.

 

The Navigational Deflectors aren't that powerful, they aren't designed to shield the ship the same way as Shield Deflectors.

 

still it was nice. And good to have some open air in a movie set mostly on starships...

Precisely: a low power deflector that stays online all the time to prevent damage from stray objects, radiation and so on.

 

I'm not saying it wasn't nice; I'm just saying that the scene blew the budget, which could have been spent on far better things, like a better space battle with a better Klingon ship and a better explosion of said ship that wasn't recycled footage from the movie right before it.

 

I like the scene, and it certainly wasn't something they could have done on the show, but it is frustrating to think that it was done at the expense of things more relevant to the overall thrust of the film.

 

This and the stellar cartography scene were the two main things that blew the budget. In both instances, the scenes serve to give us some 'wow' moments of 'they couldn't have done this in the show' like you say. Now with that said, was it worth spending all that money on these two scenes? I certainly don't think so.

 

That's not the threat I was thinking about.

I was thinking about a main shield deflector that defends against a Bird of Prey suddenly firing from cloak 3x photon torpedoes and 3x bursts of main Disruptor Bolts and give you enough time to power on the Shield to 100% and get into Battle Mode / Red Alert.

 

I guess having a force field that strong online all the times would need too much energy. Or perhaps it would interfere with the needs of the scientific labs. Or who knows, but it’s clear they don’t do that.

 

I guess it's situational

 

Except it was done in BoBW. Two cases of "Fire all weapons!" there:

BoBW I
BoBW II

But that doesn't make it speculative that "fire all weapons" is the command you use for firing a single phaser. Plus torpedoes when applicable.

Admittedly, the dialogue is ambiguous. Are the heroes holding something in reserve when they fire a single beam as their sole stratagem for breaking loose, such as in "Booby Trap"?

Why should I contradict myself? Multiple beams are aimed at multiple targets. Even in BoBW I, where the beams from the mystery emitters in the pylons are aimed at some target different from the one the saucer beam is hitting. Most targets are point targets, though.

Against hundreds of cases of single beams being preferable, and a couple where multiple beams hit multiple targets, we have the one shot from "Sacrifice of Angels" where a Galaxy adds a second beam from the saucer ventral emitter for drilling at the same spot on a Cardassian ship where the first beam is already doing its worst. Our heroes supposedly know what they are doing, and they do single beams. So where's the issue?

Timo Saloniemi