A Short Tachyon Burst

[Nedersong]

So I'm watching Insurrection again and they fire a short Tachyon burst to reset the shield harmonics to beam the android out.

And it's got me to thinking.


Do they realise they just gave the Federation ships a great weakness to their shields?

Think about it. This tactic could be used to defeat all federation ships' shields.

Assuming of course that the flaw isn't limited to the scoutship the android flew.

 

[JNG]

We've seen tachyons mess up shields and other systems in the past, I believe. Obviously they'd engineer around it if they could. It may be that the scoutship is somewhat more vulnerable to this than a larger ship would be, but I believe the Son'a command ship falls victim to this as well, does it not?

 

[Plecostomus]

Or maybe it's just something they can't work around? I mean... there are limits even to pretend technology.

 

[Timo]

I believe the Son'a command ship falls victim to this as well, does it not?

Indeed it does: that's why our heroes can beam the Son'a over to the holoship and make them think they are still running the show. One might deduce, then, that all shields ever devised by our regular players (Feds, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians) are equally vulnerable to the trick.

However, the tachyon bursts don't bring down the shields as such. Rather, they are a nuisance that ever-so-slightly degrades shield performance. And the perfectionist Data and the self-concerned and nervous Son'a are apparently more anxious than the average person to start tinkering with the shields when this slight wrinkle in the performance appears. Probably this is in the Son'a case at least partially because losing shields in the Briar Patch just minutes before the detonation of the fancy fount-of-youth collection charges would be especially inconvenient...

Outside the dangers of the Briar Patch, in the hands of a less nervous or machinelike operator, the shields of a starship would probably not be in any significant danger from tachyon bursts. It might take hours upon hours of pounding before the bursts really damaged the shields.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SoM]

Or maybe, in firing such an anti-shield weapon, you'd bring your OWN shields down too - making it a weapon you can't safely use?

 

[Major Chord]

I'd assume that the Tachyone burst only "scrambles" the sheilds for a few seconds at most, and then they just have to change their frequency to get the sheilds operating again. Wouldn't most federation ships already have a program set up to automatically change their sheild modulation, to protect against the Borg? With this rotating modulation, It probably wouldn't mater how many time you were hit with one of these bursts, because your sheilds would just automatically reset temselves. If the program can d tht fast enough, there would be a very small window of vaunerability, perhaps just miliseconds.

Then again, I could be completely wrong, and have all my concepts and terms mixed up.

 

[Gagarin]

I wonder - if someone took every instance 'Tachyon burst' appeared in during TNG, and put them in a YouTube video, how long that video would be.

It would make a crazy drinking game if you could screen enough Tachyon episodes.

Star Tachyon - The New Giberish

 

[Timo]

Wouldn't most federation ships already have a program set up to automatically change their sheild modulation, to protect against the Borg?

I actually think that ST:INS would be a damned good reason for not having this as an automated feature. If resetting the shields to another modulation makes the ship vulnerable for a moment, then it would be idiocy to use shield rotation against anybody but the Borg.

I'd assume that the Tachyone burst only "scrambles" the sheilds for a few seconds at most, and then they just have to change their frequency to get the sheilds operating again. [..] Then again, I could be completely wrong, and have all my concepts and terms mixed up.

Hard to tell; I somehow got the vague impression that the "resetting" done in ST:INS was different from frequency changing, and perhaps created a longer window of vulnerability. Or perhaps it's just that ships other than top-of-the-line Starfleet warships have great difficulty modulating their shields that way, and thus a shuttlecraft or a Son'a command vessel will suffer a vulnerable moment of two seconds where a Galaxy would only be exposed for two milliseconds.

We should assume, I think, that the vulnerable moments in ST:INS lasted for several seconds. After all, the resets in each case came at unpredictable moments, yet our heroes still managed to squeeze an entire transporter cycle through that time window. Even if the important part of the cycle only took, say, a microsecond, it would still take a second or two for the transporter to react, even at full automation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captain Intrepid]

Or maybe, in firing such an anti-shield weapon, you'd bring your OWN shields down too - making it a weapon you can't safely use?

It certainly would make sense that it's disrupt your shields as well.

 

[Timo]

Then again, phasers and torpedoes that make enemy shields fall apart never seem to bother the shields of the firing ship.

Which is yet another tech mystery. Do starships tune their shields so that phasers can pass through them? How do you prevent the enemy from learning the exact tuning so that their phasers in turn can penetrate your shields? After all, you are practically handing your tuning to the enemy on a platter by firing a phaser with that tuning at them...

Or are the shields configured so that firing out is possible but firing in is not? Is there any evidence of one-way shields elsewhere in Trek?

Or do ships indeed drop shields, for a short time, and perhaps locally, in order to let the phaser beams out? How short is short? How local is local?

How does this tie in with "The Wounded", where O'Brien was able to squeeze a transporter beam through a "window" in the shields of the Phoenix? Is such a window a necessary feature of all shields that allow a starship to use her sensors? Could such a window let through an enemy phaser, too?

Timo Saloniemi