Yeah, but don't forget that the BOP circled around and got some shots off at the back of the E-D (and even missed a couple of shots at point-blank, how silly is that?
) So going after the bridge on subsequent shots would have been a valid tactic even if they were bad enough to miss
True enough. But there we can speculate that Riker did his damnedest to keep the bridge protected through maneuvering. Or, if LaForge figured out the shield-penetrating trick and managed to get the shields working, Riker would have started to play the classic game of keeping a strong shield turned at the enemy while weakened ones replenish. The E-D was free to maneuver, after all - no indication was given of her propulsion failing.
But there in turn we can speculate that the Klingon fire
was gradually having an effect on Riker's ability to maneuver and fire back - meaning that an attack against the bridge was finally becoming feasible.
Although continuing from there, it sounds reasonable to speculate that a hit against the bridge would be irrelevant at that point of the game. The E-D would already be on full battle alert, meaning a secondary command center would be ready to take over at the already anticipated loss of the primary one. The most the Twisted Sisters could achieve would be killing Riker, Worf and Data - a potentially great loss to the E-D, but one Starfleet would deem acceptable because obviously Starfleet doctrine did not call for dispersing these top officers to various backup command centers.
A few thoughts on "One-way" shields:
- if they are one-way, how does a ship get sensor information if no energy can get in?
- can the ship selectively open a frequency-range for receiving senor information? And if so, how can the ship prevent enemy counter-fire from analyzing sensor information?
Here I'd argue that sensors indeed work through windows in the shields, and that these windows are very, very narrow. It takes a lot of skill and effort to squeeze a transporter beam through them ("The Wounded"). It's probably possible to push a very weak phaser beam through as well, if the enemy stays immobile and predictable long enough in the style of that TNG episode - but large energies in a short period of time are still unviable. It would be like trying to send an invading horde of swordsmen through a revolving door...
Sensor information hitting you can probably be readily analyzed - our heroes and villains can e.g. always tell they are being targeted, as opposed to merely being generically scanned. But returning some hostile energies with the same specs will probably gain the enemy very little. The complex sensor window will probably have closed (rotated forth) so that not even enemy sensor energies can properly penetrate, let alone weapons energies. But in general I'd argue that the sensor window is a "revolving door" or a "maze", not a straight hole through the shields.
OTOH, to get weapons-level energies through, one would have to open a straight hole. Probably not a problem in the counter-fire sense if you fire unpredictably from a long phaser strip - but a bigger problem if you always fire from that single spot beneath your saucer! Which is why I think there has to be this one-way shield thing at play there.
What if the enemy ship tries the entire spectrum and finds the holes and immediately fires?
I guess that's prohibitively difficult, too much to ask from the hardware. A bit like trying to storm a fortress by pressing all the possible combinations on the code lock of the portcullis at once. Or breaking into a car by sending all possible remote key signals at once. Possible in theory, but not in practice - especially as the target will keep moving, the frequencies shifting.
Mr. Scott's guide to the Enterprise.
...Which also claims that one can open holes in the shields for transporters, a big dramatic no-no.
Perhaps the
Mr Scott's explanation for skintight shields is how the
Defiant's ablative armor works? I mean, the "ablative" part heavily suggests there's a substance of some sort involved, but the fact that nothing is ever seen ablating away, at least not permanently, suggests a remote replenishment mechanism.
It's more plausible for the 24th century where transporter-based technologies are quite refined than for the 23rd where replicators don't yet seem to exist...
Timo Saloniemi
