That requires a bit of creative license since that wasn't depicted in the episode, don't you think?
Absolutely not. If the ship is hurt, then the shields have failed - protecting the ship is the sole job of the shields. It takes creative license to think of ways in which the shields could take a coffee break while the ship is being destroyed.
Of course that simply might have been that the Klingon torpedoes struck near the warp nacelles or the torpedo bays or that the shields fortunately came on before the first hit landed.
Indeed. But
where you hit is significant in every battle, apparently, because similar levels of firepower create dissimilar effects. It's "fortunate" that the heroes sometimes manage to disable enemy weapons or engines or perhaps their shield generators, and "fortunate" if the enemy doesn't manage to do the same - but fortune enters the picture because half a dozen hits from torps, or a good one from phasers, is plenty enough to bring down the shields.
It might be like boxing with an opponent hiding behind a rubber sheet. You can pound at the sheet until your hits connect with the opponent and start causing damage, but when you stop, the sheet returns to default position, and you again have to do a series of punches to reach the opponent. Or then you can manage to hit the buckle in your opponent's harness that causes the sheet to collapse, if you are fortunate or accurate enough. (Or then you can rip the sheet itself with enough pounding, but that takes more doing than what happens in most battles.)
This could also explain our one major outlier, "The Changeling": it takes six standard photon torpedoes to punch through the shields of the hero ship and cause damage, but more than 300 to rip the shields themselves - and NOMAD aimed at the shields for some reason, rather than at the ship. Remember how much (phaser) effort it takes to collapse the shields of various superhuman opponents, whenever our heroes hope not to harm the opponents themselves but merely to make them cease and desist or possibly release their victims...
The original VFX showed a energy ball hitting the saucer. Has there been any TOS episode that named those as "photon torpedoes"?
Not quite, admittedly. It's got the looks of what the Romulans use in "The Deadly Years", but the weapons aren't identified there, either. (Sulu does say "Sir, they have fired another..", as if the firing of a single weapon were a threat - as it was in "Balance of Terror". But these balls of fire don't quite pack the punch of that original plasma weapon.)
Speaking of other torpedoes, 8 other Klingon ships (Kor's task force) attacked the Enterprise in orbit and the hits we see on the Enterprise caused none of the shaking as the earlier attack.
Then again, the Klingons previously killed 200 Organians, with nary an impact. Perhaps their massacring techniques haven't improved in the meantime?
If you're bringing up overall continuity then a cloaked attack isn't compatible at all since a cloaked ship decloaks and attacks at point-blank range. This didn't happen because the deflectors came on as it detected the Klingon ship approaching (not said to be decloaking). That's usually for ships far away.
Fair enough. Then again, shows explicitly involving "routinely" decloaking opponents no longer involve automatically raised shields, so it's a bit difficult to tell. And shields have snapped up for opponents our heroes don't recognize previously, so they might be "smarter" than the heroes, and reacting to a decloaking opponent already, after which Sulu witnesses and comments on a routine "Klingon BoP charges weapons after decloaking and then fires" grace period during which the enemy also approaches a bit.
A ship barreling in at warp speed in TOS might give a stopped defending ship only seconds to raise shields upon detection before being fired upon. Hardly any reason to claim incompetency.
If that sort of thing is possible, how can Starfleet win any wars? Or are all its other enemies incompetent, including other Klingons?
As far as Enterprise superiority over Klingon opponents, it does appear that way in TOS that no single Battlecruiser was a match for her. IMHO.
Strongly agreed; single ships either fled, or only challenged our heroes if thinking the
Enterprise was disadvantaged somehow. But it might be that two of the ships would be a match, and three would be the sort of overkill that results in hands-down victories for the Klingons, which is why they and their Romulan pals favor that latter formation.
Timo Saloniemi
