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How do ships with no deflector dish get around the problem they're there to solve?
- Thread starter WraithDukat
- Start date
Such a great design. Matt Jefferies was definitely ahead of his time.
Well, you've got to sense the asteroids before you can deflect them, eh?
The inception of what would grow into the concepts of both shields and the navigational deflector (and ultimately the phasers too, per Herb and Yvonne Solow's Star Trek Sketchbook: The Original Series) can be traced to notes Roddenberry compiled through discussions with various scientists while working on the first pilot in 1964, as reproduced in The Making Of Star Trek, page 86:
Some kind of "meteoroid shield" or "meteoroid force field deflector" will be necessary in true spaceships. If not a force field, it may be a magnetic field which deflects cosmic dust or small meteoroids via an opposite charge. Or it might consist of a probing Laser beam which deflects and/or destroys dust and small particles from the path of the ship.
The primary "defensive shield" of the U.S.S. Enterprise. It is, in effect, an invisible force barrier around the Enterprise which protects the vessel from anything but the most sophisticated and powerful weapons. It is automatically activated by the ship's sensors when an unknown danger approaches. Note: The ship's Transporter cannot be used while the deflector screen is operating.
If the vessel should be under attack, the power of the deflector shield can be considerably increased, but at a commensurate loss in ship's power and at maximum shielding can only be maintained for a limited time.
The ship also has "navigational deflector beams" which, guided by "navigational scanners", sweep out far ahead of the vessel's path through space, deflecting from the ship's course meteoroids, asteroids, or space debris and other objects which would cause damage should the vessel strike them at this enormous speed. These are all fully automated, operated by the vessel's computers.
As for the Klingon battle cruiser, I don't know for sure whether Matt Jefferies originally assigned a particular function to the recessed bow port, but the AMT model kit (for which Jefferies designed the ship in the first place, before it was brought into the show) labelled the corresponding feature (which protruded instead, with this discrepancy later being copied by the animators of TAS) as an antenna:If the vessel should be under attack, the power of the deflector shield can be considerably increased, but at a commensurate loss in ship's power and at maximum shielding can only be maintained for a limited time.
The ship also has "navigational deflector beams" which, guided by "navigational scanners", sweep out far ahead of the vessel's path through space, deflecting from the ship's course meteoroids, asteroids, or space debris and other objects which would cause damage should the vessel strike them at this enormous speed. These are all fully automated, operated by the vessel's computers.
And in the original version of TOS and TAS, weapons were never shown being fired from there, with them instead coming either from the nacelles or other areas of the forward pod. It wasn't until the "remastered" releases that it was retconned as a weapons port, after such functionality had been depicted in its successors seen in the movies and later series.
-MMoM
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I'm basicly with the Sternbach answer: there are ways to build a decentralized deflector, and even the Federation sometimes does.
There is some advantage to the big dish, but not enough of one to make it mandatory (from a design point of view: if your design has a dish, you need the dish to work.)
From what we know about the ships and powers that don't go for dishes, I'm going to guess the dispursed systems interfere with certain scientific sensors.
There is some advantage to the big dish, but not enough of one to make it mandatory (from a design point of view: if your design has a dish, you need the dish to work.)
From what we know about the ships and powers that don't go for dishes, I'm going to guess the dispursed systems interfere with certain scientific sensors.
