question on hull polorization

[tavor]

didnt get to see many episodes
my question concerns hull polarization at the impulse exhaust ports
ok this hull polorization makes ship hull harder against physical and energy weapons is there some kind of emitters along hull ,what about exhaust ports big wide openings good lethal target for energy weapons , hardening make no difference here as hole is still open ?

 

[F. King Daniel]

The writers seemed to treat hull polarization exactly the same as they did shields in previous Treks, right down to having exact percentages of it left. I'm not sure they gave much thought to how differently it should have worked.

 

[Dukhat]

Hull polarization = Shields.

Phase pistols = Phasers.

Photonic torpedoes = Photon torpedoes.

Like KIng Daniel mentioned, no thought whatsoever was put into any of this. So don't expect any kind of technical answer to your question.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Hull polarization = Shields.

Phase pistols = Phasers.

Photonic torpedoes = Photon torpedoes.

Like KIng Daniel mentioned, no thought whatsoever was put into any of this. So don't expect any kind of technical answer to your question.

About as much thought as was put into the tech on the other shows, really.

 

[somebuddyX]

My idea of the hull polarisation is just a less advanced version of a shield that surrounds the exterior of the ship and it kind of allows it to absorb/deflect energy weapons like the White Stars from Babylon 5. I always thought hull plating should have always been vulnerable to torpedoes and missiles.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

How it might have happened:

"You know, about our decision to steer clear of the cliche of deflector shields. Did you know that my sunglasses are polarized?"

"Can they block lasers?"

"Sure, though our tech adviser says, quote: 'There's a heat-dissipation problem, and usually beam-splitting polarizers are used.'"

"Great! So we can have the hulls polarized to block phasers... err... phase canons?!?"

"Yes!!!"​

I always thought hull plating should have always been vulnerable to torpedoes and missiles.

Yep!

 

[Dukhat]

About as much thought as was put into the tech on the other shows, really.

There’s a difference though. TNG, DS9 and VOY took place in the same time period, the 24th century. ENT took place 100 years before TOS, in the 22nd. There was very little effort on ENT’s part to look and feel 200 years more primitive than the former shows. It looked like it could have taken place right after VOY.

 

[Nerys Myk]

There’s a difference though. TNG, DS9 and VOY took place in the same time period, the 24th century. ENT took place 100 years before TOS, in the 22nd. There was very little effort on ENT’s part to look and feel 200 years more primitive than the former shows. It looked like it could have taken place right after VOY.

Yeah and TNG takes place 100 years after TOS and tech is pretty much the same and they even use the same names! No effort at all.
ENT put more than a little effort to make things more "primitive". The design of the ship, the limits of the technology and even the uniforms. If you missed all that you're trying very hard to do so.
If you think this looks like it takes place after Voyager, then I think you haven't paid attention when watching either show

 

[Dukhat]

The ship looks like the Akira class flipped upside down. It took no time to get to other planets. The Klingons and Romulans looked and acted exactly like they did in the TNG era. The guns fired beams that looked indistinguishable from phaser blasts. The stories (at least for the first two seasons) could have been Voyager stories for all that it mattered.

I could go on and on.

 

[Nerys Myk]

The ship looks like the Akira class flipped upside down. It took no time to get to other planets. The Klingons and Romulans looked and acted exactly like they did in the TNG era. The guns fired beams that looked indistinguishable from phaser blasts. The stories (at least for the first two seasons) could have been Voyager stories for all that it mattered.

I could go on and on.

Akiraprise has been done to death.
Ships move at the speed of plot. So that's not a relevant criticism. They have two speeds: fast enough and not fast enough. It is as true in TNG and TOS as it is in ENT.
Why would the Klingons or Romulans look or act differently? The humans look the same in all the shows too. They act similar too. So what does that even mean?
Ray guns fire rays. It's right there in the name. So what's the complaint? Laser, phaser, phase pistol, blaster, plasma gun...what ever you call it, it's still a ray gun. You got two choices: a solid beam or a series of short beams.
Almost any story in Star Trek can be transferred to any Series/Century. Very few are "era" specific. Most of the stories could even be told in the present day or the past.

 

[Dukhat]

I think the point I’m trying to make here is that ENT was not sufficiently believable to me as a 100 year prequel to TOS as it was presented as. It totally felt like the production values were straight out of Voyager, not something so completely different as to make me believe that it was truly the primitive time that Spock described the era as in “Balance of Terror.”

 

[CorporalCaptain]

To me it was always clear that ENT played in many respects -- too many for my taste -- like TNG (especially the later seasons) with the serial numbers filed (part of the way) off.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I think the point I’m trying to make here is that ENT was not sufficiently believable to me as a 100 year prequel to TOS as it was presented as. It totally felt like the production values were straight out of Voyager, not something so completely different as to make me believe that it was truly the primitive time that Spock described the era as in “Balance of Terror.”

Of course the production values were straight out of Voyager, it was made right after it. It would be absurd for the production values to be other wise.
What the lines about "Atomic weapons" , "no visual communications" and "no quarter"? Worked for that one episode to allow for the "OMG he looks like Spock" moment, but pretty silly in the big picture

 

[Dukhat]

It would be absurd for the production values to be other wise.

Not at all. "In a Mirror Darkly" proved that they could make '60's production values look realistic even in the 21st century.

What the lines about "Atomic weapons" , "no visual communications" and "no quarter"? Worked for that one episode to allow for the "OMG he looks like Spock" moment, but pretty silly in the big picture

And yet those lines were all we had to go on for 40 years, and have been the subject of extrapolations in the past by such entities as novel writers, role-playing game producers, comics, tech manual authors (most notably Rick Sternbach), etc., all of which IMHO created a more realistic 21st century "world" of ST than ENT did. YMMV.

 

[Nerys Myk]

]Not at all. "In a Mirror Darkly" proved that they could make '60's production values look realistic even in the 21st century.

No, it didn't. It was fun to see, but on a weekly basis it wouldn't have worked

And yet those lines were all we had to go on for 40 years, and have been the subject of extrapolations in the past by such entities as novel writers, role-playing game producers, comics, tech manual authors (most notably Rick Sternbach), etc., all of which IMHO created a more realistic 21st century "world" of ST than ENT did. YMMV.

Tail wagging the dog.

 

[Dukhat]

No, it didn't. It was fun to see, but on a weekly basis it wouldn't have worked

Neither one of us know that for certain. I doubt it would have worked any better or worse than what we got with ENT.

Tail wagging the dog.

As I said, YMMV, dog aside.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Neither one of us know that for certain. I doubt it would have worked any better or worse than what we got with ENT.

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made it on a weekly basis. If you thought the rating were bad, imagine what they be for a show that looked like it was made in 1966.

 

[Dukhat]

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made it on a weekly basis. If you thought the rating were bad, imagine what they be for a show that looked like it was made in 1966.

Unless they showed that all that '60's goodness was just on the surface, and that in fact more was going on under the hood, so to speak.

 

[Timo]

"Don't expect any kind of technical answer"...? Fat chance of that here!

We aren't told what hull polarization is and how it works. We're shown what it does, though. Its protective effect does extend beyond the solid-looking hull plates, or else the blue-glowing bits of the poor NX-01 would get targeted far more often.

So let's tech. Instead of making the hull tough (this is what they do with the Structural Integrity Fields, and yes, that is a valid combat trick, too, utilized in TNG "The Chase" but probably seldom applicable and never superior to ordinary shields), the system might play with that one ubiquitous Star Trek futurotech that mankind had mastered at an early stage: artificial gravity. After installing those one-gee plates inside the Botany Bay in the nineteen-eighties or nineties, Earth scientists no doubt experimented with higher levels of acceleration. Perhaps the hull is charged with a zillion-gee gravity field that (possibly consequently) has very short range? Not only does it stop incoming projectiles cold (we see in the likes of TNG "The Naked Now" that a force imparted on a tractor beam or by a tractor beam doesn't listen to Newton and has no corresponding counterforce), it has enough negative gravity to weaken the impact of rayguns, too. Essentially, when threatened, Archer turns his hull plates into "white holes" that are strong enough to repel even EM radiation.

This sort of push could be rigged to have a range in the order of one meter or so - see e.g. the opening credits of ST:Voyager where the ship pushes aside some swirly gases about one meter before they touch the hull. Incidentally, this would also help cover things in between the actual armor plates, such as the blue-glowing bits.

It would take a few more decades to refine this into practical tractor/pressor beams, or into featuring a "subspace trench" some distance away from the ship in which the gravitons would be dropped for the invisible zillion-gee gravity trap (which is how the TNG Tech Manual describes the combat shields of the 24th century).

So much for teching. At the practical level, the one difference vis-á-vis forcefield shields is that hull polarizing doesn't prevent transporting. Which is a bad thing, of course, because it allows the enemy to use transporters as weapons, but luckily few of Archer's enemies realized Archer didn't have shields...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Longinus]

So let's tech. Instead of making the hull tough (this is what they do with the Structural Integrity Fields, and yes, that is a valid combat trick, too, utilized in TNG "The Chase" but probably seldom applicable and never superior to ordinary shields)

My head canon is that hull polarisation is actually the precursor of the structural integrity fields. In later ships it just is practically always on.