But you said shields were "purely a defensive tactic." Clearly, as shown, they are not. They can be used offensively.
SERIOUS pet peeve about TNG
- Thread starter Sisko4Life
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But often are they used as an offensive weapon and how much damage can they inflict? How is raising shields an offensive tactic when doing so has extremely minimal offensive capabilities? Are alien warships really afraid that a federation ship will use their shields to bump into them?
If something that bumps into is considered an offensive weapon, I suppose a bumper car should be declared an WMD. I don't see why the lives of a ship's crew should be put at risk because the shields might bump into another ship.
See, the problem with keeping your defensive shields up all the time is you make the other guy think you don't trust him. And that will piss him off, in most cases.
And yes, I'm sure that defensive shields are entirely seperate from navigational deflectors.
And yes, I'm sure that defensive shields are entirely seperate from navigational deflectors.
Trust is earned, not given away, as Worf would say.
I'm not going to trust someone till I know their intentions and I wouldn't trust someone with a bad reputation like Cardassians or Romulans, I certain wouldn't lower my shields to in front of them.
Quite a bit actually, depending on the speed. Going fast enough they call it ramming.
Ramming has extreme offensive capabilities. If you have the ship with the strong shields and more solid spaceframe you win. Usually.
They should be. Now a little bit of explanation here, I used "bump" because that's what Tom and B'Elanna did to pass a ship in the race. Now I'm using ramming which is just a really, really hard bump. True it may be a tactic of last resort, but it is offensive and it works better if you have shields. Also, if I'm the captain of a Galaxy and a Romulan scout ship turned to fire at me and charge me. I'd drop aft shields, transfer that power to the forward shields, and keep running right at them, my weapons firing too, so they can't try to get around to my unshielded behind. Ram my ship right through their stupid pointy eared arrogant selves.
Excuse me? WTF does that mean? How can you compare the two? In the Trek Universe a starship itself is a WMD by our 2011 standards, not by theirs. Completely false analogy. I'm truly surprised you used it.
As I told you before, you called shields purely defensive. They are not. Even the shields and armor knights wore back a few centuries ago, could be use offensively.
That would be extremely dangerous compared to just shooting the other ship with phasers.
I was being factitious with that example.
Ramming is a tactic of last resort, unless you're pushing your way through a bunch of small ships with out a powerful engine. Actually pushing the Cardassian mobile weapons platforms with shields extended, while they were not powered would have been a good way to clear a path.
Shields may not have been designed to be weapons, but per Trek history, the explosive reaction between matter and antimatter was first used to power a ship for warp, something neither defensive or offensive. Then came the photon torpedo.
And yes a car can be designated as a deadly weapon. Drunk drivers are charged under that assumption, they made the car a weapon by driving it drunk and hurting or killing someone. Was it designed for killing no, can it be used to kill yes. You can be charged with murder by intentionally running someone over, so yes a car is a deadly weapon when used as such. Shields can be weapons when used as such.
Which seems to be the point you're missing. They can use the shields as weapons.
And if you do have your shields up a race, depending on their cultural mores, could see the shields as a prelude to attack. Why have them up otherwise? Look at it from that perspective. You're looking at it from a a Romulan, Kligon and Cardassian point of view, and even they run with shields down. So either there is some agreement to not run with shields up, or there is no need too since you'd spot a Cardassian ship while it's well out of firing range, and if the Klingons or Romulans wanted to, they could sneak up right next to you and unleash holy hell on you and destroy or hurt you so bad you couldn't defend yourself any way.
Consider "The Defector." The Enterprise went into the Romulan Neutral Zone weapons hot and shields up. They turn to leave, 2 Romulan Warbirds decloak and fire on the Enterprise. Picards does nor order a retaliatory strike, because it was just a tap on the shoulder otherwise they wouldn't be there talking about it. They could have destroyed Enterprise, even with her shields up.
Shields may be made with defense in mind, but creative thinking makes them a weapon.
Shields may not have been designed to be weapons, but per Trek history, the explosive reaction between matter and antimatter was first used to power a ship for warp, something neither defensive or offensive. Then came the photon torpedo.
And yes a car can be designated as a deadly weapon. Drunk drivers are charged under that assumption, they made the car a weapon by driving it drunk and hurting or killing someone. Was it designed for killing no, can it be used to kill yes. You can be charged with murder by intentionally running someone over, so yes a car is a deadly weapon when used as such. Shields can be weapons when used as such.
Which seems to be the point you're missing. They can use the shields as weapons.
And if you do have your shields up a race, depending on their cultural mores, could see the shields as a prelude to attack. Why have them up otherwise? Look at it from that perspective. You're looking at it from a a Romulan, Kligon and Cardassian point of view, and even they run with shields down. So either there is some agreement to not run with shields up, or there is no need too since you'd spot a Cardassian ship while it's well out of firing range, and if the Klingons or Romulans wanted to, they could sneak up right next to you and unleash holy hell on you and destroy or hurt you so bad you couldn't defend yourself any way.
Consider "The Defector." The Enterprise went into the Romulan Neutral Zone weapons hot and shields up. They turn to leave, 2 Romulan Warbirds decloak and fire on the Enterprise. Picards does nor order a retaliatory strike, because it was just a tap on the shoulder otherwise they wouldn't be there talking about it. They could have destroyed Enterprise, even with her shields up.
Shields may be made with defense in mind, but creative thinking makes them a weapon.
Because those things require energy to operate, and if you don't need them it's better to save that energy.
They have the navigational deflector for that. If there's something bad enough that they need their shields, then they are generally aware of it.
And if you met someone, and they decided that they needed bodyguards, how would you feel? If you want to make friends, then you don't act like you are expecting them to attack you.
Like he said, a show of good faith. he wanted to show that he had no hostile intentions.
It is. We have no contemporary analogy for "raising shields", but back then, when the leaders of two factions on the battlefield came together and raised their shields, bad things were going to happens. It's a sign of mistrust.
Oh wait, we HAVE an analogy.
The nuclear missile shield the US want to build. The Russians are not amused. But why? It's just for protection, not attack, isn't it? Well, that's the naive idea. In fact it's the first step before an attack. You raise your shield to protect yourself, and then you attack.
Everywhere. Gama ray bursts do travel interstellar distances. There are other forms of background radiation traveling through space, luckily there are no known Gama ray bursts occurring in the Milky way. It is believed that should one hit Earth, it would trigger an extinction level event.
Either that or everyone would turn into the Hulk.
...Fortunately for us, all known bursts are significantly less than an hour long. So only half of our planet would get fried!
...was this:
This might well have been something Picard anticipated and accepted. He was specifically sent to propose a truce, in a war that the episode itself suggests was a lopsided one, a disaster for the military-technologically impotent Cardassia. He was doing that from a position of apparent strength. He thus had every reason to approach with shields down; if he got killed for that, it would be the Cardassians' loss and the Federation's gain, because then there would be no truce and Cardassia would suffer greater war damage.
Timo Saloniemi
...was this:
This might well have been something Picard anticipated and accepted. He was specifically sent to propose a truce, in a war that the episode itself suggests was a lopsided one, a disaster for the military-technologically impotent Cardassia. He was doing that from a position of apparent strength. He thus had every reason to approach with shields down; if he got killed for that, it would be the Cardassians' loss and the Federation's gain, because then there would be no truce and Cardassia would suffer greater war damage.
Timo Saloniemi
The shields need to be down so Picard can nod to Riker and Riker can lurch towards the viewscreen and bark "RAISE SHIELDS!"
The thing about space is it's big really big, and the shields should be automatically programmed to come on if enough radiation was detected to be lethal to the crew.
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