Shields always up?

[STR]

Seems like the shields have to be charged before use. Raised shields, as suggested above, may require more power than warp drive. More power that the Warp core can provide the shields system anyway. It may be warp drive takes more power, but the drive has the advantage of being directly connected to the core while shields draw from the lower capacity EPS grid

Regardless of whether it's a generating or delivery limit, If ship can't provide a level of power the shields require continuously, then you need some kind of battery or capacitor for the shields to draw down. This is actually rather obvious: if the ship could continuously power the shields, how can they ever be depleted in the first place?

A dedicated reserve would also explain how shields stay up when main power is briefly disrupted in battle. You'd still want main power (plus impulse plus emergency power), because it maximizes the input side even if the system outputs more than it takes in. But the moment you raise the shields, you're on a ticking clock as it draws down its reserves. How long? Hard to say. Maybe a matter of hours for Kirk's Enterprise. Picard's seems to last a day or so under normal circumstances.

This would also explain why shields can be "only 50%" even hours after a battle.

If we go by TOS dialog from numerous episodes, 22nd century phasers operated on a similar principle. The Constitution class lacked either the generating or delivery capacity to keep phasers continuously charged, so they could run empty. That issue appears to have been solved by the mid 23rd century.

 

[Timo]

There's this problem of shields being good against constant pounding for hours, in many an episode where the Enterprise is gripped by an alien force - intuitively, it would seem likely that shields not under constant pounding, merely raised and on standby, would last forever, then.

But that may be a false view of the situation, and an attack may not significantly add to the power consumption of the system.

Conflicting power requirements may be one reason for why Scotty can't apply full phasers with raised shields in "A Taste of Armageddon". Or then "full" shields are too thick for phasers to get through, even when they go from inside out, or operate at a "transparent" frequency, or whatever the explanation for them working at all through one's own shields. Or, conversely, "full" phasers are extremely seldom used, and Scotty only ever needs them for conventional planetary bombardment, which the ship virtually never does outside this episode (although it admittedly often challenges the mighty defenses of godlike fortresses like Apollo's temple or Vaal's lair).

Later episodes would take this rationale X as a given, and the engineer would always balance guns against protection as part of his job. And perhaps such things did not apply to the phase cannon vs. polarized hull thing in the 22nd century yet, so the people the most entitled to discuss such matters among themselves (by virtue of being novices) can be excused for never having done so on camera.

Timo Saloniemi