Oh well... Had to try.
Heh, I can only hope that she succeeds. Given her size, I'm hoping that she is extremely agile, made out of a very tough alloy, capable of polarizing her hull plating similar to the NX, have a combination of the three, because otherwise, one good hit, and she is in for a grand cremation.
She would have to be, since I also read an earlier post saying that the Polaris wouldn't have shields, which is a fair assessment, given what I remember on one program from the History Channel covering future space travel.
It said that it might be possible to create an energy field that could block attacks like energy weapons and stuff using plasma fields. But it would be difficult to create since to give a plasma field those characteristics, it would have to be made out of hot and cold plasma.
The catch is that hot plasma is like similar to the corona of the stars, extremely hot, and would melt the ship, and the crew, so it would somehow need to be sandwiched in between fields of cold plasma, which lacks the hotter forms fiery personality. But it could take quite some time to find a way to utilize it.
Even so, the Air Force, Military, NASA etc. is researching the possibility of using plasma to block out forms of radiation, in a way, similar to the navigational deflector. I don't think that 200-300 years from now, we will have full deflector shields, but we will need some form of navigational deflector for serious space travel, because without it, the risks of being exposed to radiation from stars alone would make common space travel too dangerous. And then there are micro meteoroids (ever see Mission Space, when the ship gets pelted by lots of little meteors?), which can shoot though objects like bullets.
Perhaps a cold plasma field to screen out radiation, combined with the use of gravity manipulation fields to repel foreign objects, could act as a sort of navigation deflector.
Just a thought.
