I entirely agree, there.
Yet, I hardly think positing that 23rd century starships, including Pike and Kirk's Enterprises, had force fields capable of holding against vacuum for some consequential if reasonably limited duration of time (i.e. for as long as sufficient power can be allocated, and as long as the machinery itself holds out against wear and overuse, subject to failure as much as shields or transporters or life support or any other system, at need of plot) is all that far out there in "anything goes" territory, really. I don't see what makes it an implausible idea, specifically.
I mean, they have shields by this point, and shields seem to be an advanced implementation of force field tech, so other force field trickery seems like something they might naturally be capable of, too. (Just as by the same token, considering Starfleet had not yet mastered even the basic force field at the outset of ENT, it makes sense that ships of Archer's era accordingly lacked shields.) By TOS, they clearly can seal compartments with them. If in the brig, or in Charlie's quarters, why not elsewhere? Why not the hangar deck, or a compromised section, if there were to have been a plot that called for it? It just so happens there wasn't.
If someone had pitched them a compelling story revolving around two crewmates trapped in a compartment where the hull had been breached, staring out into the abyss as they anxiously awaited their comrades' efforts to un-jam a malfunctioning door, with the ever present risk that the attempt might interrupt power to the section and collapse the force field ominously hanging over the pair as they bond, quarrel, recall loved ones and past experiences, discuss alternate escape plans, etc., with drama and poignancy and humanity in it...then I highly doubt they'd have said "sorry, we can't do it, the Enterprise doesn't have emergency force fields for that!"
We quite obviously didn't visit Kirk or Picard or Janeway and their crews every day (or even every week, or month) of their many missions and journeys. Plenty of gaps where any number of different situations we'll never be privy to might have called for a response different to what we observe in any given set of episodes, and plenty of room for plenty of things to be overlain or inserted where previously unobserved. Star Trek has always done that. Just because they physically didn't have a shuttlecraft prop yet in season one of TOS, and so using one never comes up even where we might logically expect at least the possibility to be raised, as in "The Enemy Within" (TOS), it in no way follows that the Enterprise didn't have them yet at that point. (Perhaps none were available for reasons x, y, and/or z? Or perhaps the confounding factor was the storm, and there was a moment between scenes where it was established that a shuttle could not perform a rescue? That makes the most sense to me, but the episode certainly doesn't specify.)
In discussing DSC, I've often heard people raise the questions such as: "If they have this spore drive thingy in the 23rd century, why does no one on Voyager ever bring that up as a possible way to get home?" Well, even leaving aside that the show will most likely clarify the matter further as it goes on, how do we know they didn't, exactly? It could well have been brought up and ruled out for one reason or another, offscreen, when we weren't looking, just as innumerable other seemingly-promising shortcuts were onscreen. Heck, how do we know the "sporocystian" banjo man who transported Voyager across the galaxy in the first place wasn't connected to the mycelial network, for that matter?
Same thing with hologram displays and such. We know they had those by TNG, because we saw them used in its first season...but then they stopped showing them for the rest of the series, illustrating that such tech merely going unseen by the audience, even for many years, is no counter-indication of its existence. As Pike quotes of the Bard in the latest DSC episode: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I of course mean this all in good nature and fun, Mr. Cox, not to take anything too seriously that oughtn't! I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know well yourself here.
As DSC shows ships older than Discovery with emergency force fields, and shows Pike's Enterprise herself looking as if she will need system-wide refitting in the present (and perhaps multiple times over through the years to come, if she is to ultimately appear in Kirk's day as we've seen her depicted on other shows), it would be better to just say that capability was there all along, and we simply never saw it in use because it wasn't particularly called for by any story. Again, them decompressing the hangar bay to launch and land shuttles on some occasions clearly can't be taken as evidence of absence here, because Voyager did that too.The Enterprise was of a different era when it was built; by TOS era it was already 20 years old. The shuttlebay did not have an atmosphere forcefield when it was built. The older design still worked, it was safe, and with proper maintenance, there was no reason to redesign it. I assume much of the ship's infrastructure is the same story. If it was not broke, why fix it?In its 18 month refit, the ship was redesigned into the TMP era Enterprise, and it finally got the forcefield.
Discovery is a new ship, and ~10 years newer than Enterprise, so, it benefited from the newer forcefield developments, not only in the shuttlebay but also throughout the ship. I don't think any of the ships in any era run their ships all the time with just the forcefields up, rather they close the bay doors.
(Nevertheless, Disco "going commando" much of the time may indeed be a sign of her particular opulence, sure.)
Yeah I remember he said it was "sheathed in special materials that rendered it invisible," and while it had served him "long and durably...the strain of arduous pursuit...exceeded even its advanced qualities" and that was why he barely made it aboard the Enterprise before it disintegrated.I'm waiting for a ship to use nothing but forcefields to replace all the solid materials in a ship. "WONDER WOMAN!"Remember in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, Bele's ship was invisible and just turned into nothing when it hit the Enterprise.
However, in a similar vein to your bubble ship idea, if on a smaller and shorter-term scale, The Making Of Star Trek did envision photon torpedoes as being "energy pods of matter and anti-matter contained and held temporarily separated in a magno-photon force field." (The idea of them being missiles with an actual physical casing didn't arise until TWOK.) And as someone else already pointed out, TAS had spacesuits made of force fields, too.
-MMoM
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