Mike DiCenso wrote:
That still supposes that Starfleet and other Trek power designers are stupid enough to make a system radically vulnerable to such an obvious effect and for no benefit in return.
That's kind of like saying ablative armor is a fundamentally flawed concept because the designers know it will take significant damage from incoming weapons. More importantly, it assumes Trek powers have a pure energy alternative that can effectively deflect fire by itself. This is not
necessarily the case.
We have the system readouts for shields, nothing about matter is involved with it. The gravitons are there to bend space-time around the ship and distort/block incoming attacks. The reason weapons can fire into and out of shields is due to frequency, which these things are based on and can be genuinely vulnerable to, and we hear about it over and over.
Actually, both EM and particles have been mentioned in reference to shields:
Enterprise: Vox Sola wrote:
REED: Starfleet's been working on creating a stable EM barrier for the last five years.
T'POL: A force field.
REED: Right. They just haven't found a way to control the particle density. All the specs are in the database. I've been trying to jerry-rig a prototype of my own.
This was in reference to a planar shield like typically seen inside vessels, and two centuries prior to TNG, but the concept of particles in a shield is not without precedence in the canon, and there no are specific indications that shields do
not contain particles either. I'm inclined to think of particles in a shield filling a role similar to rebar in concrete, or fiber in the resin of a carbon fiber panel.
The use of gravitons to bend space-time around the ship is limited to the TM, and while I love the concept, it doesn't match well with observed shield interactions, at least not as a
primary means of defense. Besides, if the idea is to deflect incoming fire around the ship, I dare say warp technology would do a far better job. In fact, by that logic the nacelles should be able to distort the path of incoming fire very well. Instead, we always see the shields acting exactly as a "shield," taking the hit before it reaches the ship. Although the use of gravitons could provide "push" against incoming hazards, rather than stabilizing shield particles as I first assumed.
In fact, based on what we hear, not only are phasers and disruptors EM-based, but we also know that may be a prime component of shields as well as gravitons, probably what gives them shape and form around the ship.
-Mike
Actually, while phasers have an EM component, they are referred to as particle weapons:
TNG: Inheritance wrote:LAFORGE: Data, I reconfigured the phasers to create the most highly focused particle beam possible.
ST 8: First Contact wrote:PICARD: The problem is if we begin firing particle weapons in engineering there's a risk we may hit the warp core.
I suppose they could be referring to elementary particles, but then a laser should be considered a "particle" beam too. I'm not real clear on the technical details, but I suppose it is possible that they fire particles that generate an EM field as they accelerate, and the frequencies could refer to the particle oscillations, but that's getting needlessly complicated, and I'm not even sure if it would work. Also, in TNG Peak Performance, they configured the phaser emitters to fire low powered lasers for the war game. So phasers evidently can emit EM radiation directly.
I'd say phasers actually emit a combination of charged particles and EM waves together, this opens up a lot different abilities, and most easily fits all the details given.