Starfleet Jedi

While going though the archive on a website that was linked to in the Other Website forum, I found this beauty from TNG's "We'll Always Have Paris":

LAFORGE: We have reached the coordinates, Captain.

DATA: Sensors indicate it is Vandor Four, a planetoid in elliptical orbit around the binary system.

PICARD: Standard orbit, Mister La Forge.

LAFORGE: Aye, sir.

PICARD: Give me a visual.

WORF: Viewscreen on. There's a small forcefield on the planet. Latitude twenty degrees, nine minutes north. Longitude forty degrees, two minutes east of the present terminator.

PICARD: Penetrable?

DATA: No, sir.

PICARD: Open hailing frequencies.

WORF: Hailing frequencies open, sir.

PICARD: This is Captain. This is the Captain of the USS Enterprise responding to your signal for help.

JENICE [OC]: Enterprise, thank you for hearing us. Where are you?

PICARD: We're in orbit around Vandor now.

JENICE [OC]: Then you can help me. I don't know what to do. It's only the two of us left. He's having convulsions. Please.

PICARD: Can you lock on to her coordinates?

LAFORGE: No, sir. The forcefield is preventing any kind of contact other than audio.

PICARD: There is a force field at your location.

JENICE [OC]: Yes. I know.

PICARD: Good. But it is preventing us from helping you. Now, you must find some way to shut it down.

JENICE [OC]: I'll try.

WORF: Force field is off.

This forcefield apparently cannot be gotten through by the E-D in in any fashion, either with transporters or weapons. Like the Elba-II Asylum, the Vandor research station is the only source projection for this field. Picard knew enough about how the shields worked to guide Jenice through deactivating the shields, thus establishing a common knowledge of such things in the Federation.
-Mike

"Small forcefield".... "latitude"... "longitude"... I might be wrong, since English isn't my first language, but it doesn't sound like it covers entire planet. Or even a large portion of it.

Picard wrote:"Small forcefield".... "latitude"... "longitude"... I might be wrong, since English isn't my first language, but it doesn't sound like it covers entire planet. Or even a large portion of it.

The fact it is called a small forcefield ON the planet is a hint as well, still it does mean multiple shields are possible for planetary coverage.

But we knew that from generations.

Kor wins the prize. It's a planet-based shield, and they called it small, meaning that larger sized planetary shields are possible.

In the earlier drafts of the screenplay, the shield is described as covering a whole planet, which is reflected in the final screenplay someone forgot to change Worf's lines from planet to planetoid to match the rest of what was being said.
-Mike

Funny thing how both SW and ST crossed on this topic. SW recessed after multiple corrections and debunkings, while ST ascended after defeating ignorance.

Indeed, it would be interesting to see if we can get an idea of approximately how large an area this force field covers which in turn would let us define "small".
-Mike

But until we do that, it is worthless as evidence of planetary shields. It looks to me that it is less than one arc minute in span, however, Worf might just be specifying location of an emitter, althought it does look to me he is talking about entire forcefield.

It's not worthless and we already know it covers a fair amount of area since we later get to see Data running around in the base to shut down the experiment. It's got to be at least a full acre in size, if not larger, and we know that it does cover the entirety of the base at minimum since Picard simply did not instruct Jenice to pull her husband over a few meters to transport them out, but had to shut off the entire forcefield. Or conversely, they couldn't beam a way team down to a part of the base or planetoid to just walk in and shut it off, again establishing that this is decently sized and possibly dome-shaped.
-Mike

Correct. As far as I know, one arc minute would give far more than one acre on Earth-sized planet.

Circumverence of Earth is 40075.16 kilometers on equator. 1 arc minute is then 1.855 km. Squared = 3.44 km^2. Acre is 0.004 km^2. So no contradiction here. Had it been more than one arc minute, I imagine Worf would specify how large exactly it is (few minutes, etc.).

We still don't know what exactly constutes "large" from this description.

However, this is quite clear evidence in my book:



http://picard578.6te.net/startrek-vs-st ... ssive.html

Voyager: Year of hell furthermore informs us that planetary shields are relative commonplace even among less developed races. Unfortunately, we don't know how effective they are against Borg - it might be that frequency rotation cannot be employed on such massive scale.