So, this may be a frequently discussed topic, and I’m sorry if so. But I was watching S1 of SNW and there was a scene where an early “shields up” saved the ship from serious damage. And now that I think of it, I just can’t come up with a good reason why shields aren’t up all the time, with a few obvious caveats.
- Yes, shields must be down to transport, this seems like the most obvious reason to have them down. But we see plenty of episodes where shields are brought down momentarily for a transport. Why not do that always?
- One reason brought up frequently is that raising shields could be taken as an act of aggression. But if you arrive with shields already up, then you’re not doing anything aggressive, you just arrived that way, so I don’t think this makes much sense in a world where most Starfleet ships just keep their shields up.
- I don’t know for certain, but it seems possible that shields may not be usable at warp. I don’t remember any specific episode where that happened, but it seems possible. But even then, a ship could just be programmed to bring them up as it drops out of warp.
- I guess it could be possible that the power usage of the shields is too much for the day-to-day use. But again, it seems like a lot of missions clearly begin with “dropping out of warp into an unfamiliar area” and those are the times where your shields should just be up by default.
Of course, I know the answer is that “shields up” is great dramatic dialogue, but I guess I wondered if there are any more satisfying answers than that?
Could be that the wear on the emitters would be significant enough to make it bothersome?
Possibly. But how much more wear & tear would this be compared to the wear put on the warp drive, which gets incredibly frequent use? If that warp drive can withstand it, why not the shield emitters?
The warp core is used frequently, but not constantly. And while it’s not in use, it’s literally located directly in engineering so that it can be easily maintained.
The shield emitter is located outside the ship.
Ooo fun writing challenge. *Knuckles crack*
Ok, so hear me out:
Warp Drives use up massive amounts of energy in a single burst. We all know acceleration and deceleration are the things that are costly in space, not maintaining momentum. So you can design against that, right? Massive capacitors that are easily replaced, that store the charge before passing it to the warp drive, which only needs to operate for a short time.
Shield emitters, on the other hand, need constant power running through them to generate the necessary energy field. Like a powered magnet, it’s only by running current through the device that the field is generated. And any time you move large amounts of power continuously like that you’re going to generate heat and degrade the medium.
So it comes down to the fundamental nature of the task being performed by the hardware.
If you already have one critical high-wear component in your ship you probably don’t want a second one, especially when both of them are security critical. The Federation might be essentially post-scarcity on a personal level but that doesn’t mean their resources are unlimited. Also, time spent in dry dock is time not spent on missions.
My guess is that in the end ships don’t travel with anything but navigational shields up for several of reasons: