Because energy does not disappear into thin air? If you put energy into a shield, it has to translate into work of some kind and/or waste heat (inefficiencies, etc.) This is actually one of the biggest arguments for shields 'outputs' not correlating to their defensive properties. There are very few ways to justify enormous quantities of energy being dumped into shields.

And even when you can justify huge expenditures of energy into defenses, that doesn't mean it will neccesarily be a constant drain (again if the shield draws huge amounts of power, it will only draw as much as the work it must do requires. In that sense dumping massive amounts of power into your defenses at a steady state is both stupid and wasteful: instead you would have a battery or capacitor of 'shield energy', which the shields would draw on ot do whatever work they need to do and which can be replenished by the ship's power core as needed. And if you're talking in terms of storage, treating your shield 'output' as energy rather than power can make sense.




While ST tech cna have individual differences, much of their technologies are broadly similar, and if they can identify the kind of shield used and figure out its output, they should be able to figure out its defensive properties. After all I'm pretty sure they were able to divine their offensive capabilities as well and be able to deem they were no threat.

Right. And I'd imagine that the ability to constantly do this would be expressed in watts, not joules. EDIT: yes, I see below...



If that is the case, then how did the protagonists draw any conclusions from the output of the station's shields? How is output indicative of storage capacity? It hardly seems like the right word for it. I'd imagine that your theory is essentially the "hit point" idea; that the shields draw upon a reservoir of energy that they use to dissipate hostile fire. But this would not explain how they can transfer more power to the shields, given that it's apparently different from repairing the shields.

And a "storage" of 4.3 kilojoules is less than that of a human baby. So Commander Shepard fires a pistol at the Enterprise, which promptly uses up all of its energy storage to stop it, and then the bullet still keeps on going.



I suppose that this could be true, but no matter how you attempt to rationalize it, the quote is inherently ridiculous. How do they extrapolate the shield's defensive properties from its "output"? Does output merely imply waste heat, since I wouldn't imagine that shields are supposed to give off heat?



Well, the amount of photon torpedos needed to breach the station's shields is unaffected by its weaponry.

I'm talking about the input of energy required to maintain the shields, not the defensive capability of the shields themselves.



By drawing inferences from sensors. you really don't think sensors are so completely and utterly magical that they instantly divine 100% accurate information and give it to the user, do you? The fact tey could make any sort of prediction from the sensor data they obtain requires them to have some familiarity with the tech to begin with.

Alterntely, they had data provided to them by the people who were manipulating them. I'm pretty sure they would have knowledge abou ttheir enemy's capabilities.



by the definition of output






Again how the hell do you know how the shields work to stop attacks, much less how much energy is involved in doing so.

More to the point, what the hell kind of justification to you have that shields must do massive amounts of work to be effective? Case in point: We know the theatre shield in TESB was 'strong neough to deflect any bombardment' - yet the shield itself had no illict effects on the enviroment (or people under it, for that matter. ) CAre to explain that, since your logic is the output to maintain the shield should apparently correspond to the magnitude of the firepower its meant to deal with.



How is it 'ridiculous?' if they know how the shield technology works, and they know the output precisely, then they can probably extrapolate the characteristics and limitations of the defensive technology. It doesn't even need to be a 100% accurate prediction, depending on circumstances.



Uh, they were able to tell their offensive capabilities fairly well from sensor data. EG the 2.1 MJ disruptors on attack ships.

BTW has it occured to you that by your logic, those 4.3 KJ shields should be completely unable to stand off a single attack ship? Why would they need the enterprise.

FWIW, I hinted at that in one of my last posts (how did I put it? "2.1 MJ disruptors, anyone?"). We're told Satarran and Lysian technology is roughly comparable. Even if we assume a Satarran destroyer has a tenth the firepower of its Lysian counterpart, those are still 200 kilojoule disruptors, yes? How many times does 4.3 fit into 200? Were it that simple, it'd simply be a matter of the Satarrans getting a destroyer close enough to fire on Lysian HQ.

---

Pain, or damage, don't end the world, or despair, or fuckin' beatin's. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, ya got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man ... and give some back.
-Al Swearengen

Cry woe, destruction, ruin and decay: The worst is death, and death will have his day.
-Ole' Shakey's "Richard II," Act III, scene ii.

It's not that simple. 2 MJ disruptors might overwhelm the shield, but they'll need something more powerful to take out that place. It's enormous.

---

You are standing on a 4.5 billion year old complex, self-sustaining organic spacship, which is orbiting a power source a million times larger than your ship. There are 200 billion other power sources, many of them with ships like yours, in your fleet. There are 40 other fleets in the immediate neighbourhood and your entire neighbourhood is moving at two million miles per hour towards an object 150 million light years away. Welcome to life, it's a lot more exciting when you think on larger scales.

Why does that sound familiar?

---

Pain, or damage, don't end the world, or despair, or fuckin' beatin's. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, ya got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man ... and give some back.
-Al Swearengen

Cry woe, destruction, ruin and decay: The worst is death, and death will have his day.
-Ole' Shakey's "Richard II," Act III, scene ii.

Given the utter uselessness of a 4.3KJ resilience shield, one wonders why they would bother with it. Just putting on the shield system's mass in additional armour would probably be more effective than that.

Perhaps it's a radiation shield of some sort as opposed to a defensive grid. It makes a little more sense then a shield that's totally incapable of surviving a hit from a weapon a 1000x weaker then their own conventional weapons.

It's equally useless as a radiation shield? We're talking 4.3KJ here if we assume that's the resilience. There's triple figure MW solar power installations on current day Earth.