Ted C wrote:
We know that the Federation starships worry about flanking maneuvers, and we've seen that they can be more vulnerable to certain angles of attack, so I'd suggest that the aft shields of a Galaxy-class starship are relatively weak.
Good thinking.
I don't remember the E-D's orientation, though. Surely they didn't go to warp "backwards," with their fore quarter always facing the probe! (I think they backed up a bit, turned "away" from the probe, then went to warp as it started chasing them. That would partly explain why their phaser blasts didn't have much effect; at that angle, the E-D could only bring some of her smallest strips to bear.)
EDIT: The Enterprise was running from the probe at warp speed when they identified the problem with using photon torpedoes, so much of the ship's power was going into propulsion. Barclay dropped the ship out of warp and diverted that energy to the shields to allow them to fire torpedoes. Both this episode and "Hero Worship" indicate that Galaxy-class starships don't normally dump power from the warp engines into the shields.
YES!!!!!
Very good. I have noted this, as well. Throughout TNG-VGR, using the warp core to power any non-propulsive systems required a direct order from the commanding officer. From that, I conclude that standard operating procedure dictates that tactical systems are fed by their fusion reactors. (This is substantiated by something Riker says in "BOBW," to the effect that in combat against the Borg, the
Enterprise would greatly benefit from the saucer's extra power.)
Another point: Warp-powered defense systems were almost unheard of in TNG; and though, as previously noted, it still wasn't standard procedure in DS9/VGR, we
did hear such things as "warp power to phasers" much more often.
Also in DS9/VGR, we observe ships with somewhat greater endurance under fire and/or wielding a little more firepower, even in spite of greatly reduced size; e.g.,
Defiant.
Therefore, I further conclude that, sometime between early TNG and late VGR, Starfleet did something to many ships' power distribution networks to accomodate greater power flow, allowing them to start using warp power for weapons and shields on occassion. LaForge's work on the PDN in "BoBW" might've contributed to these improvements (and it would seem that
Galaxies in the Dominion War benefitted from something similar, since they did serve as the fleets' battleships).
Before anyone thinks otherwise, I wouldn't say this translates to vastly superior weapons/shields; between TNG's first season and VGR's last, Federation ships clearly aren't a full order of magnitude more powerful in combat. But I would argue that we see a measurable increase in all tactical systems, perhaps largely for this reason...one need only compare the potentially far more powerful
USS Odyssey's initial performance against Jem'Hadar bugships vs.
Defiant's to see what I'm talking about. (Recap: D shreds a J'H ship with a ~1.5 sec. burst from her cannons. The Oddy, OTOH, did dick to them with ~1 sec. phaser shots--shots which, incidentally, were drawn from a huge phaser strip, one that would very easily DWARF
Defiant's small cannons.)
Interestingly enough, TOS and TMP-era ships used an appreciable amount of warp power to their tactical systems; we see this in Decker's belayment of a phaser order in TMP, citing that the phasers were fed directly from the warp engines or somesuch (and that would only complicate matters with the wormhole...? I can't remember. Doesn't matter).
As such, I cannot posit that Starfleet has only recently been capable of using warp power to weapons/shields--just that Starfleet has never used warp-powered phasers etc. on such a large scale. Still, that begs the question: why did Starfleet stop using the most powerful energy source available to juice their guns?
Could it be that w. core-fed phasers were always a risky procedure, but Starfleet felt power-at-all-costs was necessary to combat Klingon-Romulan threats?
I think heavy reliance on warp powered defenses might be partly endemic of a militarized Starfleet. I definitely think fusion sources became more cost-efficient as well, seen as doubly beneficial because a very large, GCS-type ship could use most or all of its badly-needed AM for propulsion and, ergo, deep space exploration; meanwhile, the secondary reactors take care of life support, impulse power, and so on. Moreover, their fusion can easily accomodate most of their needs--prior of course to the much-improved Romulans'
D'Deridex Warbirds, Dominion and Borg.
I mean, neither phasers or shields seem to draw much power--4.2 GW is enough for a small bank ("Who Watches The Watchers"), Scotty regarded "spare gigawatts...for these [shield generator] puppies" as noteworthy ("Relics")--so this was an understandable transition for a more peaceful Starfleet to make. It wasn't as if their weapons were big enough yet that they really NEEDED warp power, as is apparently beginning to be the case by TNG-VGR. Coupled with the inherent risk of dealing with antimatter, this is even more understandable.
Well, something like that. I am distracted, and badly want to return to Knights of the Old Republic.
Added note: three, not five or six, torpedoes were fired in "The Nth Degree," FWIW. And I think the probe was a good bit closer than 20 kilometers, Turbo
I'd say it was maybe 5 klicks away IIRC.
