#Deflector shield manual

Whenever an attack or effect damages a starship’s Hull Points, the deflector shields’ defense value in that quadrant also decreases by 1, reducing the amount of damage they can ignore. While the deflector shields’ defense value in a quadrant is 1 or higher, the shields increase the starship’s AC and TL against attacks in that quadrant by the listed amount. Any attack that would ignore a fraction or all of a target’s shields instead reduces the amount of damage the deflector shields ignore by an equal amount, rounded in the defender’s favor (e.g., deflector shields with a defense value of 5 would reduce damage from a burrowing weapon by 3). Deflector shields are twice as effective against attacks from melee, ramming, and ripper starship weapons, so the starship ignores double the amount of damage from such attacks. Whenever the starship would take damage, it ignores an amount of that damage equal to its defense value in that quadrant. Deflector shields and conventional shields create fields that interfere with each other, so only one of these two defenses can be installed on a starship.įully functioning deflector shields provide a starship the defense value (DV) listed in Table 1–5 to each quadrant. Deflector shield technology reduces damage from incoming attacks and increases a starship’s AC and TL, though each successive attack depletes the shields’ defensive potential. Whereas conventional starship shields absorb attacks entirely until they are depleted, some engineers insist that shields are most effective when deflecting attacks, blunting their force or causing them to miss entirely.

#Deflector shield manual

The USS Defiant, introduced in the third season of Deep Space Nine, was said to use ablative armor in addition to shields this technology also appeared in the alternate time line of the early 25th century shown in the Star Trek: Voyager series finale ' Endgame', where it withstood repeated assaults by Borg weaponry and tractor beams.Īnother type of shield, the navigational deflector (also known just as the deflector, the deflector array, the deflector dish, the main deflector, the nav deflector, or the parabolic dish), was a force beam generator, usually a dish on the front of a ship, that was primarily used to deflect objects that might collide with the ship specially when traveling using Warp drive when even minute particles could cause serious damage.Chapter 1: Building Starships / Alternate Armorsĭeflector Shields Source Starship Operations Manual pg. Shields may be unable to repel certain types of weapons the phased polaron weapons used by the Dominion - one of the primary antagonists of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - are initially unhindered by the shields of Starfleet ships. Shields can be weakened by attack, and are often shown to collapse after prolonged bombardment.

In ' That Which Survives', the alloy of diburnium and osmium is stated to be the hardest alloy known to the Federation. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise further states that shields on post-refit Constitution-class vessels - of which the USS Enterprise of Star Trek: The Original Series is an example - were generated by the subatomic scan and replication of an alloy known as diburnium-osmium, and then projected as a force field beyond a ship's hull along the shield grid. In The Making of Star Trek, authors Gene Roddenberry and Stephen Whitfield write that shields are force fields similar in nature to the navigational deflector, while Mr. Shields are said to be made of a screen of gravitons that can deflect beam and projectile weaponry. Shields are not shown unless struck, and are then often shown briefly for dramatic effect as a translucent bubble of energy. Characters discuss its existence and manipulation, while only superficially describing its exact physics, which result in a field being projected around a ship or other body, deflecting or dispersing projectiles and energy weapons. Like most technologies in the Star Trek fictional universe, the exact operation of shield technology is never precisely described. Shields are not mentioned during the earlier seasons of the Star Trek: Enterprise series, starships instead using 'polarized hull plating' to make their hull more resistant to damage. The first depicted use by a starship was in the Star Trek episode ' Arena', in which the USS Enterprise raises its 'screens' after being attacked by an alien warship although the term 'shields' is not used in this episode.

The term 'shields' first appears in the Star Trek episode ' Balance of Terror', in which they were deployed, albeit to little effect, by a Federation outpost under attack from a Romulan Warbird.