All ships have shields right?
And when the shields are hit, you can see them appearing as an blueish sphere around the ship, right?

When the dominion ship in "Valiant" attacked Jake's and Nog's shuttle the USS Valiant came to the rescue and attacked the dommie ship. It flew around fired on the ship and so on and finnaly destroyed it with some quantum torpedoes...
But every time the defiant was hit by the dommie ship, the fazor or whatever the dommies use as a weapon impacted on the hull and not on the sips's shields...
Yeah...the crew kept babbling about shields at blah,blah percent and so on....and the same was on the dominion ship...the fazor bursts hit the hull...there was no shield effect...
And later on...when they attacked the battleship (is that right? i was watching in the german language...there it was "kampfschiff" ) all the fazors and the quantum torpedoes hit the hull...i mean...isn't the basic rule of star trek battles to penetrate the shields and then deal some damage to the hull? Did they move the shields just a few centimeters from the hull or what? i don't get it...

And i don't know what episode it was exactly but in one episode (i think it was the one where the tal'shiar and the obsidian order fell in the dominion trap) the defiant attacked 3 dominion fighters of the same class as the one that the valiant burried and they all went down with 3-4 fazor hits (quad forward pulses) and the valiant had some time with just one....

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Calvin: "No efficiency, no accountability... I tell you, Hobbes, it's a lousy way to run a Universe." -- Bill Watterson

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Sometimes I run
Sometimes I hide
Sometimes I'm scared of you
But all I really want is to hold you tight
Treat you right, be with you day and night
Baby all I need is time

I don't recall I've seen any shield effects in any of the "battle-ep's" such as SoA, TotP or when DS9 was abandoned. Not even in WotW did the klingon ship's shields react.

And about DS9 I always thought the shield was spherical like when O'Brien moved it next to the wormhole in "Emissary". You saw A shield forming around DS9 then, but in all the DS9-fights you see ships passing between the pylons when the shields were up.

Now there's a consistency in Voyager's favor. They like to play with their shields all the time.

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Somehow we're going somewhere.

But I think this is simply an odd treknology fact we have to accept: shields in the DS9 era no longer manifest as big bubbles. Or, more exactly, shields do not manifest as bubbles in combat against the Jem'Hadar. That could be semi-logically explained by referring to DS9 "Jem'Hadar" and the dialogue that establishes that Jemmie weapons go through standard shields, plus "Call to Arms" where it is revealed the Feds have upgraded their shields to be effective (we did see effective shields in a couple of earlier episodes, but the Jemmies never survived to tell of the improvement there...).

It could simply be that the new, improved shield type is surface-hugging instead of spherical. It is only used against Jemmie weapons, since the older bubble shields are more useful against "traditional" opponents, like the Borg in "First Contact".

Note that the FX people usually forget to draw the bubbles in big fleet action scenes, and those always involve the Jemmies in DS9. So the explanation would be automatically consistent. Note also that TOS-era shields were also hull-hugging as far as we could tell - and the TOS-era Klingon ships in "Way of the Warrior" seemed to have skintight shields as well.

I'd really like it if paramount would release this kind of important information...

And i noticed that the ships in the big battles go down faster...like they really don't have any shields...In "Sacrifice Of Angels" when the Fed fleet attacked with the Galaxy wing...one galaxy class ship swooped by a Cardassian ship (i don't know what class was it but they were equal in size approximatly) fired the side phasors and the ship was already showing heavy hull damage...and later the same galaxy went down even faster...A few phasor shots and a torpedo and it was over...if i'm not mistaking the ships last much longer in small battles (Like the Voyager )

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Dream on...in the end...dreams are everything...

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Somehow we're going somewhere.

In any case, it wouldn't be too difficult to assume that despite advances, the surface-hugging shields still weren't as good as stopping Jem'Hadar weapons as the bubble shields are at stopping "traditional" weapons - hence, the lower life expectancy of Starfleet ships in the battles.

Andrew

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"All the lonely people, where do they all come from" - Eleanor Rigby, The Beatles.

The Real Answer To This (Tadaaa!):

There is no sheld effect because that costs money and greatly prolonges the making of an episode...especially if there are large fleet battles in it...i found it somewhere on startrek.com...