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I am reading the National Geographic article on space travel and the hazards associated with this travel. One of these hazards is radiation. Two forms of radiation are in consideration-solar radiation and cosmic radiation. At NASA, the scientists suggest polyethylene shielding for the solar radiation. For cosmic radiation, which is more energetic and can cause greater damage to living cells, the scientists are still attempting to determine effect and remedies.
Federation starships are in deep space (seen very rarely in TV) and in system space for the duration of their service life. And the majority of these starships, excluding the waste barges and cargo drones, carry a living crew. The crew is protected from wayward space debris and enemy fire by deflector shields. Deflector shields don't seem to protect the crew from radiation. This is proven by the fact that in many instances we have seen a starship with the deflectors off-line or damaged. So, my question is, what protects the crew from radiation?
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Maybe there's some sort of coating on the hull or between the hull layers? Another could be that maybe the gravity generators or the SIF generator provide some sort of protection as a byproduct of their use? Think about it: we never see starships running around with their SIF's turned off (as far as I know. TOS is probably gonna contradict me on that).
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posted
I'd say the deflectors ARE the main protection against radiation. They are rarely offline for extended periods of time. True, they are supposed to prevent transporter use, but probably there still are low-level deflector fields up all the time - perhaps tied to the transporters so that they can be locally lowered for short periods of time. The strong combat shields cannot be locally lowered AFAWK, but the weaker radshields might.
And while radiation damage currently is cumulative (that is, if you get exposed for a hundred one-second periods with one-year intervals, you receive just as much damage as if you spent a hundred seconds in the radiation flux at once), this is not so in Trek: there is this magical medication called hyronalyn that reverses radiation damage. One assumes some sort of nanomachinery that repairs tissue cell by cell, molecule by molecule... So it doesn't matter if you get several short exposures, as long as you avoid a fatally long single exposure.
The advanced materials used in Trek spaceship construction are of course another possibility against most types of radiation, at least at "natural" intensities.
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The shields protect against phaser fire, which is radiation in a visible part of the spectrum, so they should provide somekind of protection from other types of radiation also.
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Y'all are right about the shields. They have to be the primary source of radiation protection. Remember the TNG episodes "Final Mission" and "The Booby Trap" the Enterprise was concerned about their shields and protecting them from deadly radiation.
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posted
Umm, I have a book which is basically a scifi writer's guide to space travel, and one of the methods by which you can avoid the hard radiation of space is through high intensity electromagnetic forcefields, such as those used to contain antimatter and attract space dust in Bussard ramscoops.
However, the shielding system aboard starships is not an electromagnetic field. We know this has been documented. So I don't think that the shields alone could prevent cosmic radiation from impacting the crew.
We have heard of shields acutally doing this, but to me it just doesn't make sense. If it does to someone else, please explain!
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Ritten, AFAIK phaser-fire is not electromagnetic radiation (at least, you're referring to the "spectrum", I guess you're talking about the EM spectrum). The TNG:TM technobabbles about 'rapid nadion emissions' or something like that... Of course, the fact that we can actually see a phaser beam indicates the presence of photons, but they're not the mechanism which causes damage to a target; it's merely a by-product.
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