posted
I call your attention to the shield displays on the bridges in Star Trek II, Star Trek III, Star Trek V, and Star Trek VI. I also point out the VFX of Chang's torpedoes impacting the Enterprise. How many glancing hits left scorch marks on the hull before Scotty announced the shields were collapsing? And then the next shot perforated the saucer, prompting Spock's "the hull has been compromised" comment -- indicating those earlier shots hadn't done so.
TNG is debatable. DS9 and VOY definitely underscored conformal shields as the primary defensive system, while the bubbles get more and more subtly confirmed as navigational shields.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
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quote:Originally posted by Sargon: Conformal shields are first established in TAS.
One of the storyboards for TMP shows the Refit Enterprise having a bubble shield when being hit by a V'ger energy bolt (The Art of Star Trek, p. 191). While the angle in question wasn't used, the bubble can be inferred by the way the V'ger energy bolt is seen clawing against something in front of the ship rather than crackling over the surface as happened on the Klingon ships.
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Did we actually see clearly in TMP where the V'Ger energy bolt was hitting the Enterprise's shields? We know it wasn't hitting the hull, and the energy tendrils were snaking out in a pretty pherical dispersal pattern...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: TNG is debatable. DS9 and VOY definitely underscored conformal shields as the primary defensive system, while the bubbles get more and more subtly confirmed as navigational shields.
You are right about ST II and VI. I take a bit of objection to "TNG is debatable" though. In 99% of cases, deflector shields were a big, blue bubble. Or green bubble, for Klingon ships. Even in Generations, shields bubbles were still being used.
DS9 didn't start switching to conformal shields until half way through it's run, and even then they weren't always consistent. In fact, the main reason for switching seemed to be so that they could do that cool sequence of the alt-Defiant strafing the Klingon mothership in "Shattered Mirror". The station itself seemed to have both conformal and bubble shields in "Call To Arms", and don't tell me that the bubble shields were "navigational". It's a space station. It doesn't navigate anywhere.
And where in DS9 and VOY do the bubble shields get confirmed as navigational shields?
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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quote:Originally posted by Sargon: Conformal shields are first established in TAS.
One of the storyboards for TMP shows the Refit Enterprise having a bubble shield when being hit by a V'ger energy bolt (The Art of Star Trek, p. 191). While the angle in question wasn't used, the bubble can be inferred by the way the V'ger energy bolt is seen clawing against something in front of the ship rather than crackling over the surface as happened on the Klingon ships.
Well, one hit on the Klingons uses a very similar angle to the bolt hitting enterprise (looking straight back instead of straight ahead though), which made me think it hit the shield, then went right through it onto the hull (that's where the surface action happened, after that earlier shot.) So I figured shields were in place on both.
As for your storyboard mention, there is more in support of that which almost made it into the film. If you look at the longer trailer for TMP that is on the DVD (which is actually a shortened version of a 15 minute Paramount promo film that a friend of mine owned in the early 80s), you can see a fragment of an unused effect that further confirms this. Dykstra had a lot of trouble getting the asteroid explosion to work with all the other aspects (see CINEFEX #2), but he had a great zero gee explosion of the rock going. It was comped with a rotoscope effect of the debris dissolving against the shields SURROUNDING the ship, as seen looking straight ahead, but the shield zap looked bad, so Wise went with the incomplete effect (using a lesser explosion and NO shield effect) seen in the theatrical version instead. As I recall, about two minutes into the trailer, you see this better looking asteroid explosion debris hitting SOMETHING like an invisible shield. It is very brief though.
As for shields in TUC, I go with what Bill George told me in '91: as far as we [ILM] are concerned, you've never seen shields or shield hits in the previous Trek features, so we aren't going to start showing them now just because they do it on Next Generation. TNG has a different warp effect too, and is a different entity from the original cast shows.
I mentioned to him that in TREK II & III that shields conveniently happened to be down any time shots were exchanged, so there was no basis for seeing shield fx in those pictures (or in V, for that matter.) He changed the subject a little bit, noting that ILM has a saying 'continuity is for wussies.' I've interviewed him a few times over the years, and George doesn't usually take that kind of tone or 'tude, so I guess it must be a sore spot.
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posted
He didn't also hate the Enterprise model, did he?
Pity the Enterprise-B never used shields. It would have been interesting to see what they went with, since it had the Ent-B using the old movie warp effect (also called "stock foogage", if we want to get technical), whilst the Enterprise-D used the newer stretch and snap effect, and shield bubbles.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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posted
I remember DS9 itself having an outer bubble shield around the whole station, and a smaller bubble shield around either the habitat ring or the central core (can't remember where the Jem'Hadar fighter hit the shields -- have to go back and watch). As for navigational shields on the station, they have to have something to protect them during transit mode. If it actually has an operating protocol for moving the station, then it almost certainly has the appropriate systems in place.
And the only time in Voyager's run that I remember non-conformal shields was when they extended them around the Equinox. I need to go watch part 1 again, as I can't remember what the Equinox's shields looked like when we first saw her...
I'm thinking now that the bubble shields are meant primarily as a navigation tool, but can have more power run to them to actually serve as defensive shields. The conformal shields act as an additional layer of hull armour than can be replenished for as long as the shield generators aren't damaged or operating beyond capacity. That sound closer to what might actually be the case?
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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posted
The station was only suppossed to be moved very, very small distances though. They were manouvering thrusters, not impulse engines. Putting in specific navigational shields for something that would hardly have ever been used seems a bit of a waste.
The shield bubble was around the inner part of the station in CTA. All the weapons fire that hit the outer ring hit, well, the outer ring. The bubble only appeared around the inner part when the fighter made the suicide run.
If you want to get closer to what is seen on screen, then surely the most logical answer is:
Deflector shields were bubble shaped during TNGs run, and then shortly after switched to being conformal, perhaps due to advances in shield tech.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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Or else the Galaxy class, with such a large civilian population and so many windows, makes the bubble shields just as strong or stronger than the conformal shields to try and keep nasty things as far from the hull as possible.
I have no problem with the bubble shields making the move from overpowered navigational shields in the TMP-era to the first line of defense in the TNG era. I also have no problem with them not being employed in situations where tight maneuvers will be required.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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quote:Originally posted by PsyLiam: He didn't also hate the Enterprise model, did he?
I'm under the impression he likes the aesthetics of it. I think that if George had been designing shots for the earlier films (he was only building models back then, hadn't become an art director till INNERSPACE or ALWAYS), we'd have seen a bit more variety in angles on the E in II & III, especially III, where I was very disappointed with the torpedo exchange between Ent and BOP.
He's the one who came up with the cannonball/shotgun blast torpedo pass-thru on the thin part of the hull in TUC, and I think he is also the guy who sketched up the lead-in shot, the shooting from underneath/break the glass tabletop torpedo flight path.
The one angle I think they really missed out on was with the exterior of spacedock. You'd have needed to build a scaled up section of the top to do it, but I thought a great view would be moving over those towers up top while looking straight down, slowly revealing Earth below as you 'go off the cliff' and descend as a shuttle comes up toward camera.
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Conformal shields, BTW, are first established in TOS. "Errand of Mercy" has an amazingly detailed shot where the Enterprise is hit by a volley of Klingon torpedoes which very clearly make contact with the ventral saucer hull - and dialogue establishes that the shields are up (or else the ship would be dust!)...
quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: Shane, "The Making of Star Trek" is not a good resource on the TOS Enterprise at all.
--Jonah
Why not?
Unlike 100% of the Trek 'tech' books out there, TMOST was written during the original run of the series, while it was still in production. The author got his information directly from Roddenberry, Jefferies, etc.
I'd give it precedence over a LOT of the other stuff out there.
quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: Or else the Galaxy class, with such a large civilian population and so many windows, makes the bubble shields just as strong or stronger than the conformal shields to try and keep nasty things as far from the hull as possible.
Except every ship in TNG, from Klingon to Romulan to Cardassian had bubble shields. Don't tell me they were concerned about their civilian populations too.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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