Deflector Shield (WIP)

Deflector shields or screens - generally referred to simply as shields - are a type of force field that surrounds a starship, space station, or planet to protect against enemy attack or natural hazard.

Deflector shields operate by creating a layer of energetic distortion containing a high concentration of gravitons around the object (ship, city, etc.) to be protected. Shield energies can be emitted from a localized antenna or "dish" (such as a ship's navigational deflector), or from a network of "grid" emitters laid out on the object's surface (such as a ship's hull). On modern starships, deflector shields are essential equipment. They are raised to full power in anticipation of environmental hazards or in combat situations.

Neither matter nor highly-concentrated energy (i.e., weapons fire) can normally penetrate a shield. When shields are "up," or energized at a high level, most matter or energy that comes into contact with the shields will be harmlessly deflected away. In contemporary starship combat, shields are essential for hull protection. When shields are up, only minor hull damage can be expected during combat. Without deflector shields, modern weapons are capable of causing catastrophic damage to starship hulls almost immediately.

Continuous or extremely powerful energy discharges can progressively dissipate the integrity of a shield to the point of failure. Shield capacities vary according to many variables, from the power available to environmental concerns (such as nebulae), making definitive and universal calculations of how much damage they can take difficult to estimate (there is no way to know exactly how many phaser hits will cause a failure, for instance). Therefore, during combat, tactical officers continually report on shield strength. Usually, the officer reports shield strength as a percentage of total effectiveness, with 100% meaning that the shields are at full capacity, and lower percentage scores indicating weaker shield conditions. Often, specific sections of the shield grid (e.g. aft or starboard) will take more damage than other sections, so tactical officers will report on the health of any section that needs reinforcement with additional power reserves. Shields are said to be "holding" if damage is not sufficient enough to allow a compromise, while if the shields are "buckling" or "failing," then a total loss of shield protection is imminent.

Shields operate within a range of shield frequencies to allow certain specific types of energy and matter to pass through, or to make them more effective at blocking them. The frequencies of shields are not usually discernible without examining the controls on board the ship deploying them, meaning that it is very difficult to tune weapons to the exact frequency of an opponent's shields to bypass them.

In combat situations, starships match their own shield and weapon frequencies so their shielding does not interfere with their own weapons. Some weapons technologies, have rapidly adjustable frequencies, meaning that they will more rapidly penetrate shields with static frequencies. An effective counter is to repeatedly and randomly alter the shield nutations to minimize the effectiveness of the weapon's retuned frequencies.

It takes time to activate a deflector shield. A refit Constitution-class starship needs exactly 13.5 seconds to lower and raise its shields when taking a shuttlecraft onboard via its tractor beam, though this includes the time required to tractor in the shuttle during an automated docking; flying the shuttle in manually reduces this time significantly.

Shields on a Nova-class starship can be fully recharged after charging the shield emitters for 45 seconds. This task requires the shields to be dropped.

Normally transporters are not capable of penetrating shields. Older Federation starships, such as the Constitution-class USS Enterprise, could not even transport through their own shields, but later starships such as the Intrepid-class and Sovereign-class vessels could transport personnel and objects freely to and fro without having to lower their shields.

There are at least two different shield configurations commonly used by starships. One type projects an ellipsoid shield bubble around the ship in addition to a relatively large region directly adjacent to the ship. In the other shield configuration, a contour-conforming shield layer is projected a few meters outside the main hull. The ellipsoid shield bubble is easier to create but requires more energy to maintain, while the contoured shield is more energy efficient but requires a more sophisticated shield system to produce.

The ellipsoid shield configuration isn't shown until the 24th century. Though shield harmonics can be adjusted to change the shape of shields of the 24th century, it is unclear if ships could produce both shield configurations.

Certain starships have a shield system advanced enough to allow protection of only specific areas of the ship while leaving other areas unprotected. This is useful in times when power reserves are low. Lowering portions of the shields also allows usage of transporters without completely sacrificing the protection that shields provide.

Shields may be "extended" to encompass another vessel, which is often accomplished by matching the ships' shield emitter frequencies. While the extended shielding can provide some protection in the event of a shield failure on one ship in a convoy, this technique can put a strain on ship systems, and the overall strength of the extended shields is generally not as strong as two independent shield systems.

Advanced Modifications for Deflector Shield Systems


Temporal Shielding
Temporal shields are a theoretical technology that protects against weapons utilizing aspects of temporal science. Temporal shields also protect a vessel against changes in the timeline.


Immersion Shielding
A deflector shield configuration designed for a fluid environment, such as air or water.


Metaphasic/Multiphasic Shielding
A form of shield technology capable of withstanding the extremes of temperature, pressure, radiation and energy of a star's corona.


Auto Modulated Shielding
Under normal operation the shield modulation frequencies must be manually reset to prevent adaptive weapons from adjusting to them for the purpose of causing more damage to the shield matrix. This shield technology ties the shield system into the ships computer system, which continually and automatically re-modulates the shields to give the most effective possible defense.


Adaptive Shielding
The basic principle of adaptive shielding was to quickly analyze an attacking weapon's frequency and then modulate shield frequency to increase damage mitigation without depleting shield energy.


Regenerative Shielding
During combat situations and other hazards, starships protect themselves with the use of deflector shields. Unfortunately deflector shields cannot last forever and can be damaged themselves. Deflector shields utilizes one or more graviton polarity source generators whose output is phase-synchronizes through a series of subspace field distortion amplifiers. When the shields sustains some form of critical impact, whether it is energy or matter based, the synchronization of the polarized phased gravitons are disrupted which affects the properties and effectiveness of the shields. Shield percentage is based upon the “structural” integrity of the shields. These disruptions cannot be repaired while the shields are online, not even by retuning and alternating the shield frequencies. Until now.

Traditional shield restoration One traditional method of restoring shields to full strength is to reformat the shield matrix. The resynchronization and phase correction of the shield matrix. This process requires deactivating the shields and recharging the shield emitters. This process can take 30 seconds to several hours to complete, depending on the damage and disruption to the shields and their generators. This time frame can leave a ship vulnerable to an enemy attack.

Another method is to reroute power from other sources to “thicken” the shields, increasing the spatial distortion fields by which the shields operate. Varying power to the shields unfortunately does not discriminate between disrupted shields and usable shields. When shields are at 75% integrity, they need to increase power by 33% to bring shields to 100% optimal strength. However the disrupted shields will increase by 33% as well. This process also increases risk of overload of the power systems and networks throughout the ship.

Shield regenerators are units that restores the shield matrix while the shields are still operable. Deflector shields rotates and retunes frequencies at certain intervals, every 500 million cycles, or operating at a frequency of 250 megahertz (MHz) every two seconds. By using these frequency “windows”, which are also used by the ships active sensors, the shield regenerators filters out about 5% the out-of-sync shield frequencies and are de-compiled. Therefore the energy that sustains the disrupted shields is no longer required and is reused into generating new shields. With 5% filtration, it would take about a minute to restore 80% of the damaged shields while operating at 250 megahertz.

The regenerators requires considerable amounts of power themselves. Power can either be fed through the auxiliary power networks, or by temporarily diverting some shield power to the regenerators. Near instantaneous regeneration would be too energy expensive for the ship and would burn out the filters immediately. Ironically, if the shields have degraded to below 40% integrity, then the filters requires far less power to restore the shields than if they were at 70% because the disrupted shields are “easier to find.” Yet below 25%, the shield damage is irreversible without deactivating and reformatting them.


Ablative Shielding
New impact-sensitive ablative shielding, recently upgraded to improve system endurance. This system is comprised of small emitters placed over the outer hull which focus secondary energy at the point of impact of a foreign object. When a hostile energy burst is detected approaching an area of the hull, the emitters and sensor systems calculate the point of impact and focus resistant energy in that location, effectively increasing shield strength at that point by approximately 175% and reducing the force of impact by nearly 64%. The system is able to handle up to 8 simultaneous hits for up to three minutes, after which the system has shown to loose effectiveness in computer models. The system has shown to be only partially effective against torpedo-type weapons, reducing the yield of these weapons to approximately 78% of maximum.


Molecular Shielding
Molecular shielding was a special type of Deflector shield. Molecular shielding differed from conventional shielding in that it did not merely deflect or neutralize energy weapons, but absorbed their energy and converted it, using it to power the war machine's own weapons. It was nearly invulnerable to all short-range energy weapons, including artillery-grade guns. The shielding however can only absorb so much energy, once its capacitors are full they can overload if they continue to absorb the energy without discharging it.


The Multi-Layered Shielding
The M.L.S.S. itself consists of 3 Layers which absorb the impact from weapons fire.

Layer 3 - The outermost layer manipulates graviton polarity in a way not typical to shields, creating a graviton flux disruption that prevents many know designs of tractor beams from locking on to the vessel. This layer also incorporates transport inhibitor technology, helping prevent an enemy from transporting aboard.

Layer 2 - The middle layer incorporates automatic rotation of frequency and modulation with meta-phasics, which absorbs enemy fire, spreads it out along the shield. This shield sends data on what type of weapon is used and what frequency and phase the weapon uses. Once this is analyzed, the computer can automatically configure the shield to have the same frequency as the incoming weapon, but different modulation, which dramatically increases shield efficiency.

Layer 1 - The innermost shield layer is a multi-phasic shield. Based on standard regenerative shielding, this is the ship's last shielded line of defense, once this is gone the ships only defense is the hull armor. The key to this layer is its ability to 'wave' while in a state of temporal flux. Instead of a standard oval bubble, this layer 'ripples' or waves (like the surface of water) while in a state of temporal flux. This dramatically increases protection against phase shifting projectile weapons while at the same time helping protect the ship from temporal anomalies.

Under normal operation the shield modulation frequencies are under the control of the ships computer system, which continually evaluates incoming weapons fire and automatically re-modulates the shields to give the most effective possible defense. It is thought that this system, in conjunction with transport inhibitor technology, will also enable the shield system to prevent beam-through transporter technology.

Shield Capacities (Each increase in capacity requires a greater input of energy to function)

Low Capacity Shield System (The lowest rated deflector shield, offers protection against planetary weather and some stellar particles encountered during normal space travel. Offers little protection against weapon damage, resistant to standard kinetic weapons and some low yield energy weapons and explosives)

Standard Capacity Shield System (Standard deflector shield, offers protection from most stellar particles encountered during normal space travel. Offers greater protection against weapon damage, standard kinetic weapons do little against this type of shield. Higher protection against higher yield energy weapons and high energy explosives, can still be overloaded when hit with high energy electromagnetically accelerated kinetic weapons and high yield focused energy weapons.)

High Capacity Shield System The pinnacle of deflector shield technology, highly resistant to stellar particles encountered during normal space travel. Offers high levels of protection against weapon damage, immune to standard kinetic weapons and low yield energy weapons and explosives. Offers greater resistance to high yield energy weapons and explosives for prolonged periods of time, can withstand multiple impacts from high energy electromagnetically accelerated kinetic weapons and high yield focused energy weapons before failing.)