Shield frequencies

[geoschmo]

What sort of person complains that Star Trek is "junk science" because an imaginary shield that we don't know the process behind allows imaginary beam weapons that we don't know the process behind to penatrate them? Why is their idea of how imaginary beam weapons and imaginary energy shields any more technically correct then mine, or the writers of the show?

This is the sort of person that would get into arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.


EDIT: Ah, of course. Fyron. Why am I not suprised. Fyron would argue about how many buttons are on the shirt of the 14th angel from the left dancing on the head of a pin.

[Fyron]

Ahem... if you go back to the thread, the classic "match your weapon frequency to shield frequency to get complete shield piercing" garbage in Star Trek was suggested for SE5... This is why I posted the link, to keep it away. Do you want to see SE5 filled with Star Trek technobabble? I wasn't trying to start an argument over it, and don't have any interest in one, just trying to spread the joy...

*link that really does work*

[Phoenix-D]

SEIV -is- technobable. Just not Star Trek technobable.

Anything much over a single-system setting is going to run into that issue.

[brianeyci]

Actually frequencies do make sense. The normal justification is that the Fed must open holes in their shields for their weapons to fire through. If you read the whole article, you'll see that is the only justificaton for frequency.

And there is a distinct community of people who debate sci-fi for fun, that is why they nitpick things like that =D.

SE:IV is not technobabble. Technobabble is trying to use pesudoscience to explain the mechanism behind technology. SE:IV leaves the mechanisms undefined... we don't know how ripper beams work and we don't care, only their effects, that they do 250 damage with heavy mount on a weapons platform =D.

<edit>Actually that is not exactly right. The normal justification is that the Fed doesn't possess advanced enough forcefield technology to open up holes in their shields to allow weapons to fire, like syncing a propeller with a machine gun to allow forward firing guns in WWI. Therefore, they have to use frequencies so that their phasers and photons can shoot through their shields. Needless to say, SE:V should not have this stupid frequency thing, because SE:V ships are advanced enough to have this weapons-forcefield syncronization technology</edit>

Brian

[Fyron]

brianeyci said:
SE:IV is not technobabble. Technobabble is trying to use pesudoscience to explain the mechanism behind technology. SE:IV leaves the mechanisms undefined... we don't know how ripper beams work and we don't care, only their effects, that they do 250 damage with heavy mount on a weapons platform =D.

Exactly. So adding in technobabble like shield frequency matching is going in the wrong direction.

[Nodachi]

But it would be nice to be able to mod this effect!

Nitpicking the science in science-fiction is part of the fun but just because I don't know how something works doesn't lessen my enjoyment of it.

[geoschmo]

My point Fyron, which suprisingly you seem to have totally missed, is that you can't say shield frequencies are junk science, or technobabble, or unrealistic. Since energy shields are totally imaginary and a fabrication of the authors of the particular science fiction, you cannot say exactly how they will or wont work in reality, and so you can't say that any particular authors version of them is unrealistic. In Star Trek shields have frequencies that can be matched to penatrate them. This is totally reasonable and realistic from the perspective of the Trek universe, because that's how shields work in the Trek universe.

You are free to say this is stupid or poor writing if you want, but don't try to tell us it's junk science. Doing so removes any usefull meaning from the term junk science.

You could call it Junk Science Fiction if you want.