Insurrection stuff

[Darth Wong]

Having just watched Insurrection again (prior to watching Nemesis once Blockbuster gets it in, I figured I should rewatch a few Trek films), it occurs to me that there's a simple explanation for the destruction of two So'na warships with an incendiary blast: their shields do not block gas.

I've long maintained that Trek shields are weak against gas. But it appears that the gas doesn't actually weaken their shields per se; it simply passes right through them. We saw evidence of this in TNG ("Chain of Command") and it was certainly suggested in other incidents. But in Insurrection, there's a key scene where the E-E is running away from So'na ships and it's creating vapour trails from its engines as it moves. It isn't making these trails from anywhere else, and Geordi mentioned the "manifolds" being damaged by the rapid movement through the gas, so it seems obvious that the warp nacelles have some kind of gas-flow manifolds in them, perhaps as part of the Bussard collector system.

Simple enough, but the E-E was unable to accelerate to full speed because of these manifolds, which means they were unable to keep the gas out of the manifolds via shielding. And they took a hit from a photon torpedo in the same scene which was blocked by their shields, so its shields were definitely up; they just weren't keeping gas out of their nacelle manifolds.

Two possibilities here: either their shields are simply no good at stopping certain kinds of gaseous particles, or they have little holes in their shields around the warp nacelles. The latter seems catastrophically stupid from a tactical standpoint, so the former is more likely.

Anyway, this might mean that the So'na ships were destroyed not because the incendiary blast from the "unstable metryon gas" overwhelmed their shields, but because it passed through their shields as if they didn't exist, and impacted directly on the hull. Of course, this still doesn't explain the damage since any decent metal hull should be able to withstand a simple gas incendiary, but if their ships are structurally weak or rely entirely on shields for protection, it's not inexplicable.

[Peregrin Toker]

Are you adding this to your "ST: Insurrection commentaries"??

[Ted C]

Did all the previous posts to this thread somehow get axed in the site maintenance that occurred last night?

[Solauren]

There's also another explaination.

Do you remember the episode Ro Lauren shoved a Marquis ship through the Enterprise-D shields?

If the So'an ships shields and engines are like Enterprise-D's, the explosion could have simply hit a convient weak spot like that.

Off course, that's STILL a tactical problem with shields, and implies whimpy hulls still.

[Ted C]

Before the posts disappeared, we had determined that the shields being permeable to gas made sense. That would allow the metryon gas to flow into the ship through openings like the torpedo tubes, where it could do significant damage when ignited. A torpedo damaged in the tube could easily destroy the hole ship in a chain reaction: the metryon gas explosion damages the torpedo; the torpedo's containment field fails and releases the antimatter; the antimatter detonates against any convenient matter, resulting in an explosion of hundreds of kilotons; and the torpedo explosion damages other torpedos and/or anti-matter containment pods.

Gas permeability explains many odd shield failure incidents pretty well.