remote power

[sunshine220]

In dz9 the Cardassians O.D.P was powered remotely ,there was no wire connecting them . So how was the power transfer done ? Speculation any answer is welcome .

[Batman]

Double thread? And so-um-they did it wirelessly? We've been using wireless power transfer for eons. It's called 'receiving heat from the sun', and for the much more recent technological implementations 'solar power'. Besides, there's numerous examples in TNG of them doing wireless power transfer, the first of which (at least for the TNG era) being Encounter at Farpoint Pt2. It could be as simply as them beaming power to the satellites via microwaves (how many cables connect your TV dinner to the insides of your microwave oven?) and as complicated as some subspace based technobabble thingy. There's nothing miraculous about wireless power transfer.

[sunshine220]

I posted it from my phone and it got duplicated some hom tybfoe the reply tho

[Batman]

Don't post from your phone and/or take more time checking your spelling if you do? Messes like 'some hom tybfoe the reply tho' tend to get people annoyed. There is a board rule about using proper english you know.

[Dalton]

Yes, with mods to enforce those rules.

[Sea Skimmer]

They never say what it was but wireless power transmission is shown multiple times in Star Trek TNG alone, just normally with some kind of visible beam. Logically they used an invisible version of the known power beams. In fact this technology was even shown in one episode to work from a Federation Ship to a Romulan Ship in that episode when a shuttle craft finds the Enterprise and a Warbird frozen in time.

You can of course do wireless invisible power transfers on earth right now using your home microwave. Its an electrical to thermal conversion, but if you wanted you could convert the thermal energy back into electrical energy,

Its also possible to use microwaves to go antenna to antenna transmitting power for commercial purposes, its just highly inefficient. Japan thinks they can improve on this to work from orbit to ground with useful efficiency by the 2030s. The big question I see is, how does the power transmission system work through the shields on the power plant and the defense platform. This should be a major vulnerability, but it wasn't exploited and the whole setup was never seen again so we'll never know. Its unlikely to have involved microwaves since Star Trek almost never uses anything simple to move power, as seen by Federation ships using pipes pull of pressurized flammable gas to transmit power around.

[Batman]

Given this is TNG plus era Trek, the best bet for how the transmitted energy gets through the shields is probably some iteration of frequency shenanigans.
We already know they can make sensors, communications and their own weapons work through their own shields (would be kinda awkward if your photon torpedoes splattered against the inside of your own shields) and they can, with some tinkering, occasionally even beam through shields. Given the era's love for frequency based solutions, that would be my first bet.
Of course it could be something as simple as the transmitter/receiver antennae being physically stuck outside the shield but as Skimmer said, Trek doesn't do simple

[Sea Skimmer]

Frequency is possible, but with a whole network of defense platforms all on the same frequency then god would it be a horrible vulnerability. If every attacking ship just fired on different frequencies, and we know they can rotate them every shot to fight the Borg, even thousands of possible combinations would be tested out very quickly. I forget, anyone remember or have a screen cap of Star Trek Generations when they actually show the Enterprise-D shield frequency number? I think it was five digits?

[Batman]

Why would every platform need to be on the same frequency? Granted for a commercial setup that would make sense to simplify things but why couldn't every single one of them have their own frequency? Heck, why couldn't they rotate the frequency of the power transmission same way they try to rotate phaser frequencies on the Borg? Then it becomes a game of who can change faster.
Plus if memory serves once the Borg adapted to frequency XYZ they stayed adapted to that, whereas in this situation the defenders have the option to simply recycle frequencies they already used earlier, just as long as they're not the loophole frequency the Feds are currently trying to exploit.

[Sea Skimmer]

Because you have a shield around the power station, and the energy has to go through that, and thus be the same frequency in every case, while every defense platform also has to accept that frequency. The only way around it is if you had a different shield sector and frequency for each link from the power station. But since we've never seen shields run at multiple frequencies at once, even though it would have been highly useful many times, its logical to assume this doesn't work or causes gaps or something to that extent. Rotating frequencies might work, but it'd surely cause some kind of interruption.

[Batman]

Yeah, I see the problem with that (belatedly). Do we know if it was a continuous power transfer? The rotating shield frequencies idea could still work if they were feeding the satellites individually for fractions of a second at a time with the satellites going on batteries until their next power transfer (something I'd expect Treknology to be able to do on a couple dozen times a second level at the least). And yes, I know there's no evidence for that, but at least that wouldn't require us to dive even deeper into technobabble.

Do we know how important the frequency stuff is to outgoing emissions? Last I checked Starfleet ships didn't have to do beans to their shields to allow their phasers to go through them so the frequency adaption may only be necessary on the receiving end.

[Scepticalguy]

In dz9 the Cardassians O.D.P was powered remotely ,there was no wire connecting them . So how was the power transfer done ? Speculation any answer is welcome .

During the episode they mention that the platforms are being powered by a "subspace power generator" on a small nearby moon so maybe the energy was transfered through subspace as the name could indicate.

[tim31]

I forget, anyone remember or have a screen cap of Star Trek Generations when they actually show the Enterprise-D shield frequency number? I think it was five digits?

Late answer, but it was 257.4 megahertz