Ship of the Week: D'Deridex

[Aaron]

I agree 100% with regards to the traditional force field (essentially creating an energy barrier of a given size) technology.

In like the Borg's case, though, for instance, the field around the ship in Q Who and Best of Both Worlds was actually an EM field rather than a shield or force field. It simply nullified energy tossed at it. They didn't strictly stick to canon in that regard but I'm not really a bible thumper, I went with the flow that they made the Borg less invincible later.

Are we sure about that? In Q Who it looked like the fire was basically impacting on the bare hull and in BOBW there was an EM field but I don't recall it being explained what it did beyond preventing transport.

[Duskofdead]

I agree 100% with regards to the traditional force field (essentially creating an energy barrier of a given size) technology.

In like the Borg's case, though, for instance, the field around the ship in Q Who and Best of Both Worlds was actually an EM field rather than a shield or force field. It simply nullified energy tossed at it. They didn't strictly stick to canon in that regard but I'm not really a bible thumper, I went with the flow that they made the Borg less invincible later.

Are we sure about that? In Q Who it looked like the fire was basically impacting on the bare hull and in BOBW there was an EM field but I don't recall it being explained what it did beyond preventing transport.

A lot of that is up to guesswork; it's possible they "sampled" the Ent-D's weapons in order to decide upon the optimal defense. Certainly the weapons didn't appear to hit ANY kind of shielding whatsoever in the first attack. Even if the cube had been destroyed, the next one would have had an optimized defense. In BoBW they didn't refer to "shields", they referred to the electromagnetic field being intact and "phasers having no impact", not "doing no damage." The dialogue switch to talking about borg "shields" happened in Voyager and First Contact.