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Would bullets and/or arrows penetrate personal force fields, personal armor, and personal shields?
jackson900pwe
Member Posts: 191 Arc User
With the kind of personal armor/shields/force fields that exist in the time of Star Trek Online would conventional 21st century or prior bullets and/or arrows penetrate them? Always wondered this after seeing the Picard shooting Borg with holographic bullets in First Contact.
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The thing in First Contact shouldn't have been possible, but then again, the bullets there were photons? It really depends on how the script of an episode needs it to be to tell a story.
In FC Picard kills the Borg with bullets, well photonic ones at least. So that sort of counts as kinetic damage.
The Zefram Cochrane shotgun does damage that I assume is kinetic and avoids shields entirely, making it excellent for killing Borg. So together those two things seem to indicate that at least ground shields dont stop kinetic damage.
Move to space and it's even more odd.
Shields in STO have a built in 75% resistance to kinetic weapons, so that seems the opposite of what happens on the ground.
And the navigation deflector creates a shield to stop space debris smashing into the ship, again resistant to kinetic damage.
So I think it really depends what the situation is and what the writer wants. There's no logical way of stating exactly how the shields work based off what we've seen on screen and in game.
Though then again, one of the things about Star Trek (and other Sci-Fi) is that energy weapons travel much, much slower than bullets, to the point where you can dodge beams.
shields are a versatile tool, not just a form of protection, in FC the ground force field of the borg ties in well with its lore, the borg adapt to their environment, and their force fields do the same. In FC the borg are on a federation starship, with an appropriate amount of phase weapons, so logically they'd have their shields set for such a weapon as to minimize loss. but the holographic bullets, didn't become lethal until a few seconds before picard deactivated the safety parameters, so the borg didn't have it ready for such.
in space it's a similar situation, you can't have semi-realistic shields be impervious to everything, it's got to be set to specific situations. which is why Metaphasic shielding is so valuable, it's got an entire spectra capable of adapting rapidly and to vastly more situations than normal.
Borg shields are adaptive - meaning (i think) - they gain resistance to the type energy weapons that shooting on them in time.
Kinetic energy does not have that specific... lets name it "alignment", so they can not adapt to it.
Of course that does not mean that the shield are not blocking kinetic damage - it's just that they are not becoming more resistant to it, so the damage is constant in time... unless of course you use something with shield penetration x4 mod like TR116B - then you can forget about shields altoogether...
Apparently it was in the original Dune novel from 1965 on page 145.
The Machine Crusade novel from 2003 was when the first lasgun/shield explosion occurred in the chronological history of the Dune Universe.
If I remember correctly, there was a race in DS9 that used projectile weapons which could penetrate force fields due to shield disruptors in the projectile.
As for ground shields we've never really seen any in the shows so I'm not really sure how they would work. I mean since our energy weapons are charged particles they could be being deflected by simple magnetic fields, like earth's ionosphere, and non magnetic items, like a some future alloy or lead, could pass right through the field. As for Worf's one time use shield, maybe that's the best a kinetic personnel shield can do is a short duration of protection or my favorite reason sci-fi stuff works, because we say so.
As for the FC shooting of borg remember that the holodeck can make item is a similar way to the replicators, energy to matter, so when the safety systems were shut off those bullets were not photons, they were real bullets.
If we are talking about FC, Picard shot down 2 borg with the gun. Its not that strange is it? Usually the first few borg will be cannonfodder before they can do anything.
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droidekas in star wars do the same thing; their shields stop fast-moving objects but not slow ones, so rolling a grenade slowly enough in one's direction could slip it right past the shield
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maybe they do but it's not something that can be done on the fly like blocking energy weapons. if so, then maybe they decided that throw more drone at the problem is more efficient then fitting even a small number of drones for a problem that does not come up very often. and doesn't really slow them down when it does.
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I suspect the next round of Borgs would be fitted with additional armor prosthetics if hand-to-hand had continued. The Borg are individually as strong as Data, from what we normally see, so most organics are outmatched. And that's not even considering the nanoprobe injectors. Picard suggesting hand-to-hand for the average crewmember was a sign of how he out of balance he was.
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Yeah pretty much a last-ditch desperation move. It's not that the redshirts were BETTER at hand-to-hand than the Borg, it's that the Borg had not yet demonstrated an immunity to it.
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Thinking about those force fields that stop physical movement all have a frame around them (doorway, bulk heads, some kind of posts) and are not just a bubble around an emitter. Maybe that is the limitation and difference between the two
Or maybe it's a number thing like nightken said. It is easier to overwhelm a target using physical combat with numbers than to armor against it. You can only fight one guy at a time so they send four. The Borg would know our physical limitations after the first assimilation.
They are trek zombies one you might be able to defeat but three or four probably not.
Edit: also, as mentioned earlier, the type of energy shielding used to protect ships and likely the Borg Drones is different from the deflector tech used to protect ships from asteroids and other physical objects. While the deflector is good at its job, it isn't perfect as it's entirely possible for a ship to be rammed by another ship just as an example. The deflector likely has a limit to what it can deal with, either in terms of deflection mass or in terms of relative kinetic energy. If the latter, a starship may actually have difficulty deflecting something along the lines of a large railgun shot (think Mass Effect style weaponry), and a Drone may simply not have that kind of tech installed.
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In some instances I guess that means the force applied determines how effective a shield is. A fast traveling bullet exerts more force than a tossed Staff or an arrow.
In terms of Star Trek however, I see it as the Borg adapt to the frequency of energy weapons, thus the need to remodulate. Bullets have no frequency, even if they are holographic. Its a solid object. And Borg drones are not equipped with deflectors like ships. Its like getting hit with a blade, fist, or rock.
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That's the one I was thinking of, thank you