Earth planetary defenses

[Londo]

Surface fortifications would be the first targeted. A planet would have weapons on all sides, so an invading task force concentrates fire, a single target at a time, on nearest land/orbit based batteries. Warp under the orbital batteries, and a planets own orbital defenses might hit the planet and not the ship.

In extremis strategic omega particle explosions if they could be limited in size to just a solar system could prove very handy. [edit:] there must be other less dangerous ways of inhibiting warp flight but they escape me atm!

Orbital batteries are far more sensible than surface based, they have far greater field of fire so concentration of force is less effective against them.
And I just cant see the federation inviting an orbital bombardment which is what ground defences are. Orbital defences offer a clean war if the opposition wants it.

 

[Deks]

Let's not forget planetary shields.
A technology often neglected (like many others) to be used by the writers for convenience sake, much like personal shields.

A lot of things were never shown due to 'drama'.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, there's no evidence that planetary shields would exist in the Star Trek universe.

There are shields that can stop transporting to and from Elba II in "Whom Gods Destroy", that much has to be admitted. They explicitly surround the entire planet, even if they are a bit weaker on one side of it. But just as explictly, they can't stop weapons. They are only good against transport; Scotty worries that if he tried to bring down the shields by phaser fire in order to make transporting possible, he'd only end up vaporizing the surface installations and killing Kirk and Spock who are down there. And the weak spot on the other side of the planet must be really weak, since Scotty thinks a shuttlecraft could get down through it!

Even super-powerful aliens don't seem to have anything approaching planetary shields. Apollo was a god, and still all he had was a shield around his little hut. Klingons, Romulans or Cardassians never shielded their planets.

Which is probably for the better, as planetary shields would make for rather boring storytelling. And things like SW5:The Empire Strike Back make absolutely no sense: if the planet has (global or local) shields that can stop bombardment, it must have shields that can stop a ground invasion as well. Otherwise, the "ground invaders" could be bombs, making bombardment eminently possible!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BK613]

Oh really...from that episode

Scotty: Perhaps the ship's phasers can cut through...
the force field at its weakest point. Where did you say that was located?
Sulu: On the far side of the planet.

...ship moves from one synchronous orbit to another...

Scotty: Ship's phasers to narrow beam.
Sulu: Ship's phasers ready, sir.
Scotty: Let's punch a hole in it. Full power.
Scotty: Another blast, full power.
Sulu: Force field's still holding, sir.

And I think the TMP novelization, which I was perusing earlier , mentions Earth's powerful forcefield protection or some such. So at least someone thought of it back then, even if it never made it as an onscreen reference.

 

[SpyOne]

IIRC, there was an episode with a planet with a cloaking device. And IIRC cloaking devices work by affecting the shields. It is indirect, but ....

 

[GodThingFormerly]

And I think the TMP novelization, which I was perusing earlier , mentions Earth's powerful forcefield protection or some such. So at least someone thought of it back then, even if it never made it as an onscreen reference.

"Until now, there had been at least the hope that the sheer weight of Earth and Lunar firepower and powerful forcefield protection might give Nogura bargaining power or at least some delay in which a better understanding could be worked out."

SLR

 

[Deks]

To be sure, there's no evidence that planetary shields would exist in the Star Trek universe.

There are shields that can stop transporting to and from Elba II in "Whom Gods Destroy", that much has to be admitted. They explicitly surround the entire planet, even if they are a bit weaker on one side of it. But just as explictly, they can't stop weapons. They are only good against transport; Scotty worries that if he tried to bring down the shields by phaser fire in order to make transporting possible, he'd only end up vaporizing the surface installations and killing Kirk and Spock who are down there. And the weak spot on the other side of the planet must be really weak, since Scotty thinks a shuttlecraft could get down through it!

Even super-powerful aliens don't seem to have anything approaching planetary shields. Apollo was a god, and still all he had was a shield around his little hut. Klingons, Romulans or Cardassians never shielded their planets.

Which is probably for the better, as planetary shields would make for rather boring storytelling. And things like SW5:The Empire Strike Back make absolutely no sense: if the planet has (global or local) shields that can stop bombardment, it must have shields that can stop a ground invasion as well. Otherwise, the "ground invaders" could be bombs, making bombardment eminently possible!

Timo Saloniemi

A rather common space-faring race in 'Nightingale' episode of Voyager in S7 had a planetary shield.
So did the race in 'Workforce' episodes.
Their technology was no more sophisticated than the Federations ... plain and simple.

Writers didn't mention planetary shields because most of the 'drama' they created would go down the drain rather fast (remember that a lot of the time, writers often dumb down the tech in order for the drama to flourish because they cannot be bothered to operate within the confines of the setting they created themselves).
It's one of the biggest blunders in Trek writing, as was the episode 'Siege of AR-558' in it's depiction of ground battle (which was an absolute joke), not to mention the lack of personal force-fields, and many others.

The Feds are perfectly capable of those technological aspects, yet they are never shown because of a very simple reason:
drama.

 

[Timo]

A rather common space-faring race in 'Nightingale' episode of Voyager in S7 had a planetary shield. So did the race in 'Workforce' episodes. Their technology was no more sophisticated than the Federations ... plain and simple.

OTOH, most of Delta Quadrant (including those races) hadn't figured out the transporter, which everybody from Ligonians up seems to have in Alpha...

There's no evidence the Feds could build a planetary shield, and no reason why such a skill should follow from the ability to build a starship shield. The Alpha players have cloaks, yet they consider planet-sized cloaks (like the Aldean one) utter myth until confronted the existence of one. They have phasers, but they don't have Death Star -type planetsplitting phasers (like the Species 8472 and the Sphere Builders), and nobody seriously considers the possibility of such a thing existing, until again being confronted with one. From neither of these confrontations did it follow that the Feds would suddenly learn how to build planetary cloaks or planetsplitting beams.

One could just as well accuse the writers of laziness when they still use starships even though the transporter exists. Why don't they get their act together and turn Star Trek into, say, Stargate?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SpyOne]

One could just as well accuse the writers of laziness when they still use starships even though the transporter exists. Why don't they get their act together and turn Star Trek into, say, Stargate?

Timo Saloniemi

No, because the transporters were defined as working only over very short (comparatively) ranges. There is lots of dialogue about "moving into transporter range".
And when they introduced transporters with much greater range, they were described as:
A) being really dangerous to use, and
B) still working over small distances compared to interstellar distances (ie only a couple of lightyears).

 

[Timo]

Similarly, the fact that starships pose a danger to technologically defended planets was introduced to us early on. The impossibility of planetary shields is thus as much a feature of the Trek universe as the lack of transporter range. Both are deliberate writer choices, not stemming from any a priori reasons but established simply because that's how one defines one's fictional universe. It's Star Trek, not Stargate or Star Wars, because it's defined in a particular way.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CaptainDonovin]

There is no clear on-screen evidence of what defenses Earth has, other than the Mars Defense Perimeter.

Earth is almost always shown as very lightly defended. In "The Motion Picture," only the Enterprise is within range to intercept V'Ger. In "The Voyage Home," the Whale Probe meets scant resistance once it's in the Sol System. In "Generations," the Enterprise-B is the only ship within the system. In "The Best of Both Worlds," all we see is the Mars Defense Perimeter (which is destroyed so easily it's laughable). In "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost," it appears that the USS Lakota is the only ship in the system.

The only time we get the sense that Earth is defended at all is during the Dominion War. In "Favor the Bold," Sisko says that Earth is currently being defended by the Third Fleet. In "The Changing Face of Evil," it's implied that Earth's defenses fought agaisnt the Breen's raid on San Francisco.

Personally, given Earth's vital importance to the Federation, I would have loved to see either a massive network of planetery defenses or several ships within the system at all times, or at least within Sector 001 at all times.

If I remember correctly there was a large fleet fighting the Borg very close to Earth @ the beginning of ST: First Contact & a fleet 18 w/ nine more on the way (thanks Memory Alpha!) met Voyager when they returned from the Delta Quadrant. Not sure if that was normal or just for the Borg but I would think it would be a good idea to keep some ships near or at Earth just in case.

 

[publiusr]

I can see the V'ger planet alone having a planetary shield. Then too, even the Borg planets were vulnerable to the Undine (Species 8472)--thought you might make the case that the ships were using true zero point power, as opposed to Borg anti-matter reactors and such all over the surface.

I can see the Omega particles being useful, or dampening fields similar to what we saw on certain planets in Voyager that made transport impossible.

It might be that only large ships or asteroids could punch through certain shields.

A thought. OT you may remember in Last Starfighter how a ship used meteors as weapons. Perhaps such unguided craft were the only things that could make it through a dampening wall made to short out spacecraft, so just fire nickel-iron slugs to knock down the shield-wall control platform. A nice story right there.

 

[neozeks]

[ "Until now, there had been at least the hope that the sheer weight of Earth and Lunar firepower and powerful forcefield protection might give Nogura bargaining power or at least some delay in which a better understanding could be worked out."

SLR

That could just as well point to city-sized forcefields around the major population centers and military installations. I'm pretty sure those exist. That's probably why the Breen attack didn't turn San Francisco into a huge crater - most of the weapons fire was stopped by the city-shields but a very small amount of it still managed to seep through and do some damage.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

[ "Until now, there had been at least the hope that the sheer weight of Earth and Lunar firepower and powerful forcefield protection might give Nogura bargaining power or at least some delay in which a better understanding could be worked out."

SLR

That could just as well point to city-sized forcefields around the major population centers and military installations. I'm pretty sure those exist.

In fact they're nearly canon, with ENT "Affliction" as an exemplar: the Klingon's are not immediately able to destroy the colony with their disruptors, apparently because the entire town has its own deflector shield and they have to shoot through that first.

 

[Timo]

...It's both a pity and a blessing that we've never really seen what "standard" orbital bombardment looks like from the receiving end.

We've seen precision blasts from starship phasers against shielded and unshielded targets, and they are decidedly short of biblical in scale. We've seen low-yield "make them suffer rather than just die" blasts from that spaceborne mollusk in "Encounter at Farpoint". We've seen photon torpedoes fired in close air support mode in ST5, too. But real orbital death raining down (say, "The Die is Cast" or even "Skin of Evil") looks like it would melt continents, leaving mere city-sized shields relatively inefficient as a defense.

Presumably such shields would still be a practical defense, though, since most enemies wouldn't want to melt continents. Either they want to capture the planet - or then they want to make it capitulate or its defenders die at minimum expenditure of energy and effort. Say, in "Affliction", firing at the colony for two minutes might have been a much more practical way to terminate the diseased individuals than firing at the continent for five... Assuming, of course, that the planet didn't have any unexpected starship defenders.

Perhaps it goes something like this:

* 1 starship against 1 undefended planet: extermination level event in a few hours (Empire in "Mirror, Mirror")
* 1-3 starships against planet with city shields: extermination in a few days at most (Starfleet in "A Taste of Armageddon", Klingons in "Affliction" et al.)
* 1 starship against planet with city shields and antiship cannon: an even match (Klingons in "Return to Grace")
* 100 starships against planet with city shields and orbital fortifications: an even match (Breen in "When it Rains")
* 1000 starships against planet with city shields, orbital fortifications and defending starships: a difficult job at best (Alpha powers in "What You Leave Behind")
* 1-1000 starships against planetary shields: myth territory...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

That sounds about right. Planetary anti-transporter fields but shields only for cities.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ I'm suddenly reminded of Soran's forcefield in Generations, which I think is the closest thing we've ever had to seeing a "city shield" up close. We don't really know how big the field perimeter is, but I should think it's at least enough to encompass a small town, especially with the limited supplies Soran had on hand (evidently he had some type of portable generator somewhere).

Also significant is the fact that Soran happened to have a small rocket launcher sitting in the middle of it all. Substiute the "solar probe" for some type of photon torpedo launcher, and you've got the equivalent of a hardened SAM site that can fire on orbiting starships without being immediately crushed in the return fire.

It isn't clear if whole cities are equipped with such forcefields or just individual buildings (like the house shields in Dune). Or even if such forcefields are non-permanent features and are usually mounted into proper position only in time of conflict; perhaps unmodified versions of the shield generators in "Lessons," which clearly have enough power between the lot of them to protect a major city.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, Soran's field might have been set up to only repel Picard, and just possibly his hand phaser; a shield capable of stopping a starship phaser might have been too difficult to conceal. And the "Lessons" emitters might have been impotent against threats other than the specific "firestorm" phenomenon we witnessed.

We don't know. But we may suspect that potent shields also exist, and nothing in that movie or that episode necessitates those shields being weak.

In "Homefront", we learn that personal shields exist, and will be distributed to the troops on Earth in case of an invasion threat. Yet all other Trek stands witness to the fact that such shields see no use. So in that particular case, we might have a good reason to speculate that Starfleet personal shields are utterly useless in combat, and that Admiral Leyton ordered them distributed because he wanted riot police to control Earth's population, not because he wanted infantry capable of opposing a Jem'Hadar invasion. This doesn't preclude larger and clumsier combat shields... Perhaps platoon-sized ones, as suggested in the TNG Tech Manual? But personal forcefields capable of withstanding phaser fire just plain aren't part of Star Trek, at least not yet.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

About those three ships destroyed by the Borg at Mars, I don't think they were meant to be the entire Mars Defense Perimeter. I think that there was a much larger battle going on (or had gone on) off-screen and those three ships were just part of the last line of Mars' defenses.

Didn't they say something about Earth's defenses totally destroying the Breen armada that attacked Earth? They took superficial damage but the defenses worked.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ Actually the production crew has confirmed on a number of occasions that those weren't actually "ships" as much as they were enormous anti-ship missiles. Probably smaller versions of the Cardassian dreadnaught.