What's the purpose of having a force field around the warp core?

[infinix]

It is a novel idea and provide some nice eye candy, but I would have to think it serves no practical purposes.

I imagine that the force field is meant to contain a war core breach. But in order for the force field to hold the breach, it would have to put out as much power as the breach. So that particular force fields has to be fed by second warp core. Doesn't make too much sense to me.

Unless the force field is meant to contain the random debris from hitting the core and or whatever gases that typically escapes the core during a random battle. If that's the case, I wonder why they made it such a grand scene of powering on the force field. Because to me, it would be one of those "you didn't think of that until now?" moments.

 

[Timo]

...Of course, since forcefields tend to be invisible until and unless something hits them, every warp core or other piece of exposed machinery in Star Trek history may always have had such a field around it. We'd just this rare once see the Chief Engineer briefly lower that field for a checkout and then raise it again.

On the issue of containing an internal explosion, I don't think there's ever been any indication that a forcefield would need X watts of power to counter a threat of X watts. It might be more like transistors: just a nanoampere of current changes the flow of a milliampere of current.

Nor do we know that a forcefield would immediately go down when power is lost, for that matter. A delay of a few milliseconds would be enough to block a warp core explosion...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captrek]

Nor do we know that a forcefield would immediately go down when power is lost, for that matter. A delay of a few milliseconds would be enough to block a warp core explosion...

What do you mean “block”? What happens to all the energy released in the explosion?

 

[Amaris]

Nor do we know that a forcefield would immediately go down when power is lost, for that matter. A delay of a few milliseconds would be enough to block a warp core explosion...

What do you mean “block”? What happens to all the energy released in the explosion?

Tribble farts.

 

[trekkerguy]

I always assumed it was to protect it from possible weapons fire.

 

[Timo]

What happens to all the energy released in the explosion?

From what we usually see, it's turned into sparkles of light...

I guess shields shunt incoming energy to subspace or something. Certainly they don't seem to reflect it back, or store it, or turn it into matter.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Satyrquaze]

It is a novel idea and provide some nice eye candy, but I would have to think it serves no practical purposes.

Hey, remember when the Klingon was pointing a disruptor at the core of the Enterprise-D in "Heart of Glory"?

Its seems like a pretty pratical purpose at that point.

 

[Doug Otte]

Sorry; I'm having another senior moment. In which movie was the force field mentioned?

Thanks,
Doug

 

[Satyrquaze]

It was used semi-successfully in Nemesis.

 

[archeryguy1701]

It's not there to protect against a warp core breach... if the core goes, there's not much they can do about it. What I've always figured was that it was for either a)protect from weapons fire in the case of intruders or b)protect against something more minor like a coolant leak or some other form of damage that would release something hazardous to the engineers.

 

[F. King Daniel]

It's probably there as a last line of defence should enemy fire penetrate engineering, as seen in "Wrath of Khan" and "Best of Both Worlds"

 

[Pauln6]

There is only an explosion if matter meets antimatter - having a magnetic forcefield around the core limits the amount of matter that any leak can interact with and therefore limits any explosion. So possibly the field has two layers - an inner magnetic layer to control any escaping anti-matter (fine as long as the injectors can be turned off) and the traditional forcefield to contain any potential explosion.

 

[Timo]

We see in "The Adversary" that a warp core is deadly to the touch (or proximity), at least in certain fault situations. Quite possibly, all exposed warp cores have a forcefield around them merely to protect the people in the vicinity from these harmful effects. If that field goes down, the area becomes unhealthy to work in, but operations are not otherwise affected; it's unrelated to the fields that keep the core working, or to the fields that protect the core from harm.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Rarewolf]

I always thought it was a nod towards Insurrection since that directly preceeded it - it was the warp core pulling the subspace tear wasn't it?

 

[Destructor]

I assumed it was so that when they eject the warp core, not everyone in engineering would get sucked into space.

 

[infinix]

holy crap, I just saw the Plinkett review of the Nemesis where he asks the exact same question about the force field. LOL.

http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-trek/star-trek-nemesis/

I'm running through all of the Plinkett reviews. Some are over the top, but most are pretty funny.