A bit of a poll, a bit of a game; but given the subject matter I hope CS is the best place:
We all know the deflector dish, like the transporter, is an extremely versatile peice of equipment capable of an infinite variety of functions. Lets list the many different things the run-of-the-mill StarFleet deflector dish (and/or array) can do, and the episode it’s from.
It can open a rift into fluidic space for the Borg (Voyager / Species 8472 - i forget the ep)
It can be used as a superweapon that will theoretically destroy a borg cube (Best of Both Worlds I-II)
It can be used as an “interplexing subspace beacon” (Star Trek First Contact)
Some kinda funky tachyon emitter & create yet another time-space rift (All Good Things…)
You’re thinking of the bussard collectors/ramscoops at the front of the warp nacelles. The idea is that they sweep up interstellar hydrogen as the ship moves through space.
The deflector dish is the large disk or eye-shaped object on the secondary hull.
It’s designed to deflect micrometeroites and such when the ship was traveling at warp speed (when you’re going several hundred times the speed of light, a grain of sand will REALLy ruin your day)
On rare occasion we’ve seen stuff like smaller ships skipping off of the deflector sheild (I can’t remember which TNG ep this happened in).
In the case of Generations, the Klingons were able to determine the calibration used for the Enterprise’s sheilds (I’m not sure if the deflector sheilds as used for warp are the same as the sheilds used for fighting) and all their weapons were tuned to the same frequency, presumably slipping in between the gaps in the sheild that has been stated in the past to happen periodically (In a TNG ep, O’Brien was able to beam aboard a ship while it’s sheilds were up because he knew when the gap would come around, since the calibration of the sheilds hadn’t changed in the several years since he had been aboard the ship, it’s presumably quite difficult to change the calibration at a whim.)
During the Klingon Civil war in TNG, they used the deflector dishes of about 20 different starships to make a sort of net that would allow them to detect cloaked Romulan ships trying to sneak past.
You sure that wasn’t the DS9 epsidoe “Trials and Tribble-ations”, when obrien beamed a few people onto the Enterprise (NCC-1701. No bloody A, B, C, or D!)
But, all in all you seem to be saying the deflector dish isn’t the doo-dad that’s responsible for the shields when they yell “Raise shields!” Hmmm…well, good thing I guess. You’d hate to have such a useful gadget lying (relatively) idle in the heat of combat / saving the universe!
They use anti-matter, and in an admittedly early episode Scotty makes reference to “the reactors” so they may be fusing hydrogen, or reacting it with anti matter.
So in Star Trek the movie, when they went to warp and the asteroid got stuck in front of the ship (tooooorrrrrrpeeeeeeeedooooooooooes ahhhhhhhhhhmmmmmmed) was that the deflector dish’s fault?
If you have an atmosphere you’ve polluted you can draw off the pollution using the static charge, then turn the ship all the way around and fire the pollution off into space.
They use antimatter to power their warp engines. The dilithium crystals only serve to moderate the mix of matter-antimatter.
And they do use fusion power. If the ship were dependent on the warp core for power, they’d have no power source if they had to eject it. That never seemed to be a concern in the episodes of TNG, Voyager, and Insurrection when they were getting ready to or actually did eject the core. As such, they’d at least be dependent on fusion for auxiliary power in that sense, or whenever else the core was shut down.
That aside, they use fusion to power the impulse engines. It seems pretty likely that more “conventional” functions of the ship would be powered as such too.
Nope. This was a TNG episode involving the Cardassians. A captain O’Brien served under has taken his ship into Cardassian space, and has been destroying cargo ships. He tries to convince Picard and O’Brien that the Cardassians are up to something. O’Brien uses his transporter expertise and his knowledge of the other ship (‘Every 72 seconds, the ship cycles and the shields go down for a 200th of a second. I can get over’). He beams over. The captain makes some jokes based on O’Brien’s ethnicity. They reminisce about a guy named Stompy and sing an old song.
It’s worth mentioning that they do used a similar trick to get aboard the Enterprise NCC-1701 in Trials and Tribble-ations, though in that case, it they were timing it so they could uncloak, beam aboard the Enterprise, and recloak, all during a gap in the Enterprise’s sensor sweep.
