Thoughts in the NX-01's hull polorization

[Admiral X]

Quoted from a Facebook group:

You heard of the Electromagnetic Railgun,

Now get ready for..

The Electric Reactive Armor.

The Dynamic Armor is a new type of reactive armor developed by the British Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in 2010.

It is made of two layers of thin conductive armor shells, with the first layer holding a very high amount of electric charge while the second layer is at ground.

If a penetrator or a shaped charge jet pierces through the two shells, it would form a circuit and the enormous amount of electrical charge held by the first layer would disrupt it and vaporizes it.

This would obviously consume alot of energy which is why just like electromagnetic railguns, the Dynamic electric reactive armor is originally intended to be used by Nuclear powered warships to protect them against shaped charge and kinetic energy anti-ship missiles without greatly increasing their weight.

However, this technology is now being considered for use in armored vehicles such as tanks.

~Licayan09~

[Robovski]

That works on penetration weapons, but generally the NX-01 was beat up by energy weapons.

[Nealithi]

They also called it polarization indicating they would be restricting how much energy could get through. Though I do not think they ever said why the plating wasn't just made polarized instead of having to activate it in an emergency?

[Darth Wedgius]

I figured it used electric charges to twist molecules or metallic crystal structure into some stronger alignment. The Electric Reactive Armor is really interesting, though.

[Admiral X]

Just thought it was something interesting in that one could see a real-life basis for what they had on the show. The main advantage to a system like this is in theoretically adding increased effective armor protection without adding the weight of thicker armor plating would add.

I think I'll probably be using something along these lines for at least part of the armor on the Earth ships in my version of ENT, provided I ever get back to writing it. Mostly because the warships in my version actually are armed with railguns.

[Madner Kami]

That works on penetration weapons, but generally the NX-01 was beat up by energy weapons.

Actually the vast majority of weaponry they faced, were particle weapons.

[Enterprising]

Now the big question, how can it be made to go "offline"?

[Madner Kami]

Now the big question, how can it be made to go "offline"?

You see the part where this armor principle needs energy? Guess how it can go offline.

[CharlesPhipps]

My theory is either they re-used a lot of scripts for other STAR TREK shows.

Or...depressingly...

The writers literally did not know how to write a Star Trek show without the usual tricks.

[Nessus]

Sames as Charles above. It was just a cheap and transparent way to avoid having to redesign their standard script writing mad-lib engine. Why figure out how to tell new kinds of stories for a framework where "shields" aren't available, when you can just rename the shields "polarized plating" and do a find-and-replace function on your scripts? Same with "phase pistols", "nuclear torpedoes", etc. To say nothing of all the stuff they couldn't rename, but just couldn't let go of for the same reasons, like the transporter.

Wasn't just the writing. The visual design was also wall-to-wall with stuff that was just minor cosmetic reskins of "standard" Trek stuff that really should have been different in any number of ways. The total effect being that it felt like nothing had notably advanced in over 300 years. What should have been a 300 year rainbow spectrum of technological advancement and change got retconned into a homogeneous paste.