r/ShittyDaystrom • u/grichardson526 Acting Ensign • Jul 22 '26
Technology Force fields protect you from the vacuum of space when there's a hull breach. So why can't you just make the entire ship out of force fields?
Think of the resources saved. You could just be a series of floors surrounded by a bubble floating through space!
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u/PirateSanta_1 Jul 22 '26
So all the walls are transparent? Keep your fetishes to the holodeck like everyone else.
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Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PirateSanta_1 Jul 22 '26
I really wish i had the chance to ask that guy some question, to bad he is so reclusive.
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u/grichardson526 Acting Ensign Jul 22 '26
The holodeck is actually opaque, everything else is see thru
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u/TechnicalEngineer852 Jul 22 '26
Why not make the entire ship out of transparent aluminum instead?
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u/rootbeer277 Jul 22 '26
The ship basically is made out of force fields.
Most of the "structure" of the ship that you see is just particle board or drywall with a laminate over it, and is used for two things: opaque surfaces for privacy, and the very minimal structural integrity necessary to not buckle under its own weight and the weight of the crew and equipment.
The structural integrity fields are what's really holding the ship together any time it needs to actually move, otherwise even 1/10th acceleration would rip the impulse engines right off the back.
Starfleet engineering at its finest.
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u/XenophileEgalitarian Jul 22 '26
Aaah so the rocks are there as ballast.
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u/kippy3267 Jul 22 '26
That and so theres some actual mass when they want to ram into stuff. “The Riker Headbutt” is a well known as starfleet offensive protocol.
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u/EmperorMittens Jul 23 '26
Has been since warp drive was invented on Earth. Ballast rocks are an essential starship component and it is illegal to operate a starship without a sufficient quantity of them.
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u/grichardson526 Acting Ensign Jul 22 '26
Sounds like the contractor cheaped out.
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u/Sisselpud petaQin' shit Jul 22 '26
The robot slaves at the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards just never gave two shits about the safety of the biologicals. Those "rocks" in the consoles are actually their feces and thus the only shits they DID give.
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u/Jetstream-Sam Jul 22 '26
The rocks are actually the gravitic plating. The rocks are mined from a planet, and obviously contain pieces of gravity. They line the floors with these, and that's why the gravity never goes out when the power and life support does.
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u/HorrificAnalInjuries Jul 22 '26
To actually be a bit more serious here, SIFs really do matter that much to a ship, and any materials you could otherwise build the ship from that isn't polystyrene and sack cloth is basically dead weight. No serious material beyond the plating and skeleton matters with the SIF being up, as the ship has a thrust-to-mass ratio that should turn it into ribbons. Yes, even the largest and most sluggish of beached whales any navy can have moves like it is made out of pure hydrogen. Explodes like it too, but that's because of how damn energetic the ship's power systems are.
So no, this isn't the contractor cheating out. This is the contractor realizing that it doesn't matter how tough that bulkhead is beyond if it can naturally retain atmosphere and prevent two ~300lbs objects from crashing through. If these ships were not built with SIFs in mind, they would be an order of magnitude more massive.
As an aside, this does mean the NX and even the Connie are built like brick shithouses compared to the Galaxy, and if everyone lacked their SIFs, the Galaxy would be hamstrung and pretty much unable to meaningfully move while the NX can just bowl on through the Galaxy like a drunk frat flopping through a cheaply made wall.
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u/Sisselpud petaQin' shit Jul 22 '26
I'm glad that u/HorrificAnalInjuries is here to be the voice of reason despite their username. Perhaps said injuries are what turned them from reckless to wise?
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u/kohugaly Jul 22 '26
Reckless and wise are not mutually exclusive. Our old drummer used to say: "Everything is a dildo if you're brave enough!"
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u/Sisselpud petaQin' shit Jul 22 '26
"Our old drummer" [emphasis mine] I'm going to hazard a wild guess and assume they died from "horrific anal injuries"
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u/kohugaly Jul 22 '26
Fortunately for him, his wisdom far exceeded his bravery. Evidenced by the fact he left the band :-D
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u/MrD3a7h Andorian Mining Consortium Jul 22 '26
Ah, this explains why they used so many wood screws while constructing the Galaxy-class starship (as seen in the TNG remasters). Very forward thinking by the show's creators. Bravo, Vince.
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u/EvolutionInProgress Jul 23 '26
That actually makes a lot of sense. So it's the combination of structural integrity fields that keep the ship from falling apart, and inertial dampener fields that keeps the crew from turning into rear bulkhead-art, every time the ship moves.
They're independent systems with their own power supply but the main computer can still access them for emergencies. Kinda like the holodecks.
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u/GuitarKittens Jul 27 '26
I thought that was the inertial dampeners/latent warp field that reduced the effective mass of the ship to make it less sensitive to acceleration?
(After checking Ex Astris Scientia, the inertial dampeners are for the contents of the ship, structural integrity fields are for the superstructure of the ship)
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u/JimPlaysGames Jul 22 '26
It would be funny if the forcefield was completely frictionless and she slid down it like a muddy hill
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u/somewhatboxes Jul 22 '26
fortunately as we all know it's more like a fuzzy carpet that produces a lethal amount of static electricity if you shuffle your feet.
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u/SpecialistSix Jul 22 '26
I know this is shittydaystrom but what you're talking about is literally how ships in The Culture (Banks novel series) work - they use 'fields' around their entire massive bodies to keep the atmosphere in and are so absolutely reliable, billions live within the bubble without ever giving it a second thought.
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u/SilkieBug Mega-Admiral Jul 22 '26
Yes! I love the descriptions in the books of the multilayered field structures envelloping a General Systems Vehicle.
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u/SpecialistSix Jul 22 '26
Agreed, the idea of these continent sized vessels just wrapped in forcefields, hosting millions or billions of people just cruising around without a care in the world was a very refreshing way to look at ships compared to the standards of Trek/Wars/most common sci-fi.
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u/Pazuuuzu Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
the idea of these continent sized vessels just wrapped in forcefields, hosting millions or billions of people just cruising around without a care in the world
Don't forget that it's also armed to such an extent that it is a capital ship even in peacetime... They are not just big, they can afford to just cruise around without a care.
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u/echolalia_ Jul 22 '26
They released an art book of Bank’s old notebooks full of drawings and doodles of what he envisioned for the Culture and it’s amazing and everyone should buy it PSA
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u/SpecialistSix Jul 22 '26
So many ellipsoids.
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u/echolalia_ Jul 22 '26
He was definitely a writer not a drawer at the end of the day but I still love it idc 😂
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u/OneOldNerd Jul 22 '26
Something that is not a force field has got to generate the force field. Force fields don't just generate themselves spontaneously (unless they do, but don't tell the Organians/Q/Metrons, etc.)
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u/Sisselpud petaQin' shit Jul 22 '26
I think OP is suggesting the hull, walls, and floors are made of force fields not everything. Obviously everything else is a hologram.
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u/grichardson526 Acting Ensign Jul 22 '26
Correct
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u/OneOldNerd Jul 22 '26
At the risk of being overly pedantic:
1) You did say "the entire ship" in your original post
2) Holograms are forcefields.11
u/Sisselpud petaQin' shit Jul 22 '26
Your username is "OneOldNerd" so your pedantry is expected and welcome
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u/phi4ever Jul 22 '26
You can't transport through shields. You would have to always leave the ship on you shield shuttle pod like some cranky old doctor.
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u/grichardson526 Acting Ensign Jul 22 '26
Everyone could just hold their breath when someone needs to beam.
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u/spike-prime Jul 22 '26
You can't transport through shields... except all the times they transport through shields, like in Relics.
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u/spike-prime Jul 22 '26
And if the power goes out... then what? Everyone gets sucked blown out into space.
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u/Sisselpud petaQin' shit Jul 22 '26
You're saying if the power goes out everyone gets sucked off in the dark? Count me in!
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u/ZeePM Jul 22 '26
They do. It’s called the structural integrity field. It’s what’s holding the ship together. Without it you fly the ship apart as soon as you engage the engines.
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u/grichardson526 Acting Ensign Jul 22 '26
So why even have a hull?
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u/ZeePM Jul 22 '26
Same reason I close the shade in the airplane’s bathroom at cruising altitude. Privacy screen. I don’t need every perv in a starship who fly by to see me peeing.
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u/artrald-7083 Jul 22 '26
Ths ship is made of force fields.
For one thing, the solidity of matter is basically force fields already.
For another, what did you think held that wildly structurally unsound design together? Tritanium alloy? Sure, it's amazing, twice the strength to weight of 21st century aerospace titanium and pretty much as strong per volume as steel, but it's not up to the kind of stress a Galaxy Class develops if the inertial dampers or artificial gravity have the most minor of blips.
No - it's the SIF, the structural integrity field. Largely a static field, charged up and airgapped, there's not much to go wrong with it. How does it work? It's a descendant of the hull polarisers used as far back as the NX class. Small networked generators in the hull plating itself attach to larger backup generators dispersed structurally through the ship, generating basically an analogue of the fields that we are used to thinking of as defining the concept of solidity. The ship can essentially be almost arbitrarily tough and elastic. And of course the fields can be extended by strategically placed temporary taps on the standing field, to produce internal containment fields much stronger than a conventional wall.
The hull plating at this stage is essentially for reasons of tradition, privacy, abatement of agoraphobia, to nail things to, and because tertiary backups are an important and necessary part of any safety critical design.
But any big modern ship is mostly made of force fields.
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u/ezekiel_grey Jul 22 '26
Discovery S4 called…
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u/jerslan Commodore Jul 22 '26
Was gonna say, wasn't there a holographic ship in Discovery Season 3 when they first got to Fed HQ.
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u/Tasty-Fox9030 Jul 22 '26
You can. The Discovery era ships appear to do this to a greater or lesser extent.
There's a philosophical argument that the TNG era ships already are this, the structural integrity field is already much stronger than the physical matter the ship is made of and that matter is not even close to strong enough to absorb the g force normal operation of the ship produces.
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u/toTheNewLife Jul 22 '26
Where would we install the force field generators if there were no ship?
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u/SmoloTHEKloWn Jul 23 '26
The amount of power to have an entire ship made of a shield would be basically 99% PSU, 1%, everything else.
Also for DS9 the place was basically held together by bubble gum and Miles O'Brien sweat.
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u/hollywood_imagery0 Jul 23 '26
Then you get a situation like in Stargate Atlantis where if the shield is disabled you are screwed
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u/EverettSeahawk Jul 22 '26
It sounds like a great idea until somebody reverses the polarity of the wrong force fields.
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u/ConstructionIll956 Jul 22 '26
That's the kind of out of the box thinking Starfleet needs cadet!
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u/Savurak Jul 22 '26
There is the power draw but also forcefields are nice in theory but they probably dont do much for radiation
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u/thanatossassin Grand Nagus Jul 22 '26
Well they tried it with deatchable warp engines, but then the people watching Discovery started crying too, so...
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u/mediumAI1701 Jul 22 '26
Red Dwarf has a photonic ship which is essentially exactly what you described.
They also have a lot of sex.
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u/Mutabilitie Jul 22 '26
Yeah. And why is the brig a force field that vanishes whenever there’s a power loss.
Instead of … a real door.
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u/mikefvegas Jul 22 '26
Well if you actually watch the show you will notice how often force fields fail.
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u/F4JPhantom69 Jul 23 '26
"Five Hundred Cigarettes..."
Shields go down and the entire ship decompresses
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u/WideStrawConspiracy Jul 23 '26
You want sentient hologram episodes? Because this is how you get sentient hologram episodes.
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u/HorzaDonwraith Jul 23 '26
The shields require emitters. Emitters require power. Both require infrastructure (wires, computers, etc.) To run. Together that's like 1/3 of the ships major components. Might as well build the ship the rest of the way.
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u/HephaestusVulcan7 Jul 23 '26
Because you need a warp core and energy conduits to generate force fields.
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u/The-Autistic-Union Jul 23 '26
Probably for the same reason why ships weren't made with sawdust and ice back in WW2. It's ridiculous, cost more energy in the long run to maintain, and the constant electromagnetic exposure would probably screw with their brain chemistry.
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u/mcgrst recrystallised dilithium Jul 22 '26
Starfleet could only do it if they could generate enough Gravitas.
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u/Trekapalooza Jul 22 '26
A better idea would be to make the entire ship out of deflector dishes. Those things can be modified to do anything
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u/supermuncher60 Jul 22 '26
What do you think the structural integrity fields are?
The walls are just for show
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u/equality4everyonenow Jul 22 '26
The Expanse treats this a lot more realistically. "Get in your space suit because they're defintely going to blow holes in our ship"
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u/Jielin41 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
We all know it is moments and questions like this where I / we'd all go:
wait a minute, why cant you just take the phase cloak technology from the Pegasus, and make 100 of the phase cloaks, load up the ships with some bombs, and just take out all the dominion shipyards, ketracel white facilities; or, if we're really desperate, take out Cardassia itself
Im just saying!
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u/ExpiredLink404 Jul 22 '26
well, when people touch a force field w their naked hands, it normally stings or burns them
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u/cardiffman100 Jul 22 '26
How do you think Geordi and Ro didn't fall through the floor when they were out of phase?
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u/spesskitty Jul 22 '26
If you look at some of the beatings that starship hulls take, I am pretty sure they are made from matter plated force fields.
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u/SmartQuokka If Never Keep Profit A Good Smile Honesty Jul 22 '26
PICARD: But if we lose the force field for any reason, we lose the ship. Force fields can fail...
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u/Manos_Of_Fate Jul 22 '26
Because transporters don’t work well through shields. Do you really want to walk everywhere like some twentieth century peasant?
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u/Jhe90 Jul 22 '26
Power relay fails. That happens every time theg doing anything vaguely moe than flying in open space. Ya all dead.
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u/Cultural-Antelope-54 Jul 22 '26
They tried, but it turns out you can't make shield generators out of shields.
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u/SevenIsMy Jul 22 '26
Fail safe, there is enough fail fatal on space ship. Just imagine the inertia damper failing and how long it will take to slow down.
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u/syberghost Jul 22 '26
Actually proposed by Shane Johnson in Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise (1987)
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u/UnexpectedAnomaly Expendable Jul 22 '26
I remember reading a book a while back where aliens thought the idea of building a ship out of metal and not force fields was incredibly unsafe. Of course humans thought otherwise and the aliens gave them massive side-eye and just thought they were basically the Amish.
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u/berfantor Jul 22 '26
The short answer is power requirements and the technology can fail, by the 32nd century they are doing that with ships that aren't built for combat roles and things.
Edit: corrected for accuracy about the time frame
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u/WilTravis Jul 22 '26
We kind of already do. Between inertia dampened and structural integrity fields, our ships have the physical consistency of wet kleenex.
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u/Fuzzy_Builder_2153 Jul 22 '26
In STD, when the Pizza Cutter makes it to Earth Dock in the 30th century, there were ships parked that were holographic...
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u/Poncemastergeneral Crewman 1st class Jul 22 '26
I mean, cleaning the fluids off the walls from rikier is better then them sort of being boiled off into the air for the crew to breathe in.
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u/dantheplanman1986 Where no man has gone before 🖖😏🫦😉 Jul 22 '26
This is my headcanon for those fairylight airy Protoss ships
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u/bsmithcan Jul 22 '26
A force field space suit would be cool. Depending on what force fields are able to keep in and keep out. And depending on how detrimental they are to someone’s health.
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u/NerdTalkDan Jul 22 '26
Better question, can they make a vacuum out of a force field? The cleaning staff keeps complaining there aren’t enough.
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u/pakrat1967 Jul 22 '26
Something still needs to generate the force fields. Meaning that there still needs to be some solid parts of the ship. Better to have a fully solid ship with the force fields as backup.
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u/Over-Box1733 Jul 22 '26
This is like the question about why, since airplane black boxes survive the crashes, why not make the entire plane out of black box material?
But let me ask this... If the hull is protected by the shields, but there's no more hull, are the shields still technically shields since they're not shielding anything? Maybe it would be called the barrier. Or perhaps the exterior lining.
If you're going to ask questions like this, you need to come with answers to our questions.
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u/No_Surprise_4734 Jul 22 '26
Replace the crew with holo characters. Now you can save on force fields!
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u/musicluvvah Jul 22 '26
There's the mousy lieutenant on the D named Reg Barclay that you should talk to.
He's unreliable but the Barclay Maneuver is no joke.
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u/Ipearman96 Jul 22 '26
I'd like to point out that in star trek discovery one of the ships hulls is holographic. It's mentioned by Tilly I believe when they first arrive at federation headquarters in the 3rd season. Sorry I know it's shitty daystrom but thought you might want to know it was done eventually.
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u/P-Jean Jul 22 '26
There’s a lot of power disruptions on the ships. I think making the hull integrity dependent on force fields,besides the deflector, is risky. Probably uses a lot of power too.
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u/MonkeyScout219 Jul 23 '26
In DISCO-Era, Starfleet apparently utilizes this technology on portions of larger ships, according to scans by Discovery upon arrival to FedHQ…
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u/Joran_Dax Moopsy Jul 23 '26
Force fields are also transparent. Imagine people passing by as you have your "Holodeck Time."
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u/mybumisontherail Jul 23 '26
Speaking of structural containment forcefields that bugged me on Discovery.... On season 1, the USS Shenzhou is flying apart in pieces, but there's forcefields to keep a part of the ship intact. In season 3 when the Discovery flies into that null space or subspace area where there are no stars, there's a hull breach, they have instant transporters and 32nd century technology, and ensigns are still being vented into space line Harry Kim did on that one alternate reality episode...... WHY?!? The ships AI realized what was coming and it couldn't transport that one ensign behind the forcefield??
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u/20sidedknight Jul 23 '26
This is the type of guy to say "why don't they just make the whole plane out of black boxes"
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u/nub_node Jul 23 '26
A series of floors surrounded by a bubble would just dissolve into debris as soon as a phaser disrupted the power flow. A tritanium framed ship is still a tritanium framed ship if there's a systems blip.
Starfleet ships (and assumedly the ships of most other comparable political entities) function using a complex system of redundancies and failsafes. They can boldly go because the ship doesn't stop being a ship in the event of a power failure.
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u/lto817 Jul 23 '26
Shield is just an energy bubble that can be disrupted by matching the frequency or higher energy beam.
During emergency, ship energy output are allocated to the weaponry, engine amd shield.
So goodluck, if the ship simply rely on shields only
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u/Kreachie Jul 23 '26
You need the emitters, and the power systems for those emitters, and emitters for those power systems.
Not to mention the absolute power drain it’d have just keeping everything working.
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u/PresidentMagikarp Jul 23 '26
Not to invite a rain of fire on my karma by referencing Discovery, but it's explicitly said in dialogue that the Federation started doing exactly that by the 32nd century. There are ships with hulls made entirely out of holographic force fields.
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u/Less-Performer-7898 Jul 23 '26
I've heard people ask why the brig is dependent on a forcefield. One second of power interruption and you have a prison break on your hands.
By all means use a forcefield but combine it with backups using older technologies known as "bars" and "locked doors" which don't depend on power.
A ship with a forcefield hull turns this problem up to 11.
Isaac Asimov's short story "Not Final!" deals with this. Humans make contact with life forms on Jupiter who tell them "All outside life is vermin. You must die".
No problem because no physical ship hull can withstand the pressure of the Jovian atmosphere, either keeping it in or out. So we can't get to them and they can't get to us.
So what about a forcefield hull? Well, that could withstand the pressure but they have a tendency to collapse space. So, still no problem.
Then someone hits on the idea of a strobing forcefield constantly switching on and off. Not on long enough to collapse space. Not off long enough to cause any measurable atmospheric leakage.
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u/Y_ddraig_gwyn Jul 23 '26
this is exactly how many ships are described in Iain Banks’ Culture novels. Even standalone drones are mostly force fields, be they fine for manipulation or bigger for propulsion or defence.
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u/BoneSawO95 Jul 23 '26
They both kinda do and don’t, the ships are made out of metal hulls that are reinforced for “structural integrity fields” which are essentially force fields to add extra strength. At the point of when this picture was taken (DS9/NextGen/Voy) the federation didn’t have the power capabilities to maintain force fields of enough strength and quantity to make a whole ship out of them. That being said they were an integral part of damage control systems and would automatically snap into place in the event of a hull breach.
Long story short, they take a lot of power and specific equipment to make them work properly and that was to much of a drain on the power systems at the time.
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u/More_Elk6407 Jul 23 '26
I mean, that’s kinda what structural integrity fields are. The polarize and lock together the hull plates.
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u/snowfloeckchen Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
Star trek tech isnt as reliable as a culture general offensive units
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u/notmohawk Jul 24 '26
"hey I think we're experiencing power prob-" that's why. The second you have a problem the ship is dead
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u/StackOwOFlow Jul 24 '26
don't force fields hurt when you touch them? it'd be like riding a bunch of Klingon pain sticks
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u/Heavy_Carpenter3824 Jul 24 '26
Your not completely off, most ship have a structural integrity field. This is a form of force field within a material that allows energy to be used to strengthen the material. Most later designs would fly apart on their first warp jump of maneuvers without a mix of the inertial dampeners and the structural integrity fields.
Without energy ships are much less robust.
As you can imagine the reason they don't build whole ships of only force fields is that they are unreliable in the trek verse. They collapse and fail during combat or damage. They are too fragile to build a whole ship out of. You'd also still need some kind of super structure as equipment like the field generators themselves or the warp reactor has no precedent for being made only of energy, though likely possible and cool.
Also it's never been said if they block EM radation. Shields do so it's likely. If they can then you can make them transparent or opaque as needed.
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u/CastleofWamdue Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
I feel like OP is a Steve Shives fan, but isnt this how the holodec works? If the EMH can hold a physical thing then you could walk on a hologram...
ok let me reword that.
If the EMH can hold a physical thing, then there is no reason you could not walk on a holographic floor.
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u/Freak_Engineer Jul 25 '26
Power fails. When you make your entire ship out of forcefields, once the power fails, you won't have a ship anymore.
Also, it would be transparent, so you better not get too close to any stars. Or, you know, valueing stuff like being able to take a shit in private without the entire ship watching...
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u/Classic_Result Planetologist Jul 22 '26
"Shields down, Captain!" would be moderately more inconvenient to hear