That's not quite true, the defiant has some sort of ablative armor coating or layer. There's also the polarized hull plating from the NX, which while not nearly as good as shields, could possibly have been used as an emergency system to buy a ship under fire a little bit more time.
Uh...the GCS does have an ablative hull.
TNG TM
The outermost hull layer is composed of a 1.6 cm sheet
of AGP ablative ceramic fabric chemically bonded onto a
substrate of 0.15 cm tritanium foil.
I mean, it's like half an inch thick, but they do have it.
The polarized hull plating was also a pre-runner to structural integrity field. And the two systems may not be compatible with each other. In fact, we can't even be sure that the hulls that the modern UFP uses is compatible with that system.
Yes?
I get a lot of folks here thinks Trek ships are poorly designed, but it's really telling in setting that NOBODY seriously up-armors ships. Not the Klingons, not the Romulans, not the Cardassians, not the Dominion... NOBODY does it. They all similarly depend on the combination of Shields+SFI just like the Federation does.
Actually, I think the BoP user's guide/handbook suggested that it had pretty thick armor. But we're not talking anything exceptionally thick.
This fundamentally means that within setting there must be some logical reason nobody does it. It's not been explicitly stated in canon, but I can think of a few logical reasons off the top of my head.
1. The tradeoff to acceleration and maneuverability isn't worth it.
It may be that more hits are evades by evasive maneuvers (which we see called for ALL THE TIME in Trek) and that adding armor to the ships would make it so that those maneuvers are dramatically less effective due to the Impulse drive and maneuvering thrusters having to accelerate so much more mass (as any serious amounts of armor on the ships is going to add considerable mass, given that you generally need fairly exotic high density materials to effectively armor against Trek weapons).
This is actually probably the crux of the issue. Realistically, some of the best armor you're gonna find around is not going to be made of steel or titanium--it's going to be graphite. Because graphite offers a strong balance between mass and protection. And when you have a spaceship (a real one), you need to worry about your mass cost. In most designs, you'll find that there is going to be a trade-off between mass cost and protection. There are drawbacks no matter what you do.
In regards to armor, even with the absurd--underline, absurd amount of heat resistance that Trek ships can take, you simply cannot produce a material that is going to laugh off a large-scale nuclear detonation at point-blank range. You'd basically need a ship made out of neutronium for that to be the case. You are better off with a lighter ship that can get that extra 100 meter distance from a nuclear/antimatter detonation than you are slapping a shitload of armor and taking a direct hit.
2. The materials needed are prohibitively expensive for large scale deployment.
As noted above, armor for Trek ships tends to be required to be made of highly unusual materials for it to be effective against Trek weapon systems. Think things like Neutronium and other exotic matter. These are things not easily replicated (as we know exotic materials often have difficulty being replicated) and thus likely take considerable investment in. This means that for large scale production lines like the Galaxy class it simply may be to cost prohibitive to manufacture the amounts needed.
Cost would also come in added mass for long-range deployment.
3. They do not have effective armor materials at the time.
I'll grant this is a variant of the point 2, just coming at it from a different angle. It may well be that they simply do not have effective armor technologies that work against common weapons technology at the time, and so it's kinda pointless. This seems weird? Consider most of the 18th to 20th century re: armor for infantry, it wasn't until the late 20th century that we developed materials that were effective against the weapons in common use, Trek might be in a similar situation.
That is the most probable case.
Trek tends to have two type of torpedoes; those that do large damage even from a distance (ie, around max yield) and those that tend to be direct hits, but tend to just blow out small holes, which means that it was probably around a few kilotons. There is simply no material that you can make that can withstand these sort of explosions at point-blank range. Your ship will be vaporized (to some degree). I don't care if it's made out of fucking lead. And what's more, you can't armor everything. You can't armor sensors. Not all the time. Not without blinding yourselves. Or your damn exhaust ports.
It won't mean shit if your armor can tank a dozen torpedoes if the first one takes out your entire sensor network. Because now you're just a blind motherfucker stumbling around.
Torpedoes are missiles, and they can be shot down, Voyager did it.
Voyager fired at its own torpedo, whose path and trajectory they knew. They would have also known of any sort of weak point in the armor (and said weak point is probably going to be on the rear, where most enemy fire is not going to hit it) and if it were shielded, they would know the shield frequency and hence be able to bypass it.
That scene was also completely nonsensical, as I've pointed out.
Nor does the ability for torpedoes modified for a particularly mission to withstand being fired into a sun (for a moment anyway) mean that therefor all torpedoes are capable of withstanding fire from other weapons,
That's a good point, but you don't need it to resist fire from all other weapons. Let's go back to my example of ship weapons. The GCS's secondary phaser emitters, which are obviously for smaller targets. 8 of the 12 arrays on the GCS don't surpass 51 MW. And half of those are at around 20 MWs. Even with the UFP's NDF phaser effects--that may not be enough firepower to destroy a torpedo. And if the torpedo is small enough and moves erratically enough, it's going to be really difficult to hit the target.
Especially because most torpedoes, being matter/antimatter warheads, don't tend to make contact detonations. Rather they are supposed to get close and detonate, causing a massive explosion that does damage to wide areas of the ship. Direct hits from full scale warheads are NOT common. And you do NOT survive. See Q Who and how well the Enterprise was doing getting backwash from its own torpedoes. It got to the point where firing any torpedoes at the approaching Borg Cube would have done more damage to them than to the enemy.
or even just a counter-missile being fired at them.
Interceptor missiles are really hard to get right. And that again asks if it's worth the cost to carry them.
If they were, why not just use torpedos to intercept incoming weapon fire, letting hostile phaser beams bounce off it's invulnerable shielding?
Or maybe it's just that the small arrays that might be used for that sort of thing (instead of being fired at the enemy firing the torpedoes) are just not capable of overpowering the armor before they impact? And even if you detonate the torpedo, so what? You still breach the matter/antimatter containment or the torpedo is programed to detonate on its own. And unless you get enough distance from that, it really doesn't matter what you do.
Replacing a starship that's been blown to atoms by a torpedo salvo is a much greater waste of time, space, and energy, not to mention lives.
A second possibility would be that while the Husnock bombarded the colony at first, they later followed up with a ground assault to finish off survivors.
Also, you didn't have 4 examples. You had one, and it was an attack on the heart of the federation itself, which was able to scramble all of five ships to defend itself. That's not a good basis for a claim that every colony (or every larger colony) should have like a dozen or so fighters on hand to defend itself.
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