Talk:Ablative armor

First starfleet vessel?
First of all, there's no real indication that the Defiant was the first Starfleet vessel to be equipped with ablative armour. She certainly did not arrive at DS9 with it originally. Also, where in First Contact does anything suggest that ablative armour was impervious against the Borg's cutting beam? The only on screen hit the Defiant took was a tractor beam that ripped off part of the starboard nacelle plating, IIRC, and the Borg had already beaten her up quite thuroughly by that point. Ablative armour has been shown not to work as advertised before, as it never seemed to work against the Dominion's polaron weapons. Furthermore, the assumption that ablative armour was so classified that even Starfleet Operations did not know which vessels had it contradicts on screen evidence. Captain Benteen accused Sisko of neglicting to inform Starfleet that he had equipped the Defiant with ablative armour, to which Sisko responded that he must have forgotten; there was no shock that he had access to the technology itself. This means that Sisko had access to both the technical knowledge and facilities to armour the Defiant at DS9, which does not at all support the idea that ablative armour and its deployment were such secrets that even Starfleet Operations was left out of the loop.


 * I have to agree. First of all there's no onscreen evidence ablative armor was even developed to fight the Borg. The only direct mention of the Borg in the entire DS9 series is in when Sisko first introduces the USS Defiant (2370) and mentions that the ship was developed to "counter the Borg threat"(quote may not be exact). And yes I know that the Borg are eluded to a few other times in the series, but they are only directly mentioned once.


 * Also, though I concede that ablative armor was most likely relatively new when it was first added to the Defiant, there is absolutely zero on screen evidence that it was particularly secret. I mean we can assume that Starfleet probably kept a pretty tight lid on the technology itself (at least from apposing powers), but there's no evidence it was kept any more secret then say Starfleet photon torpedo or even Starfleet warp technology. In the Captain of the USS Lakota doesn't say "we keep firing on the Defiant and they are only taking a small amount of damage", no she says "someone equipped the Defiant with ablative armor and neglected to inform Starfleet Operations". She wasn't shocked that ablative armor existed; she was shocked that Starfleet Operations didn't know anything about the Defiant being equipped with it. And if you remember, O'brien and Dax were just as surprised that the Lokota had upgraded its "phasers", they just didn't mention the Starfleet Operations part.


 * Bottom line Ablative armor is like quantum torpedoes yea they are supposed to be more powerful then photon torpedoes, but do really think you'll ever hear someone say "dam its a good thing we had quantum and not photo torpedoes or we would have really been in trouble."


 * In general, I think Memory Alpha is beginning to suffer from to much opinion and guesses about the nature of things and not enough references to support what is being written. One person's guess about what's going on shouldn't be in the main body of articles quoted as fact.--Illwill 03:26, 28 April 2006 (UTC)