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star trek - Are the shields and hull of the USS Enterprise-D capable of withstanding a direct nuclear strike?


I'm watching the season two episode of TOS "Patterns of Force" where a nuclear missile is on an intercept course with the Enterprise, but is destroyed by the ship's weapons. This got me thinking as to whether or not the Enterprise-D would be able to take a nuclear missile. In the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons and humans basically throw nuclear missiles at each other constantly and the ships remain relatively unscathed. Would this be the case with the Enterprise-D?



Answer



They would survive with very little damage. Especially if the sheilds were up, but they could probably take it even without that.


Though I'm having trouble finding the numbers on how much force ship phasers deliver, a single Photon Torpedo delivers an explosive force of 690 Gigatons.



By comparison, the Tsar Bomba only manages 50 Megatons (Or .05 Gigatons). With shields up, the nuclear device would probably not even shake the ship.


With shields down, damage would be mitigated by the structural integrity field, which is an always-on field around the ship designed to protect it from background radiation in space and would definitely protect it from nuclear radiation. Given that it regulary protects the ship from warp-factor stress as well, it's unlikely that the nuclear blast would even break the field.


Finally, if any of the nuclear blast DID cause some damage to the hull, there are emergency force fields that can be activated all throughout the inside of the ship that would offer the same protection as the structural integrity field, shielding the rest of the ship from any harmful effects caused by the breach.


In short, a nuclear missile isn't even in the same scale category of destructive force as a Photon Torpedo. It would be like trying to blow open a tank with a firecracker.


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