Iain: <Plasma bolts presumably consist of magnetically confined plasma. Thus, a suitably configured electromagnetic field should shield the ship from all -- or nearly all -- of the plasma bolt. Such shileds could be defeated either by sufficiently powerful plasm bolts, or by overloading the shield mechanism with repeated attacks.>

My thoughts exactly. That's most probably what the Federation intended, when sent 20 ships after Liberator in "Hostage".

<The neutron blasters, firing a neutral beam, would pass straight through these shields, no problem. Thus you can fire out while the shields are operating. Similarly, photon beams would be unaffected by the shields.>

I wonder do we need one type of shields to protect a ship, or one for each kind of weapons and one - for the solid particles, floating in space.

<<It is possible, that the shields work the same way - they allow the ship's lasers (with a particular frequency) to fire *out*, but stop everything else (with any other frequency) from penetrating *in*. That could be a reason why every time Vila needed to "clear blasters for firing" manually - for security reasons the "home" frequency has to be changed often.>> <But then you wouldn't be able to see out.>

Why not? The frequency of the visible light presumably is different from the frequencies of the weapon's beams. Otherwise you would be able to shot people with a camp torch.

Hellen == "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -- Jules de Gautier _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.