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Comment by kennethrc | Hacker News Reader

Apropos of absolutely nothing, but IIRC a "Star Trek" movie where a screenshot of one of the displays on some ship or another had the Shields Frequency up which allowed the enemy to match it and disable it, and back in the 80s(?) when this came out I remember thinking "237GHz" (or something like that) was an insanely high frequency and doubted it could ever be reached with any degree of stability. Physics: HMB

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I thought it might be Generations, but that was 257.4 MHz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A9IZHWz45Q&t=20s

That's the scene. Says it's from 1994.

After that, I'm sure the Owner's Manual that comes with your new Enterprise-class Starship now has a "DO NOT DISPLAY YOUR SHIELD FREQUENCY" in the "Warnings" section

I mean I get that series like Star Trek rely on technobabble and suspension of disbelief, but surely an enemy can just... detect the frequency, or rapidly adjust their own like tuning in until it matches?

That would work, but modern starships use a rotating phased tachyon field to prevent that.

With an inversed polarity!

And fitted with six hydrocoptic marzlevanes to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft to effectively prevent side fumbling.

go home, Scotty, you are drunk!

For those who have never had the oportunity to learn of the marvels of the Turbo Encabulator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag

Yes. It happens every third episode.

To be fair, we don't know if Starfleet ever figured out how the Klingons bypassed the shield. Nor do we know if they ever discovered someone installed a rootkit on Geordie's visor.

Also, given Starfleet's continued examples of not learning their lessons from previous encounters, I suspect all ships still display the shield frequency in big, bold font. Possibly even visible from the viewscreen of the bridge on one of the rear consoles.

That's the shield modulation frequency though, so the actual frequency of whatever field the shield consist of is unknown. It's also entirely possible the numeric strings displayed in the bottom part of the image constitute the secret key to a pseudorandom binary sequence that is overlaid onto the useful shield signal, and that's what the Klingon actually use to penetrate them.

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