Structural Integrity

In order to counteract the massive stresses placed on the starship at warp, the whole hull is covered with a structural integrity force field. If this field fails then the ship would be torn apart as soon as it accelerated to high impulse or warp speeds. This is demonstrated on Voyagers “Year of Hell” episode were Voyager leaps to warp with the structural integrity field down and hull plates are seen being ripped off the ship.

Each outer hull section has a Structural Integrity Field Generator. Although they can be individually damaged, the remaining sections can transfer power to assist damaged section. Therefore the whole system is usually treated as one.

For example: If a ship has 20 hull sections and one of them was damaged at 50%, then Structural Integrity would be down to 97.5%. (19 sections at 100% and 1 section at 50%).

Each individual section can be individually controlled if required.

Field strength is measured in percentages with normal operation at 100%. Reducing the structural integrity field below 90% in any area of the ship will risk increased damage in that area during high velocities or combat.

Field strength can be increased up to 200% which will help to protect them from damage (from weapons fire) but will draw significantly more power and require more maintenance.

Increasing the structural integrity field by more than 100% will overload the circuits and may cause small amounts of damage to the health of the structural integrity field which will need to be repaired. The chance for damage is calculated every second the field is overloaded. The formula used every second is:

Percentage chance that the system will lose 1% health = (Field Strength – 100) * 0.01

So a field at 200% has a 1% chance per second that it will lose 1% health on that field generator.

This means that the structural integrity can be boosted significantly, but only for limited lengths of time.

Power Requirements

The structural integrity fields draw power based upon their field strengths.

The power draw for each generator is Percentage Output * 0.073 Megawatts of power.

So a 100% health generator with an output of 100% would draw 7.3 Megawatts of power. Multiply this by 40 generators and the whole structural integrity field draws 292 Megawatts of power. This makes the structural integrity field one of the largest power users on larger ships.

Dev Notes

As with the ships other systems, the structural integrity fields each have a health rating (starting at 100%). As this is damaged, then the efficiency of the field reduces at the same rate. So a field with 75% health and 100% output would only be producing a structural integrity field strength of 75%. The field would need to be boosted to 133% output (0.75 * 1.33 = 1.00) to retain 100% structural integrity.

If the ship does attempt to use high impulse or warp with a below strength structural integrity field then each second every system in the affected area will take damage as defined in the table below.

 So at 0.25 light speed (full impulse), every second each of the ships systems in an area with only 50% structural integrity field has (0.25 * 10) – (2.5 * 50/100) = 2.5 – 1.25 = 1.25% chance of suffering a failure.

 At Warp 6, the same area has (6 * 10) – (100 * 50/100) = 60 – 50 = 10% chance of failure for each system per second – which would result in catastrophic damage within a few seconds. Slower warp speeds however would be okay due to the reduced stress on the ship from the warp bubble.

However, if the structural integrity field failed in any area, then even warp 1 would produce a 10% chance per second per system of damage.