Quote Originally Posted by MrFluffyWolf View Post
I'm almost 100% positive we poked a tiny hole only big enough for the Enterprise to get through. We did not destroy the entire barrier around Azys Lla with a tiny needle. It's even arguable that the barrier would have closed itself back up behind us. I really don't see any reason to believe the ram destroyed the entire barrier.
There's also the fact that they showed up immediately which implies they were already there. It's not like a ship that huge was gonna sneak up on us.
Think of it like the energy shields on the Elites or Spartans in Halo. You shoot one tiny area of the shield, but the only thing that matters is how powerful the thing you hit it with is, in order to disable the whole.

Basically it's an overload principle. When something contacts the shield, the generator for the shield has to put out more power. Anything with enough force causes an overload, which stops the whole system.

I will grant that the way they chose to portray it was pretty poor. I had a similar feeling of, "Huh? How?" on my LP replay with that scene. It's like Moose says though, that little shockwave that ripples outwards from where we broke the shield is intended to show that we removed the whole barrier. If you watch it frame by frame though, you can see that it's not really a ripple, it's every hexagonal energy layer breaking apart in a rapid upheaval.