yeah go ahead and downvote me because its not perl but the geek factor is +10

Jeff,

Of course the deflector dish is critical to warp travel: when traveling faster than light, the graviton beam cannot be projected forward. This is the ultimate problem of out-driving your headlights. Thus only a graviton field integrated onto the deflector shield can protect against stray matter in the path.

I always found it practical to evaluate the projected path prior to entering warp speed, just to check for debris on the road. This is impractical if you are planning to travel significant distances, as the time required to check ahead increases the travel time out to light speed ... thus I preferred to only use warp drive when far from the boundaries of the Higgs boson.

However, if sufficient power can be spared for a really high graviton shield layer on the deflector, small pieces of stray matter are converted instantly to energy. We used this technique when approaching Star system 6531-2, and stored all the extra energy captured in the photon torpedo banks. However, we recommended in the captain's log notation after circling 6531-1 that this procedure not be used prior to sampling with the tachyon pulse for stray anti-matter, as this creates small black holes in the deflector, and large pulses of inverse tachyon beam are required to cut these off the shield.

The graviton beam must not be cut off, or the ship come out of warp, while the hole is there, as you risk having the entire ship eaten. We noticed this, along with the severe steering problem, while dealing with the first anti-matter induced hole, when we attempted to come out of warp. As we slowed, large segments of the deflector were being sucked into the hole, and only some quick calculations by Data prevented disaster. Fortunately the photon banks were fully charged; even then it took a vote of the crew to convince the captain to actually fire photon torpedoes at our own shield... but then traveling is always an educational, broadening experience.

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” George Orwell

Fred W Gerdes, PE