>To be fair, the engineering crewmen do wear radsuits in the movies.
>In the TNG era, the fact that emergency forcefields were pretty much
>instantaneous and ubiquitous was used as the justification to save
>all that money omit specialized engineering PPE. Which is an idea
>that got kicked around for the original series—in the episode
>where spacesuits first appeared, the script called for some kind of
>handwave about personal forcefields instead, but the producers decided
>it would require too extreme a suspension of disbelief. Which may
>have been the only time anyone involved in the production of Star
>Trek ever said that. :)

I have to wonder if what changed was FX technology and budget.

It probably wasn't that hard for them to add the shield shimmer effect that would indicate "a shield is here" or "the shield is under stress because something like a phaser is hitting it" to various scenes in post-production in TNG, which meant that when you said "there's a force field" the viewers at home could see the force field, have a sense of its presence and effect.

That sort of stuff was a hell of a lot harder in TOS, when saying "there's a force field" would often mean either "take our word for it, it's there" or additional and potentially tricky work in post.

-Merc
Keep Rat