Darths and Droids V: Thread IV Was Eaten By Dogs

[Peelee]

Huh. Wouldn't the natural conclusion be that the, er, shield generator on Endor that went down was the shield generator, and the reason it's announced that the shields are down immediately after the dome blows up is that the dome wouldn't have blown up if the shields weren't down?

No, that wouldn't make any sense. General Calrissian gave the order for all ships to pull up, as he realized the shield was still up. Logically, the only reason to pull up is if they would be destroyed trying to pass through the shield (or the rebels could just go straight for the Death Star openings to fly towards the core). The star destroyers, including the SSD Executor, are all behind the Rebel fleet, and thus outside the area shielded by the generator on Endor. They can only be defended by their own shields, not the planetary shield projected from Endor.

Your last part is probably right, the dome was blown up likely to demonstrate that the ship's shields were down, but the explosion followed by the dialogue lead to the belief that the domes were the (ship's) shield generators. Which was later made true.

Just looking at what's here and here, I think the idea that was settled on was that it is a sensor globe that also generates a small shield. Basically, it would have protected the sensors and the bridge area only. So the main shield generator for the entire ship must have already been down (or maybe it didn't cover the bridge) and now the bridge lost its shield. The one link contains the quote, "Sir, we've lost our bridge deflector shield," but I don't know if that is a change to the dialogue or not.

Ayep. Haven't looked at any of the schematic or cutaway books in years, though, so they may have changed the belly bubble to something else entirely and gone ahead with the domes for all shielding, just each dome doing different parts of the ship. I dunno.