Much was made of cloaked ships being a threat but if you look at the premise more closely you will see that cloaked ships would be easy to detect,all space is full of gas atoms/molecules/hydrogen atoms/molecules at a density of about 1 particle per 1 cubic cm,hence any cloaked ship moving through such a gas at any speed above a snails will interact with these gas particles and alter their speed direction and energy and as we already have single photon detectors we would easily be able to see a ship in the same way as a gas bubble moving through a liquid as in a fizzy drinks bottle,also any course alteration,speed alteration would entail the use of hot gas expulsion again visiable through infra red detectors and of course impulse engine use would be a dead giveaway as in ST6 and I do want to you to realize i wrote this in a single continous sentence as a single inspired sentance.
Cloaked Ships
- Thread starter STARTREK11
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There's no telling that course changes in Trek would have to be performed by rockets that spit out exhaust. Also, there's little to say that interstellar gas in Trek would behave nicely enough to be "calm" when there are no cloakships present and "turbulent" only in their presence. That universe is rife with all sorts of anomalies; the scanning ship herself would probably stir up things; and as far as we know, the cloak can mask the passage of the ship through (thin) matter just as easily as she can mask the presence of the ship in a "radiation medium". Whatever she bumps into, she juggles around her hull with that fancy forcefield whachamacallit, releasing it behind her seemingly undisturbed.
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Forbin said:
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon!
Haha quality!
All correct. The Picard Mauever can be thwarted in exactly that way, watching the displacement of interstellar gas as a ship moves through it at high speeds. Kirk's sensors were still able to track the Romulan ship even while it was invisible, and was able to destroy Chang's ship by homing in on the exhaust from its engines. Cloaked ships really only have the advantage of being invisible to active sensors, but still give away some signs of a ship being there, just like any stealth system.
That's the funny thing about stealth: it's not enough just to be hard to spot, a commander has to be smart enough to REMAIN hidden despite his enemy's best efforts to find him. This means doing all sorts of things to mask your own engine emissions, avoid sudden movements that might give you away, avoid environmental factors (like flying between your target and a star) that would blow your cover, avoiding systems the enemy is using to unmask you. Cloaking devices may be tricky to build, but USING them effectively is even trickier. A clever Starfleet captain can think of all kinds of ways to beat them, and an even cleverer Romulan can out-think his Starfleet counterpart.
As always, the man with the best brains comes out on top.
3D Master
Rear Admiral
Uh, the whole point of the cloak, is that it actually takes all these particles and moves it around the ship and puts them back where they should be as if it wasn't there.
An Impulse engine gives off no exhaust. No doubt, after VI, the Klingons run around with engines that too don't give off any exhaust.
The cloak is no doubt an imperfect device: military hardware usually cannot afford to be laboratory-perfect, even if the "theory of cloaking" allowed for complete masking of all emissions and complete rerouting of all incoming signals such as sensor beams, incidental lighting or bombardment by lightweight particles.
Like Newtype and 3DMaster say, the device as seen in use is good enough for its purpose, provided that the correct tactics are used - but can be defeated if the tactics are wrong, even though the mechanisms themselves are extremely seldom shown to malfunction or underperform to the effect of partial let alone total exposure.
No doubt a cloakship wants to allow some incoming and outgoing emissions, since those are necessary for seeing around. But a useful cloak will be able to let those "information flows" in through very hard-to-spot "windows" (spectral ranges, opportune moments, odd directions etc). And a clever captain will only use his sensors when absolutely necessary; a good computer should be able to interpolate a view of the universe even if the sensors sample the surroundings at ten-second intervals on the average (and irregular intervals at that).
The known vulnerabilities of cloaks have been as follows:
1) The Romulan prototype in "Balance of Terror" was power-hungry, at least when used in connection with that plasma weapon, and thus couldn't be used all the time.
2) Even though giving perfect optical invisibility, said device didn't mask the energy signatures of active maneuvering from Spock's instruments.
3) When moving through a very dense medium, said device failed to mask the resulting compression wave or wake.
Later cloaks do not seem to suffer from any of the above limitations. The following shortcomings are seen in their stead:
4) At point-blank ranges, (some?) Klingon cloakships emit neutrinos that can be detected if one knows where to look (but this is said to be useless in battle).
5) A 2290s-vintage Klingon BoP may leave an impulse exhaust trail, at least when maneuvering carelessly and arrogantly.
Even when a good skipper renders the above two points moot by not getting too close to the enemy, and not leaving a simple, direct impulse trail (or when a clever engineer devises technologies that don't emit neutrinos or leave trails), there are known countermeasures:
6) Tachyons apparently cannot be rerouted as easily as photons or standard sensor beams, so tachyon beams can be used as "tripwires". Tactically it may be very difficult to ensure that the cloaked enemy flies between your two tachyon devices, though.
7) Antiproton beams fired at a cloak also seem to create some sort of a return signal that reveals the cloakship (perhaps the tiny antimatter explosions against the hull cannot be efficiently masked?). But these are only useful at extreme point-blank range, mere ship-lengths away from the looks of it.
Nondescript Dominion sensor tech can detect cloaks across whole sectors, dozens of lightyears away. These sensors only seem to exist in huge planetside mounts, though, and apparently cannot be fitted even on the huge Dominion battleships.
9) Finally, one can always fire blindly, since phaser beams and photon torpedo explosions work just as fine as antiproton beams in giving a "return signal"!
The list of stealth measures in aviation or submarine technology would look very similar, with some "old and solved" problems, some "persisting" ones, and some countermeasures that are ages-old plus some that are hypermodern and often needlessly complicated.
Timo Saloniemi
Like Newtype and 3DMaster say, the device as seen in use is good enough for its purpose, provided that the correct tactics are used - but can be defeated if the tactics are wrong, even though the mechanisms themselves are extremely seldom shown to malfunction or underperform to the effect of partial let alone total exposure.
No doubt a cloakship wants to allow some incoming and outgoing emissions, since those are necessary for seeing around. But a useful cloak will be able to let those "information flows" in through very hard-to-spot "windows" (spectral ranges, opportune moments, odd directions etc). And a clever captain will only use his sensors when absolutely necessary; a good computer should be able to interpolate a view of the universe even if the sensors sample the surroundings at ten-second intervals on the average (and irregular intervals at that).
The known vulnerabilities of cloaks have been as follows:
1) The Romulan prototype in "Balance of Terror" was power-hungry, at least when used in connection with that plasma weapon, and thus couldn't be used all the time.
2) Even though giving perfect optical invisibility, said device didn't mask the energy signatures of active maneuvering from Spock's instruments.
3) When moving through a very dense medium, said device failed to mask the resulting compression wave or wake.
Later cloaks do not seem to suffer from any of the above limitations. The following shortcomings are seen in their stead:
4) At point-blank ranges, (some?) Klingon cloakships emit neutrinos that can be detected if one knows where to look (but this is said to be useless in battle).
5) A 2290s-vintage Klingon BoP may leave an impulse exhaust trail, at least when maneuvering carelessly and arrogantly.
Even when a good skipper renders the above two points moot by not getting too close to the enemy, and not leaving a simple, direct impulse trail (or when a clever engineer devises technologies that don't emit neutrinos or leave trails), there are known countermeasures:
6) Tachyons apparently cannot be rerouted as easily as photons or standard sensor beams, so tachyon beams can be used as "tripwires". Tactically it may be very difficult to ensure that the cloaked enemy flies between your two tachyon devices, though.
7) Antiproton beams fired at a cloak also seem to create some sort of a return signal that reveals the cloakship (perhaps the tiny antimatter explosions against the hull cannot be efficiently masked?). But these are only useful at extreme point-blank range, mere ship-lengths away from the looks of it.
Nondescript Dominion sensor tech can detect cloaks across whole sectors, dozens of lightyears away. These sensors only seem to exist in huge planetside mounts, though, and apparently cannot be fitted even on the huge Dominion battleships.9) Finally, one can always fire blindly, since phaser beams and photon torpedo explosions work just as fine as antiproton beams in giving a "return signal"!
The list of stealth measures in aviation or submarine technology would look very similar, with some "old and solved" problems, some "persisting" ones, and some countermeasures that are ages-old plus some that are hypermodern and often needlessly complicated.
Timo Saloniemi
^ theoretically, it should; in some situations it should look like a distortion, like the Predator's cloak or the thermoptic camouflage from Ghost in the Shell. You should only be able to see it when it's moving against the background (as Enterprise did in Balance of Terror).
Of course, in TVH, you can literally run into it and bounce off the hull without actually seeing it. THAT seems more than a little far fetched to me.
Of course, in TVH, you can literally run into it and bounce off the hull without actually seeing it. THAT seems more than a little far fetched to me.
Well, the Mk I Eyeball might well be the easiest known sensor to fool. And Scotty could well have set the cloak on "perfect visual masking" mode while on the surface, because he wasn't exactly worried about antiproton beams or starship scanners, or even simple radar; it's quite possible that the cloak can be tuned to be better at one area by allowing for imperfections in other areas.
Timo Saloniemi
Yes,you are correct.
Space is very cold as Kahn said and the temperature is about 3 kelvins which means hydrogen gas particles moves very slowly and any ship traveling would change the speed/energy of said hydrogen gas such that e2-e1=1/2 m(v2-v1) after bouncing of it.
The sensors on the vessal would be able to spot this instantly.At present we have devices which can spot single atom energy changes.
I was always surprised why Pickard/Kirk did not extrapolate from last known position and fire wide beam phasers when a ship cloaked.Any course alteration would mean the use of directional thrusters again giving lock-on.
In ST6 Chang was reciting Shakespeare and all Kirk had to do was track/lock on to his voice signal but failed to do so.
Nigh Vision goggles can see in total darkness using long wavelengh radiation given of objects as blackbody radiation.
I've removed the Leave Brittany alone videos. Its been posted other places, so it really doesn't need to be posted in the middle of this thread 
But can we detect atom energy changes from several kilometers away? from dozens of kilometers away? how about thousands?
The last known position doesn't help at all unless you also know the speed and direction of the ship. And thrusters don't seem to give away the ship's locations (not in later trek, at least).
There seems to be a way in trek to mask the origin of a signal when it suites the plot (like Shinzon's hologram at the end of NEM). I guess we can assume Chang bounced it off the atmosphere of Kitomer or something...
I think we can assume the clock blocks out all wavelengths, otherwise it would be worthless.
I've always assumed the impulse trail in TUC was unique to Chang's prototype, and was the price of making the ship able to fire weapons while cloaked. It could attack, but the engine emissions were more detectable than a normal BOP.
I could easily be wrong of course, but it seems like if this was a common weakness then the BOP wouldn't be a huge threat. It would also explain why the idea wasn't attempted again after the conspiracy failed.
I could easily be wrong of course, but it seems like if this was a common weakness then the BOP wouldn't be a huge threat. It would also explain why the idea wasn't attempted again after the conspiracy failed.
3D Master
Rear Admiral
Uh, no, they don't need directional thrusters, the stuff that allows them maneuver doesn't have thrusters. They fly around coasting like a surfer on energy fields.
And I've already said, that the cloaking device also moves particles and even temporarily speeds up light to make it as if it disturbed nothing. Motion sensors could still detect a cloaked ship in Balance of Terror; by The Enterprise Incident, that weakness was removed - and that was the reason Starfleet needed a working device to try and find a weakness to detect it; and possibly build one themselves.
Alidar Jarok said:
I've removed the Leave Brittany alone videos. Its been posted other places, so it really doesn't need to be posted in the middle of this thread
So in other words you have placed a cloack around the Birttany, thus making them undetectable in this thread.
They alwys said they used thrusters in course corrections/adjustments and the cloak would not be able to make colliding particles behave differently after it had bounced off and gained energy and an increase in temperature making it visable to an IR detector.
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