CLOAKING DEVICES IN THE MIKEYVERSE....

[MikeKozlowski]

It’s always been my feeling that cloaking devices are in the same league as transporters - an unpleasant reality we’ve gotta deal with. And I think I’ve come up with a reasonable place/explanation for them.

On Stardate 1709.2(1), Enterprise NCC-1701 was on routine patrol along the Romulan Neutral Zone when she received a mayday from Earth Outpost 4(2), under attack by a ship or ships of unknown origin. Upon arrival, Enterprise found Outpost 4 destroyed - as well as Outposts 2 and 3, apparently hit so hard and so fast that their crews couldn’t even call for help. Going to investigate, Enterprise discovered that a Romulan vessel (since identified as a CRICKET-class CL(3)) a with a powerful new weapon had taken out the outposts and was apparently trying to get back home - but worse, the ship had an invisibility cloak that rendered it invisible to the naked eye and only detectable to sensors with some difficulty. Enterprise was able to eventually corner and destroy the CRICKET, but was herself fairly seriously damaged and was out of action for almost two months.

Upon hearing the details of the fight, StarFleet went into a state described by one historian as ‘controlled panic’. The Romulan superweapon was bad enough, but as one tactician said, “That’s why the sliders on the shield controls go up to eleven.” It was seen to be slower than light and even slower than photon torpedoes, and Enterprise had shown that it could be shot at to reduce it’s impact strength. The cloaking system however was another matter entirely. First Officer Spock had dutifully recorded every single emanation from the CRICKET, and the StarFleet techs pored over every byte, twenty-four hours a day for months in an effort to find some kind of flaw…and couldn’t find one. StarFleet had been working for decades on cloaking technology but had never been able to get anything to work except some small and ultimately impractical technology demonstrators:

“If we wanted to cloak a WorkBee - for an hour or so - we could do it. Anything else just wasn’t happening.”

On top of all that, the Romulan-Klingon alliance had just become known, and the idea of Klingons with cloaks sent pure terror through Building 1. The decision was therefore quietly made at the highest levels that something drastic was needed…and they had just the ship and the man for the job. Accordingly, on Stardate 5027.3, Enterprise returned to the Neutral Zone, provoking an incident with the Romulans, who arrived in newly arrived Stormbirds (Klingon D7A CBs). What happened next is very unclear and still mostly classified unto the seventh generation, but Enterprise not only got away but did so with a Romulan cloaking device bolted to it.

The cheers which met Enterprise upon her return were short lived. The cloaking device, installed by Enterprise’s chief engineer, had worked just long enough to get Enterprise out of danger and then failed in a spectacular fire which damaged main engineering. StarFleet techs proceeded to tear apart the scorched unit, and were able to get a good grasp of how it was put together, eventually turning out several reverse engineered units collectively nicknamed the Blanket. Unfortunately, almost all the Blankets met the same fate - working for short periods of time (the record was just over four hours) then disintegrating in a spectacular visual display. At this point, the thinking by some of the techs was that the cloaks may well be disposable, one-time use units intended to provide a temporary advantage. That made sense, but it was then pointed out that the Warbird that Enterprise encountered in the Neutral Zone was documented to have been under cloak for as long as three days.

Back to work the techs went, but it was only some months afterwards that one of them had a brainstorm: Was it possible that they were using the wrong power source? That set off a lot of lightbulbs; because it was then remembered that the Romulans used an enclosed singularity to create warp power, not a Cochrane core. Proving this idea took some convincing; the ES system worked but StarFleet engineers had taken it as an article of faith for more than a century that running one at all was dangerous, powering a ship with it was unacceptably dangerous/foolhardy. Eventually, however, the techs convinced StarFleet to assemble a single ES for power purposes only at a remote test site and hook it up to the last remaining Blanket. Power was applied, the switch thrown, and the Blanket worked.

For six days. The plug was only pulled due to overheating, but the point had been made. Later analysis indicated that the Blanket was progressively failing but when it did so it wouldn’t have been as violent as before.

The Admirals and engineers proceeded to bang heads for some time afterwards, trying to decide what to do from there. ES systems could be installed on the Stormbirds and other Klingon designs just to power a cloak, and it was assumed that the upcoming new generation of Romulan ships would have them built in beside their Klingon warp systems. But the Admirals were adamant - no matter what possible tactical advantages there might be to a cloak, the risks of an ES system far outweighed it no matter what promises the engineers might make. In the end, a Federation cloaking device was a dead letter.

(1) This stardate is somewhat fuzzy - 'Balance Of Terror' is one of the few eps that does not mention a stardate in the script. However, 1709.2 does show up in the original 'Next Week On Star Trek' teaser at the end of 'Conscience Of The King'.
(2) StarFleet as a unified entity didn't yet exist at the time of the First Romulan War - the old United Earth Space Agency was lead agency on constructing the outposts, and the name has stuck even though they have long since come under StarFleet.
(3) Romulan ship ID names are a bit fuzzy. C-series IDs date from the First Romulan War and are shown here from https://www.starfleet-museum.org/postwar-romulans.htm:

romulan-lineage.jpg

The names 'Warbird' and 'Bird Of Prey' are used somewhat unevenly, and were never used officially by StarFleet; rather they became popular nicknames.


To Be Continued.....

Mike

[jemhouston]

Didn't see this article coming.

[Poohbah]

I have always thought that if it had been anyone but Scotty wiring the cloaking device into the Enterprise's deflectors, the cloaking device itself would have turned invisible, and that's it.

[Craiglxviii]

Interesting. So a cloak’s a true cloak here then? I’d always preferred the SFB idea that it was a hole in space, it could be observed to exist, but not localised enough for a weapons lock.

And yes, Plasma-R is a nasty beast!

[Johnnie Lyle]

How does HMS BOUNTY’s Klingon cloak and ability to be integrated into Federation power systems as shown by TITAN play into things? Or the Romulan cloak on DEFIANT? At least circa 2285, Klingon ships were using matter/antimatter reactors, given the need for dilithium.

Similarly, where does the PEGASUS incident fit into this? I assume that the phased cloak both Federation and Romulan scientists were working on in the 2350s-2360s works differently?

[Johnnie Lyle]

Interesting. So a cloak’s a true cloak here then? I’d always preferred the SFB idea that it was a hole in space, it could be observed to exist, but not localised enough for a weapons lock.

And yes, Plasma-R is a nasty beast!

Well, it can be detected with impulse tracking torpedoes, and of course tachyon grids.

[Poohbah]

Interesting. So a cloak’s a true cloak here then? I’d always preferred the SFB idea that it was a hole in space, it could be observed to exist, but not localised enough for a weapons lock.

And yes, Plasma-R is a nasty beast!

The Gorn Anchor: "I fire a hundred pointssss of plassssma. You die."

[Craiglxviii]

Interesting. So a cloak’s a true cloak here then? I’d always preferred the SFB idea that it was a hole in space, it could be observed to exist, but not localised enough for a weapons lock.

And yes, Plasma-R is a nasty beast!

Well, it can be detected with impulse tracking torpedoes, and of course tachyon grids.

In SFB the cloaking device’s primary advantage was to deny a weapons lock. You’d know where the cloaked ship was (in-game, which hex; in real life, to within 5,000km). The idea was that your own sensors would be adequate to pick up the tiny perturbations of energy, unshielded E-M emissions, the odd occluded star or asteroid, enough to say “it’s over that way” but not enough to fire/ launch weapons at it.

However, adequate to throw a transporter bomb in front of it… the explosion of which would illuminate the cloaked ship long enough to get a few shots off.

[Craiglxviii]

Interesting. So a cloak’s a true cloak here then? I’d always preferred the SFB idea that it was a hole in space, it could be observed to exist, but not localised enough for a weapons lock.

And yes, Plasma-R is a nasty beast!

The Gorn Anchor: "I fire a hundred pointssss of plassssma. You die."

Gorn ships were nasty little buggers. Even those single disc destroyers.

Not as nasty as the ISC though!

[Johnnie Lyle]

Interesting. So a cloak’s a true cloak here then? I’d always preferred the SFB idea that it was a hole in space, it could be observed to exist, but not localised enough for a weapons lock.

And yes, Plasma-R is a nasty beast!

Well, it can be detected with impulse tracking torpedoes, and of course tachyon grids.

In SFB the cloaking device’s primary advantage was to deny a weapons lock. You’d know where the cloaked ship was (in-game, which hex; in real life, to within 5,000km). The idea was that your own sensors would be adequate to pick up the tiny perturbations of energy, unshielded E-M emissions, the odd occluded star or asteroid, enough to say “it’s over that way” but not enough to fire/ launch weapons at it.

However, adequate to throw a transporter bomb in front of it… the explosion of which would illuminate the cloaked ship long enough to get a few shots off.

Which is what we saw during both the Romulan incursion into Federation space in 2266 and the Tin Man incident of 2366: the cloak was detectable, especially if there were either significant power demands and/or high-speed transits. Similarly, the bird of prey prototype destroyed during the Cartwright-Chang conspiracy was not able to be targeted, despite the flaming datum of firing torpedoes and Chang transmitting on an open channel.

Conversely, blind-firing phasers down their course also worked.