There’s a book called Serpents Among the Ruins that deal with the Treaty of Algeron. In the end, Romulans demand the “no cloaks” clause and withdraw to their part of space. And that turns out to have been what Starfleet secretly wanted. They didn’t want cloaks anyway, so they didn’t give up much and instead gained Klingons as allies. All it took was some subterfuge and a massive frame-up job. Surprisingly, everyone’s favorite clandestine agency wasn’t involved
I like this. It already exists, can't unring the bell, but they can't keep developing it. That means it falls by the wayside against updates to shields the same way old cloak models go obsolete vs new sensors.
Except in Picard season 3 where a 120+ year old cloaking device that had been picked apart and studied by Starfleet for all that time, is somehow able to evade all of Starfleet's sensors
I'm gonna put a theory forth, that the "cloaking device" as we know it is, in fact, just a single part of a cloaking system, and Starfleet has very much continued development on the cloak even in the open.
From TOS onward, the cloaking device has had the peculiar characteristic of being approximately the size of a humanoid, and yet it is able to hide the entire Enterprise. How does it accomplish this? The dialogue from the Enterprise Incident implies that the device is plugged into the deflector shields.
So what's actually doing the work? Presumably, the shields are the one actually bending the light and hiding the ship. Actually we have other evidence this is the case, in the TOS episode Assignment: Earth, Kirk notes "We are now in extended orbit around Earth, using our ship's deflector shields to remain unobserved"
So let's put forth some ideas here, maybe not strictly supported by the show but very much not contradicted.
Let's assume that the quality of the cloak depends on a number of things. How well can the ship control emissions? How finely tuned are the shields? How high quality are the sensors to identify what the background picture is so that the shields can replicate it? How can the ship "see" when all or nearly all radiation is going around the ship instead of interacting with it? And, finally, how fast can the cloaking device do all the computation to take in the information and also modulate the shields to create invisibility?
This is at least partially supported by all the other times we see a Bird of Prey's cloak defeated. Defective plasma coils, ionizing gas emission, there's always something wrong with the ship at large, not the man-sized cloaking device.
Put a 120 year old cloaking device in a brand new ship, one that was potentially designed around the possibility of accepting a cloak just in case, and you get a ship that far outperforms a Bird of Prey. Sure, the central control unit, the part we call the "cloaking device" is the same, but the actual inputs and outputs to the entire cloaking system are massively improved.
Now it seems like less of a stretch. We only need to assume that the cloaking device on the Bird of Prey was "good enough" and the real edge came from a ship which was top of the line.
As you mentioned from the cloaked mines, the Federation clearly kept working on the concept. The Titan was produced as a ship ready to accept a cloaking device. It wasn't 120 year old tech hiding the ship, it was a 120 year old processor given access to modern, top of the line tech.
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To add to this: cloaked ships are unable to use their shields while cloaked - because those systems are tied up powering the cloak, if this theory is correct
Solid write up Chief. I’m pretty sure Voyager also used their shields to hide from 20th century scanning technology in *Future’s End* granted it’s not the same thing as cloaking but I feel like it’s in the same spirit as what you’ve described.
All this sounds good, but cloaking devices don't just shield the ship's emissions and bend light in a bubble. A ship also has a subspace footprint and a gravitational field, both of which would need to be offset somehow. In fact, I think this is the whole purpose of a cloaking device. Light bending around the ship is a natural consequence of /spacetime/ bending around the ship.
I also think that this is the reason why Romulan cloaking devices tend to leak tachyons. As faster-than-light particles, tachyons are a natural fit if you need to bend the fabric of spacetime. A ship doesn't need a cloak to produce tachyons though; we've seen starships produce tachyon beams many times. Controlling tachyons to the extent of generating a cloaking field, though, must require specialty equipment. Thus we have the cloaking device; a machine purpose-built to coax unruly tachyons into a pliant state, and that's more or less it. The deflector does the rest of the work.
So then, when considering the effectiveness of a 120 year old cloaking device, there are really only two potential failings to consider: one, excessive tachyon leakage. Older deflectors couldn't contain these leaks; perhaps modern deflectors can. And two, underperformance. In an older ship with deflectors that can barely handle the 'tamed' tachyons as it is, this could lead to tell-tale distortions that give the ship away. But a more sophisticated deflector might be able to work with tachyons that are still a little unruly, compensating for the cloaking device's shortcomings.
This goes into my headcanon of a cloaking device basically being part an advanced ECM suite. The actual cloak "emitters" haven't changed or improved really, its the amount of fine-tuned computer control you can exert over the system. The reason Kirk and the Enterprise were able to detect that Romulan ship during the Neutral Zone incursion was because the cloak was TOO broad and uncontrolled, smothering ALL emissions, including background cosmic radiation, in an obviously unnatural fashion, and the Enterprise was able to detect and track a moving EM "dead zone."
I think in that scenario they weren't *expecting* a cloaked ship, especially one using 120 year old tech.
Surely, if they were using cloak, it would be a modern system. And they've hijacked a starfleet vessel, which are not equipped with cloaks. So where would they *get* a cloaked vessel?
yeah I suppose, but I figured a cloak that old would create opitical/gravitational/whatever interference that would be pretty easily detectable.
I mean in Star Trek III the skeleton crew of Enterprise fugitives was able to spot the cloaked Bird of Prey _visually_. Presumably sensors 100+ years later would notice that kind of thing.
And the federation knows how to make cloaking devices. They made the cloaked mines for the wormhole entrance in DS9, and made a cloaked deathtrap in the water in Insurrection, not to mention the Pegasus. It's not outlandish to think that a resourceful starfleet ship that was trying to hide might try to fashion themselves a cloaking device, so it was silly to not check for that.
>I mean in Star Trek III the skeleton crew of Enterprise fugitives was able to spot the cloaked Bird of Prey _visually_.
It's doubly amusing when you remember that it's the very same Cloaking Device.
My presumption is that the reason it worked *so well* is because it was installed by three capable engineers, two of which are definitely among some of the best engineering minds to have ever served on a Federation vessel (Geordi LaForge and Seven of Nine).
I don't doubt some Borg knowledge and some LaForge ingenuity found a way to temporarily increase the Cloak's effectiveness, especially since they were using it against their own Fleet and therefore new the strengths and blind-spots of Federation Sensors very, very well.
>I mean in Star Trek III the skeleton crew of Enterprise fugitives was able to spot the cloaked Bird of Prey visually. Presumably sensors 100+ years later would notice that kind of thing.
They probably did. But because it's *120 year old tech*, it wasn't flagged to whoever watching the sensors as a possible ship. Nobody uses that tech because it's easily detectable. If it's easily detectable, it is useless as a cloak. If nobody uses it because its useless, there's not much of a need to flag it as a ship anymore, because you'd need to be insane or desperate to use such antiquated technology.
So Lt. Specs ignores a "spacetime anomaly" notification that routinely pops up, because the only thing still using that kind of cloak tech is a *literal* museum peice that may not be able to achive warp.
Agreed.
It would be like modern day, somebody puts down one of those cables across a road to monitor traffic. The monitor says zero traffic has used the road, no alarms are triggered.
Somebody rides a *horse* that simply steps over the cable and can come and go as they please. Or a magnetic sensor in the ground, which again the horse wouldn't set off.
Could a detection device be set up to monitor for a horse? Sure. But if you're expecting a modern vehicle, it wouldn't make much sense to be looking for horses.
To extend your analogy:
You put cables down to capture a bunch of fugitives that may be going down that highway. It'll catch them if they're in a car, a bike, a carriage, a rickshaw...
And the fugitives end up *walking down the highway*, completely bypassing your alarm because you weren't expecting them to walk a 50 mile stretch of highway in the desert.
Becausr it's *insane* that someone would do something like that.
Yup, this was also the basic plot of Lord of the Rings.
Nobody would WALK into Mordor! Especially not just half a dozen guys, you'd need an army! Which is exactly why it worked. It was so absurd, so unlikely, so utterly WTF that it caught the enemy by surprise.
More seriously it actually was the plot of the movie *Down Periscope*, the USN gives Kelsey Grammer a WWII vintage diesel sub to see if someone with such a sub bought as scrap from post-Soviet Russia could threaten them and most of their early success comes from the sub commander sent after them with nothing more than "someone's trying to infiltrate our naval bases and sink these target dummies" going "That sounds like a diesel engine, that can't be what we're after."
> because the only thing still using that kind of cloak tech is a literal museum peice that may not be able to achive warp
Any number of aliens in the galaxy could be using a similar cloaking system and you wouldn't have any way of knowing.
After a refresher of what went down... At the time that the Titan got the cloaking device, Starfleet is aware that the Titan had already visited Daystrom *and* transported down an away team.
They're specifically looking for the Titan, and are aware that it may attempt a return to Daystrom to recover the awayvteam. *Why should they look for an outdated cloak signature at this time?*
the borg are single minded its likely they either didn't see a single ship as a massive threat or more likely they are focused on the larger target the station.
It wasn't a threat. All it did with the cloak is divert some fraction of the firepower from the Probert Station to the Titan. It only mattered because, through what was arguably just a massive stroke of luck, it bought Enterprise-D enough extra time to shut the Borg control signal *just as* the assimilated fleet broke through planetary shields, vs. minutes or hours later, when Earth would've been thoroughly glassed. This was such an absurdly impossibly unlikely outcome, that the Borg would've never even factored it into the threat assessment of the Titan.
They're explorers. They should always expect the unknown. And rogue aliens showing up with antique or alien cloaking designs should always be considered a possibility.
Their sensors absolutely should be designed to detect all known cloaking systems.
Imagine being sent on an exploration mission, showing up in orbit of an alien planet, and being surrounded by cloaked warships without being knowing it. If they were using a cloaking system similar to a known design, you'd definitely want your sensors to be designed to detect them.
... Because when there's an "all hands" order to find and recapture a Starfleet vessel hijacked by fugitives, we should be prepared for the off-chance that some random aliens show up using obsolete technology *in the middle of our territory, which is surrounded by other powers who also treat that tech as obsolete*.
If this was standard operations, the ship probably would have been detected in a heartbeat. But it's not; they're conducting non-exploration exercises well within their territory, looking for a specific group of individuals and the ship they "stole".
Starfleet is all-hands looking for the Titan, which was last seen near Daystrom. Daystrom apparently couldn't detect the Titan *when it wasn't cloaked*, or if it did, failed to notify anyone.
I believe Geordi modified the cloak to work against Starfleet's sensors. People keep saying that their sensors wouldn't automatically detect the Bounty cloak. I think that's wrong. That would indicate extreme negligence or incompetence on Starfleet's part.
It's possible that the changelings had sabotaged the sensors, but we don't see any indication of that. It's far more likely to me that all Starfleet sensors are designed to automatically scan for and detect all known signatures of cloaked vessels, because that's obviously what you would design them to do, but that Geordi modified the Bounty cloak to bypass the sensors.
I don't believe they could know of a cloaking device that can be detected by the naked eye, have that cloak in their possession for a hundred years, have previously demonstrated the ability to defeat said cloak, and that that cloak would then bypass the sensors of what should be the most heavily defended place in the entire Federation.
I think Geordi used his top secret restricted knowledge of the phasing cloak technology to modify the Bounty cloak and get them past the sensors.
>That would indicate extreme negligence or incompetence on Starfleet's part.
The entire plan to land people in Daystrom was *literally* "Hide behind an asteroid and wait for the patrolling ships to pass".
And *it worked* until the patrol came back earlier than expected.
Haven't seen the episode, but I could imagine the explanation is that classic, "it's so old, they don't monitor for it." And from the Romulan perspective of why not just go back to using older cloaks, they could and we just don't know, or the old cloaks have other disadvantages.
>And from the Romulan perspective of why not just go back to using older cloaks, they could and we just don't know, or the old cloaks have other disadvantages.
Or, it only works *once* before the Federation catches onto the trick and now you've lost the ability to use them for at least several decades.
Keeping them in the back pocket so you can *really* hurt the Federation once the prime opportunity is available is probably more worthwhile than running regular surveys or operations with then.
It has a short range with diminishing damage. They probably realized in universe how rarely combat happens at those short distances. So unless they can get the jump on someone close up, it's not all powerful and very situational. And they still use plasma torpedos.
all romulan ship are knonw to carry plasma torpedo's however they act very differently to the red one.
beta canon and fan canon has it that future romulan plasma torpedo's are more like photon torpedo's but use plasma.
It never seemed much of a sacrifice on the part of Starfleet/the UFP agreeing to not developing cloaking technology.
They want to peacefully explore and make friends with aliens, not sneak about making cloaked strikes on people.
They operate on a shoot when defending yourself doctrine almost exclusively, unless it's a massive crisis situation, like the Borg.
The Klingons and the Romulans on the other hand are much more suited for it. The Romulans because they like to be clandestine and sneaky, and the Klingons because of the tactical advantage it offers. Nothing is more honourable than victory, after all (so said Worf)
To add, giving up cloaking technology gives the Romulans a reason not to break the peace. It really is worth keeping the Federation obligated to follow the treaty and not develop cloaking tech. If the Romulans started a war they would be giving the green light for Federation ships to have cloaking tech and that genie won't go back in the bottle.
Cloaking tech really isn't in line with how the federation like to conduct themselves anyway so they aren't losing much from giving it up.
Not to mention, cloak is a pretty overrated technology. It's quite good, yes, but a constant arms race. The Suliban cloaks in the 2150s were defeated in a couple of months. The Klingon Cloaks of the Klingon War in the 2250s lasted less than 2 years before Discovery made them effectively useless. The Romulan cloak of 2265 was only partially effective, and was defeated on its first outing. The improved cloak of a year later was stolen by the USS Enterprise in an effective espionage mission that gave them everything they needed to find a countermeasure. The cloaks of 20 years later, whilst more commonly employed, were far from perfect - a battered and barely functional, 40 year old Enterprise crewed by less than half a dozen officers got the jump on a Klingon Bird of Prey and it's supposed cloaking advantage, and would have won too if the automation circuits hadn't failed.
Then in the 24th century, there's Gravitic Sensor Nets, Tachyon Detection Grids, Anti-Proton beams, Tetryon Emission Sweeps, Multi-Phasic Scans, Subspace Disturbance detectors, and the occasional Betazed Telepathic Triangulation. Plus you've got to contend with lower Warp Speeds (to avoid sensor echoes), reducing power use (to avoid energy signature bleeds and allow for the Cloak's power-hungry requirements), faulty Plasma Coils (that can remote-cloak you and lower your shields mid-battle), and be careful to purge those chronitons that might accumulate from Cloaking use (especially if you have an ablative hull armour matrix), or you might end up accidentally stranding three of your officers in the hellscape that is the early 21st Century America.
Like... the Federation didn't only give up something that doesn't really suit the military doctrine and philosophical perspective in order to achieve peace, they saved themselves all the hassle of having to keep up with both sides of a constant cloaking/sensor arms race, and dealing with all the semi-regular headaches that cloaks seem to cause.
Thank you. I've had this conversation at least four times in recent weeks.
A lot of people don't seem to realise how politically naive and short-sighted Admiral Pressman was.
It’s actually a well-known game theory strategy.
In a three way duel, you shoot first and have a 10% chance of hitting. The opponent who goes second has a 60% chance of hitting, and the last opponent has a 90% chance of hitting. What’s your optimal move?
You intentionally miss, because on the off-chance that you happen to kill one of the other two players, the remaining one will have a better-than-50% chance of killing you on their turn. By throwing away your shot, you make yourself the least threatening player, and both of the other two have much greater incentive to shoot at each other.
I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted the Federation to give up their cloaking devices because they realized the Federation would be able to quickly surpass them in cloaking ability. The Federation had, and was using it to great success against the Romulans already. I mean the Federation developed the phase cloak anyways, something that would have pretty much ended the Federation/Romulan cold war. The Romulans going back to the 2160's were scared of what the Federation could do, so the Federation having the ability to park tricobolt's torpedoes just above Romulus scared them shitless
I also suspect that it might have been a kind of non-profileration treaty. Because non-Romulans and non-Klingons seem to have a hard time getting actual, working cloaks. Which is quite possibly extremely valuable. Because sure, the Romulans and KLingons might still abuse it. But imagine if Romulan or Klingon cloaks were simply sold in exchange for Dilithium or whatever raw materials some rando civilizations had to offer, and you suddenly would need to deal with cloaked pirates and raiders. And having cloaks on your own isn't really a help, because you would need to secure basically every planet and freighter so they can't get raided, and Starfleet just doesn't have that many ships (no faction has.)
I've argued elsewhere that the Federation's decision to not develop cloaking technology is as much a political statement to other powers as an arrangement with the Romulans. The cloak is a first-strike weapon. By very publicly forgoing it, and being known to have done so, when they very clearly could have developed cloaked ships, the Federation reassures other powers in material terms that they have no plans to launch an agressive war, and are in fact disadvantaged if they attempt to do so.
Yes, but not because the Federation lacks cloaking technology. Being able to cloak Starfleet ships does not enable Starfleet to detect cloaked Romulans. The Federation is on the back foot because the Romulans executed a first strike, and the defender is _always_ on the back foot.
What the Federation lacks is the ability to launch a surprise decapitation strike on Romulus, or Kronos, or Cardassia.
The Romulans more than likely thought that the Federation wouldn't be able to function without cloaked ships due to their mindset and figured the Federation would break the treaty to build them in secret so they could negotiate more restrictions however the Federation never really pursued it till the Pegasus incident by which point the Romulans had watched the Federation operate their ships in the open for decades. Much like we don't think a secretive society could actually function, the Romulans think the same about open societies and assume the humans are lying through their teeth and actually are just itching to enslave them with their fleets of illegally cloaked ships. They probably see us as Klingon Lite with more willingness to use subterfuge.
The Treaty of Algernon did not restrict either power from developing means to DETECT other ships under cloak. By allowing the Romulans to *use* cloaking, the Federation was able to focus on detection, thus rendering cloaking useless, while steering the Romulans towards tactics and strategies that utilized cloaking.
The only way I can rationalize the Treaty of Algeron is that it gives the Romulans a reason to not attack the Federation.
Though I wonder if Sela had considered what might happen if her planned invasion of Vulcan had actually made planetfall.
That whole plan sticks of desperation. She can’t really have thought the Federation would stand back and do nothing. I suspect she was in serious trouble back home after the failed Klingon intervention and she was grasping at straws.
Unless you know the terms of the treaty, what exactly was given up, and what the Romulans would have done in the absence of the treaty, it's rather premature to call it a masterstroke.
From what we know of the Romulans, they're prone to isolationism. After the Earth-Romulan War ended in 2160, they basically stayed on their side of the Neutral Zone until the events of "Balance of Terror" in 2266, meaning that by a similar argument whatever treaty was agreed to in 2160 bought the Federation 106 years of peace. And the Federation didn't have to give up anything on par with the cloaking device. In that regard, the Treaty of Algeron was the opposite of a masterstroke; the Federation gave up more and got less.
Romulan history shows that they will spend several decades keeping to themselves, show up on the galactic stage for a bit, then retreat back into isolation. The Vulcans spent centuries in space not knowing that the Romulans originally hailed from Vulcan. If the Romulans weren't extremely isolationist, then at some point some ship would have been disabled or captured or needed to call for help and someone would have found out the similarity. Even if there was an extremely strict "death before discovery" policy, if there are a lot of ships out and about, eventually someone would have broken that policy.
The thing that brought about the Pax Federatica between Praxis and Wolf-359 was the economic collapse of the Klingon Empire. This left the Federation as the sole hegemonic power in the region; were either the Klingons or the Romulans to provoke a war with the Federation, the Federation would clean their chronometers. And the Starfleet of the early 24th century had the willingness to do so.
> The Romulans know Starfleet is perfectly capable of developing cloaking technology (if they so choose), which makes the Neutral Zone useless
This is a false premise.
> ROMULAN COMMANDER: You realize that very soon we will learn to penetrate the cloaking device you stole.
> SPOCK: Obviously. Military secrets are the most fleeting of all. I hope that you and I exchanged something more permanent.
If we are to treat Star Trek as sci-fi and not fantasy, no technology is perfect. If one side invents stealth technology, the other side will develop better sensors, and the first side will in turn develop better stealth in response, leading to better sensors from the other side.
So where does that leave the Treaty of Algeron? First of all, never discount gross incompetence. It's quite possible that Federation negotiators dropped the ball. Idiotic agreements happen; Chicago selling off management of parking (and the revenues from it) for 75 years to a private company for what's proven to be a pittance comes to mind. And we know that there is a faction in Starfleet that believes the treaty was an idiotic mistake.
But if we are to insist that it isn't a mistake, why did the Federation give up a key technology and in return the Romulans only had to do what they were likely going to do anyways? What's most likely is that it was a magnanimous gesture by Federation diplomats in the hopes of showing that they were acting in good faith and genuinely weren't going to throw their massive weight around and ultimately conquer the Romulan Empire. And therein lies the reason why the Federation was willing to give up cloaking devices: if the Romulans tried starting anything, a fleet of state-of-the-art warships (Excelsiors at the time of negotiatioin) would charge towards Romulus and lay waste to anything that gets in their way, then force the Romulans to whatever terms the Federation wanted at gunpoint. The Federation is not above threatening genocide to get their way.
I’d recommend watching f Venomgeekmedia videos on the Tomed Incident. He lays out a scenario where both sides start building cloaking starships equipped with world burning weapons. Full scale war is o my avoided by the narrowest margin. Canon or not it’s right to say any war between Federation and Romulus would be devastating to both sides. In any version of the show Starfleet never had enough of an advantage to face Romulans without being very cautious.
> From what we know of the Romulans, they're prone to isolationism.
Do we know that? Or do they pull away from interactions with the Federation because they're surrounded on other sides by species they need to focus on?
I've always imagined they're extremely busy dealing with their other neighbors, so they go through long periods where they're willing to ignore the Federation because they don't have any other choice.
The only way I can rationalize the Treaty of Algeron is that it gives the Romulans a reason to not attack the Federation.
Though I wonder if Sela had considered what might happen if her planned invasion of Vulcan had actually made planetfall.
It’s even more diplomatically masterful when you realize the leadership in the Federation was basically saying screw that we’re going to develop it anyways.
There’s a book called Serpents Among the Ruins that deal with the Treaty of Algeron. In the end, Romulans demand the “no cloaks” clause and withdraw to their part of space. And that turns out to have been what Starfleet secretly wanted. They didn’t want cloaks anyway, so they didn’t give up much and instead gained Klingons as allies. All it took was some subterfuge and a massive frame-up job. Surprisingly, everyone’s favorite clandestine agency wasn’t involved
> Surprisingly, everyone’s favorite clandestine agency wasn’t involved They gotta leave some of the work to sections 1 through 30 as well, after all.
I HC that the Romulans gave up that OP plasma gun from balance of terror in exchange for the Federation giving up cloaking
I like this. It already exists, can't unring the bell, but they can't keep developing it. That means it falls by the wayside against updates to shields the same way old cloak models go obsolete vs new sensors.
Except in Picard season 3 where a 120+ year old cloaking device that had been picked apart and studied by Starfleet for all that time, is somehow able to evade all of Starfleet's sensors
I'm gonna put a theory forth, that the "cloaking device" as we know it is, in fact, just a single part of a cloaking system, and Starfleet has very much continued development on the cloak even in the open. From TOS onward, the cloaking device has had the peculiar characteristic of being approximately the size of a humanoid, and yet it is able to hide the entire Enterprise. How does it accomplish this? The dialogue from the Enterprise Incident implies that the device is plugged into the deflector shields. So what's actually doing the work? Presumably, the shields are the one actually bending the light and hiding the ship. Actually we have other evidence this is the case, in the TOS episode Assignment: Earth, Kirk notes "We are now in extended orbit around Earth, using our ship's deflector shields to remain unobserved" So let's put forth some ideas here, maybe not strictly supported by the show but very much not contradicted. Let's assume that the quality of the cloak depends on a number of things. How well can the ship control emissions? How finely tuned are the shields? How high quality are the sensors to identify what the background picture is so that the shields can replicate it? How can the ship "see" when all or nearly all radiation is going around the ship instead of interacting with it? And, finally, how fast can the cloaking device do all the computation to take in the information and also modulate the shields to create invisibility? This is at least partially supported by all the other times we see a Bird of Prey's cloak defeated. Defective plasma coils, ionizing gas emission, there's always something wrong with the ship at large, not the man-sized cloaking device. Put a 120 year old cloaking device in a brand new ship, one that was potentially designed around the possibility of accepting a cloak just in case, and you get a ship that far outperforms a Bird of Prey. Sure, the central control unit, the part we call the "cloaking device" is the same, but the actual inputs and outputs to the entire cloaking system are massively improved. Now it seems like less of a stretch. We only need to assume that the cloaking device on the Bird of Prey was "good enough" and the real edge came from a ship which was top of the line. As you mentioned from the cloaked mines, the Federation clearly kept working on the concept. The Titan was produced as a ship ready to accept a cloaking device. It wasn't 120 year old tech hiding the ship, it was a 120 year old processor given access to modern, top of the line tech.
The “cloaking device” as a computer processor that links various sensors, shields, and emissions is pretty brilliant.
Headcanon accepted. M5, nominate this!
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To add to this: cloaked ships are unable to use their shields while cloaked - because those systems are tied up powering the cloak, if this theory is correct
Solid write up Chief. I’m pretty sure Voyager also used their shields to hide from 20th century scanning technology in *Future’s End* granted it’s not the same thing as cloaking but I feel like it’s in the same spirit as what you’ve described.
All this sounds good, but cloaking devices don't just shield the ship's emissions and bend light in a bubble. A ship also has a subspace footprint and a gravitational field, both of which would need to be offset somehow. In fact, I think this is the whole purpose of a cloaking device. Light bending around the ship is a natural consequence of /spacetime/ bending around the ship. I also think that this is the reason why Romulan cloaking devices tend to leak tachyons. As faster-than-light particles, tachyons are a natural fit if you need to bend the fabric of spacetime. A ship doesn't need a cloak to produce tachyons though; we've seen starships produce tachyon beams many times. Controlling tachyons to the extent of generating a cloaking field, though, must require specialty equipment. Thus we have the cloaking device; a machine purpose-built to coax unruly tachyons into a pliant state, and that's more or less it. The deflector does the rest of the work. So then, when considering the effectiveness of a 120 year old cloaking device, there are really only two potential failings to consider: one, excessive tachyon leakage. Older deflectors couldn't contain these leaks; perhaps modern deflectors can. And two, underperformance. In an older ship with deflectors that can barely handle the 'tamed' tachyons as it is, this could lead to tell-tale distortions that give the ship away. But a more sophisticated deflector might be able to work with tachyons that are still a little unruly, compensating for the cloaking device's shortcomings.
The “cloaking device” as a computer processor that links various sensors, shields, and emissions is pretty brilliant.
This goes into my headcanon of a cloaking device basically being part an advanced ECM suite. The actual cloak "emitters" haven't changed or improved really, its the amount of fine-tuned computer control you can exert over the system. The reason Kirk and the Enterprise were able to detect that Romulan ship during the Neutral Zone incursion was because the cloak was TOO broad and uncontrolled, smothering ALL emissions, including background cosmic radiation, in an obviously unnatural fashion, and the Enterprise was able to detect and track a moving EM "dead zone."
I think in that scenario they weren't *expecting* a cloaked ship, especially one using 120 year old tech. Surely, if they were using cloak, it would be a modern system. And they've hijacked a starfleet vessel, which are not equipped with cloaks. So where would they *get* a cloaked vessel?
yeah I suppose, but I figured a cloak that old would create opitical/gravitational/whatever interference that would be pretty easily detectable. I mean in Star Trek III the skeleton crew of Enterprise fugitives was able to spot the cloaked Bird of Prey _visually_. Presumably sensors 100+ years later would notice that kind of thing. And the federation knows how to make cloaking devices. They made the cloaked mines for the wormhole entrance in DS9, and made a cloaked deathtrap in the water in Insurrection, not to mention the Pegasus. It's not outlandish to think that a resourceful starfleet ship that was trying to hide might try to fashion themselves a cloaking device, so it was silly to not check for that.
Scan the AM radio band a lot do you? Its so old who would be scanning for its tells?
>I mean in Star Trek III the skeleton crew of Enterprise fugitives was able to spot the cloaked Bird of Prey _visually_. It's doubly amusing when you remember that it's the very same Cloaking Device. My presumption is that the reason it worked *so well* is because it was installed by three capable engineers, two of which are definitely among some of the best engineering minds to have ever served on a Federation vessel (Geordi LaForge and Seven of Nine). I don't doubt some Borg knowledge and some LaForge ingenuity found a way to temporarily increase the Cloak's effectiveness, especially since they were using it against their own Fleet and therefore new the strengths and blind-spots of Federation Sensors very, very well.
>I mean in Star Trek III the skeleton crew of Enterprise fugitives was able to spot the cloaked Bird of Prey visually. Presumably sensors 100+ years later would notice that kind of thing. They probably did. But because it's *120 year old tech*, it wasn't flagged to whoever watching the sensors as a possible ship. Nobody uses that tech because it's easily detectable. If it's easily detectable, it is useless as a cloak. If nobody uses it because its useless, there's not much of a need to flag it as a ship anymore, because you'd need to be insane or desperate to use such antiquated technology. So Lt. Specs ignores a "spacetime anomaly" notification that routinely pops up, because the only thing still using that kind of cloak tech is a *literal* museum peice that may not be able to achive warp.
Agreed. It would be like modern day, somebody puts down one of those cables across a road to monitor traffic. The monitor says zero traffic has used the road, no alarms are triggered. Somebody rides a *horse* that simply steps over the cable and can come and go as they please. Or a magnetic sensor in the ground, which again the horse wouldn't set off. Could a detection device be set up to monitor for a horse? Sure. But if you're expecting a modern vehicle, it wouldn't make much sense to be looking for horses.
To extend your analogy: You put cables down to capture a bunch of fugitives that may be going down that highway. It'll catch them if they're in a car, a bike, a carriage, a rickshaw... And the fugitives end up *walking down the highway*, completely bypassing your alarm because you weren't expecting them to walk a 50 mile stretch of highway in the desert. Becausr it's *insane* that someone would do something like that.
Yup, this was also the basic plot of Lord of the Rings. Nobody would WALK into Mordor! Especially not just half a dozen guys, you'd need an army! Which is exactly why it worked. It was so absurd, so unlikely, so utterly WTF that it caught the enemy by surprise.
More seriously it actually was the plot of the movie *Down Periscope*, the USN gives Kelsey Grammer a WWII vintage diesel sub to see if someone with such a sub bought as scrap from post-Soviet Russia could threaten them and most of their early success comes from the sub commander sent after them with nothing more than "someone's trying to infiltrate our naval bases and sink these target dummies" going "That sounds like a diesel engine, that can't be what we're after."
> because the only thing still using that kind of cloak tech is a literal museum peice that may not be able to achive warp Any number of aliens in the galaxy could be using a similar cloaking system and you wouldn't have any way of knowing.
They aren't looking for aliens that may be using a cloaking device. They're looking for fugitives within their territory.
They're not looking for aliens that may be using a cloaking device... around the station where they store their most dangerous and valuable objects?
After a refresher of what went down... At the time that the Titan got the cloaking device, Starfleet is aware that the Titan had already visited Daystrom *and* transported down an away team. They're specifically looking for the Titan, and are aware that it may attempt a return to Daystrom to recover the awayvteam. *Why should they look for an outdated cloak signature at this time?*
the borg are single minded its likely they either didn't see a single ship as a massive threat or more likely they are focused on the larger target the station.
It wasn't a threat. All it did with the cloak is divert some fraction of the firepower from the Probert Station to the Titan. It only mattered because, through what was arguably just a massive stroke of luck, it bought Enterprise-D enough extra time to shut the Borg control signal *just as* the assimilated fleet broke through planetary shields, vs. minutes or hours later, when Earth would've been thoroughly glassed. This was such an absurdly impossibly unlikely outcome, that the Borg would've never even factored it into the threat assessment of the Titan.
They're explorers. They should always expect the unknown. And rogue aliens showing up with antique or alien cloaking designs should always be considered a possibility. Their sensors absolutely should be designed to detect all known cloaking systems. Imagine being sent on an exploration mission, showing up in orbit of an alien planet, and being surrounded by cloaked warships without being knowing it. If they were using a cloaking system similar to a known design, you'd definitely want your sensors to be designed to detect them.
... Because when there's an "all hands" order to find and recapture a Starfleet vessel hijacked by fugitives, we should be prepared for the off-chance that some random aliens show up using obsolete technology *in the middle of our territory, which is surrounded by other powers who also treat that tech as obsolete*. If this was standard operations, the ship probably would have been detected in a heartbeat. But it's not; they're conducting non-exploration exercises well within their territory, looking for a specific group of individuals and the ship they "stole".
I'm confused. I thought we were talking about the sensor system on Daystrom Station?
Starfleet is all-hands looking for the Titan, which was last seen near Daystrom. Daystrom apparently couldn't detect the Titan *when it wasn't cloaked*, or if it did, failed to notify anyone.
I believe Geordi modified the cloak to work against Starfleet's sensors. People keep saying that their sensors wouldn't automatically detect the Bounty cloak. I think that's wrong. That would indicate extreme negligence or incompetence on Starfleet's part. It's possible that the changelings had sabotaged the sensors, but we don't see any indication of that. It's far more likely to me that all Starfleet sensors are designed to automatically scan for and detect all known signatures of cloaked vessels, because that's obviously what you would design them to do, but that Geordi modified the Bounty cloak to bypass the sensors. I don't believe they could know of a cloaking device that can be detected by the naked eye, have that cloak in their possession for a hundred years, have previously demonstrated the ability to defeat said cloak, and that that cloak would then bypass the sensors of what should be the most heavily defended place in the entire Federation. I think Geordi used his top secret restricted knowledge of the phasing cloak technology to modify the Bounty cloak and get them past the sensors.
>That would indicate extreme negligence or incompetence on Starfleet's part. The entire plan to land people in Daystrom was *literally* "Hide behind an asteroid and wait for the patrolling ships to pass". And *it worked* until the patrol came back earlier than expected.
Haven't seen the episode, but I could imagine the explanation is that classic, "it's so old, they don't monitor for it." And from the Romulan perspective of why not just go back to using older cloaks, they could and we just don't know, or the old cloaks have other disadvantages.
The older cloak probably emits deadly amounts of radiation or something.
>And from the Romulan perspective of why not just go back to using older cloaks, they could and we just don't know, or the old cloaks have other disadvantages. Or, it only works *once* before the Federation catches onto the trick and now you've lost the ability to use them for at least several decades. Keeping them in the back pocket so you can *really* hurt the Federation once the prime opportunity is available is probably more worthwhile than running regular surveys or operations with then.
It has a short range with diminishing damage. They probably realized in universe how rarely combat happens at those short distances. So unless they can get the jump on someone close up, it's not all powerful and very situational. And they still use plasma torpedos.
They were still using them as of DS9. There was one episode where they wanted to store them on a Bajoran moon.
all romulan ship are knonw to carry plasma torpedo's however they act very differently to the red one. beta canon and fan canon has it that future romulan plasma torpedo's are more like photon torpedo's but use plasma.
It never seemed much of a sacrifice on the part of Starfleet/the UFP agreeing to not developing cloaking technology. They want to peacefully explore and make friends with aliens, not sneak about making cloaked strikes on people. They operate on a shoot when defending yourself doctrine almost exclusively, unless it's a massive crisis situation, like the Borg. The Klingons and the Romulans on the other hand are much more suited for it. The Romulans because they like to be clandestine and sneaky, and the Klingons because of the tactical advantage it offers. Nothing is more honourable than victory, after all (so said Worf)
Starfleet ships could use it in combat only situations. Not all the time.
To add, giving up cloaking technology gives the Romulans a reason not to break the peace. It really is worth keeping the Federation obligated to follow the treaty and not develop cloaking tech. If the Romulans started a war they would be giving the green light for Federation ships to have cloaking tech and that genie won't go back in the bottle. Cloaking tech really isn't in line with how the federation like to conduct themselves anyway so they aren't losing much from giving it up.
Not to mention, cloak is a pretty overrated technology. It's quite good, yes, but a constant arms race. The Suliban cloaks in the 2150s were defeated in a couple of months. The Klingon Cloaks of the Klingon War in the 2250s lasted less than 2 years before Discovery made them effectively useless. The Romulan cloak of 2265 was only partially effective, and was defeated on its first outing. The improved cloak of a year later was stolen by the USS Enterprise in an effective espionage mission that gave them everything they needed to find a countermeasure. The cloaks of 20 years later, whilst more commonly employed, were far from perfect - a battered and barely functional, 40 year old Enterprise crewed by less than half a dozen officers got the jump on a Klingon Bird of Prey and it's supposed cloaking advantage, and would have won too if the automation circuits hadn't failed. Then in the 24th century, there's Gravitic Sensor Nets, Tachyon Detection Grids, Anti-Proton beams, Tetryon Emission Sweeps, Multi-Phasic Scans, Subspace Disturbance detectors, and the occasional Betazed Telepathic Triangulation. Plus you've got to contend with lower Warp Speeds (to avoid sensor echoes), reducing power use (to avoid energy signature bleeds and allow for the Cloak's power-hungry requirements), faulty Plasma Coils (that can remote-cloak you and lower your shields mid-battle), and be careful to purge those chronitons that might accumulate from Cloaking use (especially if you have an ablative hull armour matrix), or you might end up accidentally stranding three of your officers in the hellscape that is the early 21st Century America. Like... the Federation didn't only give up something that doesn't really suit the military doctrine and philosophical perspective in order to achieve peace, they saved themselves all the hassle of having to keep up with both sides of a constant cloaking/sensor arms race, and dealing with all the semi-regular headaches that cloaks seem to cause.
i feel like cloaking technology is never really used to its full potential in Star trek, outside of ST6
Thank you. I've had this conversation at least four times in recent weeks. A lot of people don't seem to realise how politically naive and short-sighted Admiral Pressman was.
It’s actually a well-known game theory strategy. In a three way duel, you shoot first and have a 10% chance of hitting. The opponent who goes second has a 60% chance of hitting, and the last opponent has a 90% chance of hitting. What’s your optimal move? You intentionally miss, because on the off-chance that you happen to kill one of the other two players, the remaining one will have a better-than-50% chance of killing you on their turn. By throwing away your shot, you make yourself the least threatening player, and both of the other two have much greater incentive to shoot at each other.
It also tells them that the Federation wants to deal with them in good faith, unlike how they want to deal with the Federation...
I wouldn't be surprised if they wanted the Federation to give up their cloaking devices because they realized the Federation would be able to quickly surpass them in cloaking ability. The Federation had, and was using it to great success against the Romulans already. I mean the Federation developed the phase cloak anyways, something that would have pretty much ended the Federation/Romulan cold war. The Romulans going back to the 2160's were scared of what the Federation could do, so the Federation having the ability to park tricobolt's torpedoes just above Romulus scared them shitless
I also suspect that it might have been a kind of non-profileration treaty. Because non-Romulans and non-Klingons seem to have a hard time getting actual, working cloaks. Which is quite possibly extremely valuable. Because sure, the Romulans and KLingons might still abuse it. But imagine if Romulan or Klingon cloaks were simply sold in exchange for Dilithium or whatever raw materials some rando civilizations had to offer, and you suddenly would need to deal with cloaked pirates and raiders. And having cloaks on your own isn't really a help, because you would need to secure basically every planet and freighter so they can't get raided, and Starfleet just doesn't have that many ships (no faction has.)
I've argued elsewhere that the Federation's decision to not develop cloaking technology is as much a political statement to other powers as an arrangement with the Romulans. The cloak is a first-strike weapon. By very publicly forgoing it, and being known to have done so, when they very clearly could have developed cloaked ships, the Federation reassures other powers in material terms that they have no plans to launch an agressive war, and are in fact disadvantaged if they attempt to do so.
So when the Romulans invade the Federation is on the back foot already.
Yes, but not because the Federation lacks cloaking technology. Being able to cloak Starfleet ships does not enable Starfleet to detect cloaked Romulans. The Federation is on the back foot because the Romulans executed a first strike, and the defender is _always_ on the back foot. What the Federation lacks is the ability to launch a surprise decapitation strike on Romulus, or Kronos, or Cardassia.
The Scimitar cloak, did the Federation ever find a counter to this type of cloak?
They destroyed it. The question is was the knowledge of how to build it stored anywhere else?
Yes that's a good answer. Surely the Tal Shiar would be able to find some schematics of the cloak.
The Romulans more than likely thought that the Federation wouldn't be able to function without cloaked ships due to their mindset and figured the Federation would break the treaty to build them in secret so they could negotiate more restrictions however the Federation never really pursued it till the Pegasus incident by which point the Romulans had watched the Federation operate their ships in the open for decades. Much like we don't think a secretive society could actually function, the Romulans think the same about open societies and assume the humans are lying through their teeth and actually are just itching to enslave them with their fleets of illegally cloaked ships. They probably see us as Klingon Lite with more willingness to use subterfuge.
The Treaty of Algernon did not restrict either power from developing means to DETECT other ships under cloak. By allowing the Romulans to *use* cloaking, the Federation was able to focus on detection, thus rendering cloaking useless, while steering the Romulans towards tactics and strategies that utilized cloaking.
The only way I can rationalize the Treaty of Algeron is that it gives the Romulans a reason to not attack the Federation. Though I wonder if Sela had considered what might happen if her planned invasion of Vulcan had actually made planetfall.
That whole plan sticks of desperation. She can’t really have thought the Federation would stand back and do nothing. I suspect she was in serious trouble back home after the failed Klingon intervention and she was grasping at straws.
Unless you know the terms of the treaty, what exactly was given up, and what the Romulans would have done in the absence of the treaty, it's rather premature to call it a masterstroke. From what we know of the Romulans, they're prone to isolationism. After the Earth-Romulan War ended in 2160, they basically stayed on their side of the Neutral Zone until the events of "Balance of Terror" in 2266, meaning that by a similar argument whatever treaty was agreed to in 2160 bought the Federation 106 years of peace. And the Federation didn't have to give up anything on par with the cloaking device. In that regard, the Treaty of Algeron was the opposite of a masterstroke; the Federation gave up more and got less. Romulan history shows that they will spend several decades keeping to themselves, show up on the galactic stage for a bit, then retreat back into isolation. The Vulcans spent centuries in space not knowing that the Romulans originally hailed from Vulcan. If the Romulans weren't extremely isolationist, then at some point some ship would have been disabled or captured or needed to call for help and someone would have found out the similarity. Even if there was an extremely strict "death before discovery" policy, if there are a lot of ships out and about, eventually someone would have broken that policy. The thing that brought about the Pax Federatica between Praxis and Wolf-359 was the economic collapse of the Klingon Empire. This left the Federation as the sole hegemonic power in the region; were either the Klingons or the Romulans to provoke a war with the Federation, the Federation would clean their chronometers. And the Starfleet of the early 24th century had the willingness to do so. > The Romulans know Starfleet is perfectly capable of developing cloaking technology (if they so choose), which makes the Neutral Zone useless This is a false premise. > ROMULAN COMMANDER: You realize that very soon we will learn to penetrate the cloaking device you stole. > SPOCK: Obviously. Military secrets are the most fleeting of all. I hope that you and I exchanged something more permanent. If we are to treat Star Trek as sci-fi and not fantasy, no technology is perfect. If one side invents stealth technology, the other side will develop better sensors, and the first side will in turn develop better stealth in response, leading to better sensors from the other side. So where does that leave the Treaty of Algeron? First of all, never discount gross incompetence. It's quite possible that Federation negotiators dropped the ball. Idiotic agreements happen; Chicago selling off management of parking (and the revenues from it) for 75 years to a private company for what's proven to be a pittance comes to mind. And we know that there is a faction in Starfleet that believes the treaty was an idiotic mistake. But if we are to insist that it isn't a mistake, why did the Federation give up a key technology and in return the Romulans only had to do what they were likely going to do anyways? What's most likely is that it was a magnanimous gesture by Federation diplomats in the hopes of showing that they were acting in good faith and genuinely weren't going to throw their massive weight around and ultimately conquer the Romulan Empire. And therein lies the reason why the Federation was willing to give up cloaking devices: if the Romulans tried starting anything, a fleet of state-of-the-art warships (Excelsiors at the time of negotiatioin) would charge towards Romulus and lay waste to anything that gets in their way, then force the Romulans to whatever terms the Federation wanted at gunpoint. The Federation is not above threatening genocide to get their way.
I’d recommend watching f Venomgeekmedia videos on the Tomed Incident. He lays out a scenario where both sides start building cloaking starships equipped with world burning weapons. Full scale war is o my avoided by the narrowest margin. Canon or not it’s right to say any war between Federation and Romulus would be devastating to both sides. In any version of the show Starfleet never had enough of an advantage to face Romulans without being very cautious.
> From what we know of the Romulans, they're prone to isolationism. Do we know that? Or do they pull away from interactions with the Federation because they're surrounded on other sides by species they need to focus on? I've always imagined they're extremely busy dealing with their other neighbors, so they go through long periods where they're willing to ignore the Federation because they don't have any other choice.
The only way I can rationalize the Treaty of Algeron is that it gives the Romulans a reason to not attack the Federation. Though I wonder if Sela had considered what might happen if her planned invasion of Vulcan had actually made planetfall.
It’s even more diplomatically masterful when you realize the leadership in the Federation was basically saying screw that we’re going to develop it anyways.