Cloaked Ships Through the Wormhole

[Photon]

Romulans headed to blood bath @ FHP and Defiant numerous times, cloaked after passing throught WH.

Is there anything w/in the WH that would mess up a ship's cloak field?

[Sandoval]

Did TrekBBS start rationing words and forget to tell me?

[Timo]

Compensating...

Ahem. Supposedly, warp fields within the wormhole are a Very Bad Idea. Furthermore, everybody seems to understand this much from the get-go.

But in "Homefront", our heroes speculate that the mysterious opening and closing of the wormhole is due to a cloaked ship going through, and nobody points out "But when we tried that with the Defiant, we blew the starboard and the port power coupling!". There doesn't appear to be anything explicit that would make the combination dangerous or otherwise undesirable, not according to our heroes.

We can speculate that the wormhole in the general case doesn't open unless it sees a ship attempting to enter, though. And what would be the point of flying through cloaked, when the sight of the wormhole opening will alert everybody to your transit anyway?

Of course, clever villains might send in one visible ship and follow with an invisible armada - but not too big an armada, because the wormhole will close after the visible ship enters, and getting caught in the closing orifice might ruin your day. But perhaps some cloaked Dominion ships got through in the wake of runabouts or the like, explaining e.g. the mysterious disappearance of Eris the Vorta (initially chalked up as a suicide, but we know the Vorta aren't that selfless!) as a beam-out into a cloaked support vessel...

Timo Saloniemi

[Finn]

Timo wrote:

---

Compensating...

Ahem. Supposedly, warp fields within the wormhole are a Very Bad Idea. Furthermore, everybody seems to understand this much from the get-go.

Says who?

[Timo]

Hmm. "Crossover" tells us that accidentally keeping your warp field active inside the wormhole is the thing that throws you out of the continuum and into the mercies of evil lesbians. And the accident involves failure of the apparent standard procedure of dropping down to impulse before entry, so probably our heroes had a hunch earlier on already.

Yet "Sacrifice of Angels" seems to contradict this. The episode involves a desperate quest of reaching the wormhole under fire, and yet Sisko takes the ship out of warp for entry; fine and well. But inside the wormhole, Dax observes the warp signatures of Jem'Hadar ships approaching along the hole...

Timo Saloniemi

[Tosk]

Timo wrote:

---

But inside the wormhole, Dax observes the warp signatures of Jem'Hadar ships approaching along the hole...

Does a ship have to actually be at warp to have a warp signature? I thought it was something that any warp capable vessel produced.

[Timo]

We could rather ask if there are any examples of a ship producing such a signature while not at warp. Supposedly, starships can "run silent" by shutting down some of their systems; this wouldn't work too well if warp drive couldn't be made silent for periods of inactivity, but needed to be dismantled or something...

I guess it can go either way. In "The Sound of Her Voice", the mere presence of a warp core made transit through that weird atmospheric chrono-haze dangerous, not the actual use of warp. But "Sacrifice of Angels" is our only example of warp signatures within the wormhole. And in nice contrast, "Playing God" shows a runabout traversing the entire length of the wormhole at crawling speed; actually using warp drive within should thus get you across the distance in a millisecond.

Timo Saloniemi

[Tosk]

In ST: First Contact, the Enterprise uses Luna's gravitational field to disguise their warp signature from the Vulcans, despite never using warp drive in that time period.

There are probably examples for both sides though, but that's the first one I could think of.

[Timo]

One might argue the E-E did need to use warp speed within the Sol system to reach Earth before the Vulcans did... Just musing.

Timo Saloniemi

[Tosk]

I don't understand what you mean. The Enterprise was already orbiting Earth, and was so for their entire stay in 2063.

[Jono]

The Defiant's lack of cloaking probably can be put down to the agreement with the Romulans about not using the device in the AQ.

As for the Romulan fleet, it might have been a safety issue giving they were operating with Cardassians who don't use cloaking technology regularly. Or the Changeling posing as the Romulan wanted DS9 to know the fleet was going through and insisted on it.

[FKnight]

Timo wrote:

---

Hmm. "Crossover" tells us that accidentally keeping your warp field active inside the wormhole is the thing that throws you out of the continuum and into the mercies of evil lesbians.

I think it was more the injector leak that caused the crossover event, including the return trip.