Spoilers Star Trek: Discovery 1x14 - "The War Without, The War Within"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Indeed, but that took time. And while we didn't have the key to Enigma, that was a significant advantage and we were losing major assets to submarine attacks. Discovery was the Bletchley Park here, the only ones who could crack the cloak, and they did, but couldn't share the knowledge before getting lost. Without the key to match the advantage of the cloak, the Federation were getting beasted. Eventually, they'd probably capture a Klingon ship and retro engineer the cloak. But in the meantime, they were struggling.
And now that they've cracked the cloak they will forget all about the technology.
Well one assumes the Klingons will counter their countermeasure. Unless the Feds, like the allies in wwii, are clever enough to conceal the fact they know by allowing acceptable losses while preventing the major hits.
They conceal this knowledge so well that Captain Kirk and his second in command are utterly bewildered that anyone managed to make such a technology work a few years later?
I didn't suggest that. The line about cloaks being 'theoretically possible' had been completely ignored for a long time. In fact that episode, being quite early on, has a number of things which were later ignored or retconned.
DSC set this close to the events shown in TOS the STD-writers should - and could - have done a much better job at addressing these issues.
Isn't that what Jon Bon Jovi was doing during the war?
Personally I've taken all the cloak stuff to be new versions with each side struggling to stay one step ahead of the others. I don't like that way of doing things but I can't think of another explanation, having seen cloaks before TOS.
I'd rather the cloak had never been shown as a major plot-point until its "most high profile" entry in TOS. Although non-canon, books by people like Diane Duane also provided a very neat backstory for why the Romulans worked so hard on a good cloak in the first place. But alas none of that was to be.
I'd rather the cloak had never been shown as a major plot-point until its "most high profile" entry in TOS. Although non-canon, books by people like Diane Duane also provided a very neat backstory for why the Romulans worked so hard on a good cloak in the first place. But alas none of that was to be.
And quite honestly, TOS retconned itself in a fashion with "The Enterprise Incident" less than two years later when the cloaks on the Romulan D7 cruisers were described as being a practical technology that shielded their vessels from being detected until the moment they decloaked, which is the same technology we saw in "Balance of Terror" yet for some reason Kirk and his officers have already forgotten that the Romulans have this.
Genuine question for those with better memories than me. We know Roddenberry made comments to the effect that certain aspects of the TOS shouldn't be taken too seriously and that TMP was "how things should have been" (e.g. the look of the Klingons). Did his comments extend to the (inevitable I guess) canon violations within TOS? Was he warning us not to get too bothered about contradictory aspects of TOS that went beyond the "look" of the show?And quite honestly, TOS retconned itself in a fashion with "The Enterprise Incident" less than two years later when the cloaks on the Romulan D7 cruisers were described as being a practical technology that shielded their vessels from being detected until the moment they decloaked, which is the same technology we saw in "Balance of Terror" yet for some reason Kirk and his officers have already forgotten that the Romulans have this.
Depending how you read his comments which feature as part of the narrative in the TMP novelisation, you could interpret them that way, although of course the entire thing is his retrospective on the show. There's no evidence that at the time he intended anything other than what was on TV.
My main argument about TOS continuity is that the show is internally inconsistent throughout season 1 at least and so using anything from that year as a hill to die on when it comes to the latter series is a dubious position. It took a dozen or more episodes to sure up who they work for.
The argument that 9 months is too quick and the cloak is no big deal does sit right with me.
An invisible enemy can blitzcrieg and roll back. 9 months in there is no reason to assume the UFP isn't adapting and headway from here on in would harder for the Klingons.
An invisible enemy can blitzcrieg and roll back. 9 months in there is no reason to assume the UFP isn't adapting and headway from here on in would harder for the Klingons.
That looks like the cloak argument has been dismantled whole cloth.
Admiral Cornwall makes this exact point when discussing USS Discovery’s spore drive with Lorca. Fleet command was worried he was overusing the drive ,and that the Klingons would develop a countermeasure before Starfleet could get the tech built into other ships.
Ultimately I don’t have a problem with Starfleet losing to the Klingons. I do have a problem with them losing in a matter of months. It’s implausible ,like the Captain of a starship traveling around a war zone in a shuttle unescorted,or a fleet admiral going to a diplomatic meeting without orbital backup.
Like France collapsing in 6 weeks?
The worst part has nothing to do with the cloak or the time frame. It's that a politically divided foe - basically 24 different houses acting independently - could defeat the Federation. It means that one 24th of the total Klingon fleet is enough to win essentially any engagement with the Federation. It also means the Klingons are not coordinating anything. Not strategy, not tactics, not even logistics. Any admiral worth their salt should be able to use this against the Klingons - to win the war through the Federation's superior coordination.
Lincoln kept saying that for 4 years.
In this case the spore hub drive would be a critical component of the Federation's Maginot Line.
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