Firing on a cloaked ship

[Vanyel]

I'm not sure if this belongs here or not, but I'm going to put it here and if it needs to be moved, please move it. I'm pretty sure it belongs here though.

Anyway.....

I was just watching Yesterday's Enterprise and when the attacking BoP cloaks the 1701D fires a couple of times and stops. Kurn's BoP stops firing on the BoP attacking Gowron's ship shortly after it cloaks in Redemption.

My question is: Why stop firing?

For example, in Yesterday's Enterprise, the 1701D fires on the BoP then stops once it's cloaked. In other episodes, including YE and Galaxy's Child, it is shown that the ships phasers can be "steered" to stay with the target. So why, once the BoP cloaks, doesn't the 1701D start firing in a wave pattern to at least try to hit the unshielded BoP? The phaser beam has a range of a few thousand kilometers (phasers can hit ground targets from orbit) which should be enough to hit the BoP before it's able to warp away.

 

[Gagarin]

1.) Lack of 3-dimensional thinking in VFX storyboarding. But Balance of Terror got this right.

2.) Doctorine may state that since a ship that's cloaked cannot fire, that it is best to stop firing and use that phaser energy to shoot current threats, or to use the phaser energy to rebuild shields.

 

[Timo]

I dunno. It seems to me that Kurn kept firing aplenty after the surviving enemy ship cloaked. The first hit after cloaking connected; the second one did not.

To keep firing after that would be futile, as there'd be the whole celestial sphere of directions to choose from, while the target would only cover a teeny weeny angle of that sphere. It doesn't sound realistic that blind firing in the approximate direction of the enemy would hit anything. Really, let's just look at the closest real-world analogy: firing a Hedgehog anti-submarine mortar salvo at an escaping Nazi submarine. The ranges involved there were minuscule compared with the Star Trek case, yet the hit record of that weapon was very poor initially, and only climbed to about 25% of attempted attacks after lots and lots of practice. This against submarines that moved at a snail's pace and couldn't dodge worth mention after diving.

The Hedgehog was similar to a blast from a disruptor or a phaser in that a "near miss" did no damage to the enemy; only a round directly impacting on the enemy would count. In further analogy to phasers, the Hedgehog featured no targeting against the invisible enemy other than "thataway"+prayer. The weapon was sometimes fired as a means of intimidating the enemy sub rather than actually hoping to score a hit, but that was waste of ammo since, as said, near misses were harmless. Based on all this, one would expect starships not to waste their phaser energies against invisible enemies...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

We could ignore the proximity blast phasers by saying that cloaks got good enough not to trigger by proximity.

But too bad the writers forgot that phasers can be set to wide beam sweeps and also photons set to "illuminate" on explosion. The DS9 writers clued in on that at least with the Jem'hedar sweeping around with their cloak detection beams when they searched for the Defiant (and also in Nemesis with the E-E vs Shinzon's? ship). I see no reason why a ship that just cloaked at close range would not be subject to a wall of firepower other than writers skimping out on good tactics.

 

[Unicron]

Data also states in YE that he loses the bearing on the BOP once it recloaks. So he could have kept firing, but he'd probably miss the way Kurn does in "Redemption."

 

[Timo]

But too bad the writers forgot that phasers can be set to wide beam sweeps

Can they? We've never seen a starship phaser do that. Just because you can hose down the enemy with a submachine gun doesn't mean you can do the same with a naval cannon...

When we see our heroes "sweep" space against cloaked vessels, they do it either by sweeping one or two beams in a relatively limited arc ("Arsenal of Freedom") or then by firing two or at most three unmoving beams at a time, in a series that spans a limited number of directions (ST:NEM). We never see anything like a comprehensive sweep. So probably it's technologically impossible to swing the phasers like laser lightshow elements and/or fire in fifty directions at once - which is what you'd need to do score a hit on a small invisible starship at anything beyond a couple of kilometers.

The DS9 writers clued in on that at least with the Jem'hedar sweeping around with their cloak detection beams when they searched for the Defiant

Note that they appeared to swing their beams at the hero ship from something like a hundred meters away, and still saw nothing they could act on! Clearly, covering all the necessary spatial angles wasn't a practical undertaking, rendering the antiproton beams unusable. The whole scene was a bit like an encounter between the hero and two guards in a pitch-dark room, with the hero (and the audience) wearing IR goggles but the guards simply flailing their arms in the dark. They'd never hit the hero that way, even when they stood just ninety centimeters away from him. They might still be suspicious since they had heard the hero breathe a few moments ago, but if he kept holding his breath, they'd just have to move on...

Really, using beams, bullets or other such "missile weapons" against an invisible enemy is folly even in two dimensions and in relatively confined spaces. In open space, it is only logical that Starfleet never even tries.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

But too bad the writers forgot that phasers can be set to wide beam sweeps

Can they? We've never seen a starship phaser do that. Just because you can hose down the enemy with a submachine gun doesn't mean you can do the same with a naval cannon...

When we see our heroes "sweep" space against cloaked vessels, they do it either by sweeping one or two beams in a relatively limited arc ("Arsenal of Freedom") or then by firing two or at most three unmoving beams at a time, in a series that spans a limited number of directions (ST:NEM). We never see anything like a comprehensive sweep. So probably it's technologically impossible to swing the phasers like laser lightshow elements and/or fire in fifty directions at once - which is what you'd need to do score a hit on a small invisible starship at anything beyond a couple of kilometers.

But that is just it - Yesterday's Enterprise the BOP wasn't that far away when it cloaked. Even a limited sweep or an amassed salvo of beams in the predicted volume of space would've lit the ship up. It wasn't like the BOP was a 100,000 kilometers off or at extreme phaser range.

As far as technologically impossible to swing a phaser around like that, if a hand phaser can be swung around (ala Arsenal of Freedom, or the disruptor in The Undiscovered Country) and a hand phaser can be set to wide beam, I see no reason a starship can't do that.

The DS9 writers clued in on that at least with the Jem'hedar sweeping around with their cloak detection beams when they searched for the Defiant

Note that they appeared to swing their beams at the hero ship from something like a hundred meters away, and still saw nothing they could act on! Clearly, covering all the necessary spatial angles wasn't a practical undertaking, rendering the antiproton beams unusable.

The difference here if I recall was that the Defiant wasn't cloaking under fire. The Jem'hedar had a vague idea of the Defiant's location unlike the events in Yesterday's Enterprise where they were looking right at the BOP cloaking

Actually, it would seem that in The Search that the antiproton beams did hit the Defiant but the first encounter they weren't sure what they had found and let it go. At the end of the episode, the same antiproton beams were used to find the Defiant and then attack it. So it was usable.

Really, using beams, bullets or other such "missile weapons" against an invisible enemy is folly even in two dimensions and in relatively confined spaces. In open space, it is only logical that Starfleet never even tries.

Nah. The only folly is to not even try. I suspect none of the new generation starship commanders want to fill out the weapon expenditure reports

 

[Kaziarl]

They should just equip all torpedoes with sensor equipment designed to chart gaseous anomalies. Problem solved

 

[Timo]

they were looking right at the BOP cloaking

Considering how we have seen these things turn on a dime, it would sound extremely unlikely that the BoP would remain on a predictable course after becoming invisible... Remember that Kurn did hit the escaping invisible BoP at first (thereby proving that Klingon ships can maintain some sort of shields even when cloaked!), but the next hit missed already.

And playing with Micromachines starships is an informative way of learning about the true cross section of a BoP. Hitting one at an arm's length should be pretty similar to hitting one of the "problematic" cloakers of the quoted episodes, or perhaps a bit simpler, yet the ship is positively tiny at that distance. Fire a dozen beams in a cone as wide as your outspread palm, and you're still likely to miss...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[blssdwlf]

True - the odds of hitting a ship drops sharply from the moment a cloaked ship is no longer being fired upon. But I do think that one should at least try

 

[Vanyel]

True - the odds of hitting a ship drops sharply from the moment a cloaked ship is no longer being fired upon. But I do think that one should at least try

That's my point too.

 

[Vanyel]

But too bad the writers forgot that phasers can be set to wide beam sweeps

Can they? We've never seen a starship phaser do that.

Timo Saloniemi

But they can. Wasn't there an episode of TOS where Kirk ordered a wide beam to stun a large area of a city?

So if that is the case. A wide angle beam could light up the cloaked BoP, allowing other ship phasers to fire a tight beam on it.

True there would be a very small window to fire both a wide beam and then a tight beam before the BoP jumps into warp.

 

[Timo]

If it's a beam that hits a city block from five hundred kilometers up, it's not very "wide".

And that was a stun beam in any case. The only other time we saw a beam that wasn't narrow as a pencil was in "Return to Grace" where the phaser emission from Dukat's transport ship was a wide and diffuse cone - and that one was too weak to even scratch the paint of an unshielded BoP! I'm not sure it would be sufficient even for the light-n-paint job...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vanyel]

If it's a beam that hits a city block from five hundred kilometers up, it's not very "wide".

And that was a stun beam in any case. The only other time we saw a beam that wasn't narrow as a pencil was in "Return to Grace" where the phaser emission from Dukat's transport ship was a wide and diffuse cone - and that one was too weak to even scratch the paint of an unshielded BoP! I'm not sure it would be sufficient even for the light-n-paint job...

Timo Saloniemi

If the beam can be widened to hit a city block (an area that is open to interpretation) it stands to reason that it could be made wider. The beam would most likely not do any damage to the cloaked BoP, it might even be too diffuse to light up the BoP like a Christmas Tree, but even a sparkle can be enough to target phasers.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If it's a beam that hits a city block from five hundred kilometers up, it's not very "wide".

And that was a stun beam in any case. The only other time we saw a beam that wasn't narrow as a pencil was in "Return to Grace" where the phaser emission from Dukat's transport ship was a wide and diffuse cone - and that one was too weak to even scratch the paint of an unshielded BoP! I'm not sure it would be sufficient even for the light-n-paint job...

Timo Saloniemi

If the beam can be widened to hit a city block (an area that is open to interpretation) it stands to reason that it could be made wider. The beam would most likely not do any damage to the cloaked BoP, it might even be too diffuse to light up the BoP like a Christmas Tree, but even a sparkle can be enough to target phasers.

Depends on the range. If the phaser beam is diffuse, beyond a certain range its energies will bounce off the cloaking field just as well as ordinary light. Even the normal detection methods for cloaked ships require narrow particle beams in sweeping patterns; phasers are one way to do this, but antipritons is apparently easier (probably faster and requires less energy), and the tachyon method is much more reliable.

 

[T'Girl]

It would depend on how the cloaking device worked. The Romulan ship in "The Balance Of Terror" simply became invisible, you couldn't see it but it was physically still there. If later cloaking devices had the ship drop into subspace (warp factor zero) or maybe ascend into some realm of hyperspace, then it wouldn't do any good to continue to fire at it. Your fire could past straight through it and have no effect because there is nothing physically there, no substance.

 

[Vanyel]

It would depend on how the cloaking device worked. The Romulan ship in "The Balance Of Terror" simply became invisible, you couldn't see it but it was physically still there. If later cloaking devices had the ship drop into subspace (warp factor zero) or maybe ascend into some realm of hyperspace, then it wouldn't do any good to continue to fire at it. Your fire could past straight through it and have no effect because there is nothing physically there, no substance.

I think it has been well established that in Trek cloaked ships are still there, just invisible to sensors or sight.

 

[blssdwlf]

It would depend on how the cloaking device worked. The Romulan ship in "The Balance Of Terror" simply became invisible, you couldn't see it but it was physically still there. If later cloaking devices had the ship drop into subspace (warp factor zero) or maybe ascend into some realm of hyperspace, then it wouldn't do any good to continue to fire at it. Your fire could past straight through it and have no effect because there is nothing physically there, no substance.

You might be thinking of the phase-cloak developed in TNG...

 

[SoM]

Indeed - the illicit Starfleet interphase cloak from "The Pegasus" made objects intangible as well as invisible, but that was explictly presented as Different.

[Compare Rom & Quark being able to carry a cloaked Klingon cloaking device in DS9: "The Emperor's New Cloak" - while complaining about the weight, no less!]

 

[Vanyel]

Indeed - the illicit Starfleet interphase cloak from "The Pegasus" made objects intangible as well as invisible, but that was explictly presented as Different.

[Compare Rom & Quark being able to carry a cloaked Klingon cloaking device in DS9: "The Emperor's New Cloak" - while complaining about the weight, no less!]

That cloak might have pushed the ship into subspace. If it phased through the asteroid, the rock should have passed through the ship, leaving the crew unable to breath. However, if it went into subspace, it could go through the asteroid without the asteroid going through it.