How does a cloaked ship move through the gas and dust of the interstellar medium without being noticed by some sort of sensor device?
JDW
JDW
A Cloaked Ship ?
- Thread starter James Wright
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Generally, it doesn't. Which was a plot point in "Balance of Terror" and "Arsenal of Freedom".
That is, generally, there is no gas and dust in the interstellar medium. And no, a dozen atoms per cm^3 doesn't count. There wouldn't really be any technology to reliably tell whether such a non-density of matter is swirling on this particular volume in this particular manner on its own accord or due to the presence of a starship.
Not today anyway. Perhaps Trek has its own equivalents of sub-hunting sonars that can identify dust swirls with a certain percentage of reliability, and its own breed of eccentric sonar operators who claim to be able to spot cloaked vessels but are viewed with healthy sceptiscm by their commanding officers.
Timo Saloniemi
That is, generally, there is no gas and dust in the interstellar medium. And no, a dozen atoms per cm^3 doesn't count. There wouldn't really be any technology to reliably tell whether such a non-density of matter is swirling on this particular volume in this particular manner on its own accord or due to the presence of a starship.
Not today anyway. Perhaps Trek has its own equivalents of sub-hunting sonars that can identify dust swirls with a certain percentage of reliability, and its own breed of eccentric sonar operators who claim to be able to spot cloaked vessels but are viewed with healthy sceptiscm by their commanding officers.
Timo Saloniemi
^ 
Who pipes classical music through the subspace, just for fun? 
Who pipes classical music through the subspace, just for fun?
How did Data use torpedoes to pinpoint the Romulan supply ships during the Klingon Civil War, how did he know where to fire them!?
JDW
JDW
Maybe they dump the waste heat into subspace (after all, any problem can be solved by using the Magic Of Subspace TM).
It works for Optimus Prime's trailer as well
They could also simply pack the heat in a compact form (say, small metal droplets) and shoot it out in confusing directions. One would see a few hot spots flare up along the path of a cloaked vessel, but not in a dense and clear enough a geometry to tell one anything new about the presence or movement of the ship.
During combat, the ship could easily "hold her breath", pumping heat into an internal sink which then gets emptied at the earliest opportunity. Starships expend fantastic amounts of energy in short time often enough, say, when firing their weapons; excess heat could be expended in conjunction with such operations.
The laws of thermodynamics would only become a nuisance if the cloaked mission lasted for days and days, without a chance for relief. Perhaps those laws are unbreakable even after one discovers things like subspace or antigravity or FTL travel, but they can certainly be bent to a significant degree by applying those discoveries; waste heat management should be a triviality compared with all the violations of currently known conservation laws that a warp drive or a transporter must commit.
Timo Saloniemi
During combat, the ship could easily "hold her breath", pumping heat into an internal sink which then gets emptied at the earliest opportunity. Starships expend fantastic amounts of energy in short time often enough, say, when firing their weapons; excess heat could be expended in conjunction with such operations.
The laws of thermodynamics would only become a nuisance if the cloaked mission lasted for days and days, without a chance for relief. Perhaps those laws are unbreakable even after one discovers things like subspace or antigravity or FTL travel, but they can certainly be bent to a significant degree by applying those discoveries; waste heat management should be a triviality compared with all the violations of currently known conservation laws that a warp drive or a transporter must commit.
Timo Saloniemi
That would be a death-ray. Why bother with disruptors and photon torpedoes?
He knew where to fire them because he figured out how they were bypassing the tachyon detection grid.
They were flooding the area around Data's ship with tachyons, so the tachyon beams the Starfleet ships were sending to each other became useless. This created a blind spot in the grid that the Romulan ships could slip through. Data adjusted the sensors to detect the residual tachyons on the hulls of the Romulan ships.
He then set the torpedoes to low yields to the explosions would reveal the ships but not damage them. He was looking to expose the ships, not provoke a war with the Romulans.
The Trek answer I would vote for is to dump all of the waste energies into subspace.
You can re-use a small amount of it, but you're always going to have waste heat, as no system is 100% energy efficient. All modern projections for nuclear-powered spacecraft involve the use of huge, exposed radiator panels to shunt off as much waste heat as possible. A vacuum is not the ideal medium into which to disperse heat, either. Makes an excellent insulator.
I remember a scene in Star Trek III TSFS where Kirk noticed a "ripple" as the cloaked Klingon ship moved in to attack, how has cloaking technology improved over the years and which is better, Klingon or Romulan?
JDW
JDW
Well the Romulan War Birds appear to not be detectable except via an active tachyon scan, where their Birds of Prey could be detected from the impulse drive emissions "Balance of Terror". And I don't recall a Romulan ship post-Bird of Prey being detected before it uncloaked, so my money is that the Romulans either didn't give the Klingons all of their tricks when they handed over their cloak technology or Klingon tolerances are not as tight as Romulan. 
Well the Romulan War Birds appear to not be detectable except via an active tachyon scan, where their Birds of Prey could be detected from the impulse drive emissions "Balance of Terror". And I don't recall a Romulan ship post-Bird of Prey being detected before it uncloaked, so my money is that the Romulans either didn't give the Klingons all of their tricks when they handed over their cloak technology or Klingon tolerances are not as tight as Romulan.
Also -- technology advances. It's a constant battle of innovation in cloaking technology versus innovation in sensor technology.
The Romulans seem to be more advanced than the Klingons by the 24thC (I get the impression a warrior culture might not be as inventive as some others), so I suspect their cloak has advanced more in that time. However, the Romulans don't seem to be able to detect the Klingons, as evidenced by "The Defector", so perhaps they've both advanced in their own way.
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