Balance of terror, balance of evidence?

The reason why the Enterprise crew was shocked was becasue they looked like Spock. They probably would not have been shocked had the Romulans looked like any other BEM or humanoid. So I can see why a Romulan response(or human response, had they not looked like Vuclanians), would be: "meh."

 

The Romulans didn't act surprised at human appearance in BoT in the first place.

Kor

 

Because they've been among us!!!!!!!

#StilesWasRight

 

Those hundred campaigns that the Commander and the Centurion participated in were probably against some of the myriad species in the galaxy that look exactly like humans. So when they saw Kirk on the screen, it was like, "Oh, just more of those people with stubby ears."

Kor

 

Why was Spock so sure that no Romulan had ever laid eyes on a human? Maybe Spock was wrong in his analysis.

 

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A perhaps better way to phrase that would be that every president before Lincoln said "The United States are..." and Lincoln was the first that said "The United States IS...".

 

The fun thing is that Spock appears to be plenty wrong in his musings already.

Invisibility isn't theoretical. Spock himself has seen (!) it happen already - the Thasians popped out of nowhere in "Charlie X", say.

Invisibility doesn't consume lots and lots of power, either. The Romulan plasma gun might, meaning there's less fuel to go to the engines and the cloak - but cloaks are the very last thing to fail on ships starved of power, and not just because they'd get dibs on remaining power, because we've seen them powered up easily enough by their own internal batteries.

Should we trust Spock to get it right with anything else in the episode, either? He knows less about Earth history than he lets show, confusing the Eugenics Wars with WWIII...

Timo Saloniemi

 

The Thasians popping out of nowhere doesn't mean they were invisible, it just means they popped out of nowhere.

 

Was this in the episode? I can't remember off the top of my head. If not, it doesn't have much bearing because technology could advance to the point where cloak consumes less power. Spock could be right in his musings at that time.

 

Spock claims invisibility is "theoretically" power-hungry. Improvement of technology would not affect the truth value of that statement: Spock is simply wrong here. (Or thinking about a completely different theory of invisibility from the one the actual cloaking devices of Star Trek end up using. But this just goes to show that a theory of invisibility in which power consumption is low exists, and Spock's adherence to another theory is baseless/unexplained and potentially disastrous.)

Popping out of nowhere is a repeat of the feat the Romulans accomplished, regardless of the means. Perhaps the Thasians just flew in really, really fast? The point is, this is practice, and Spock is talking about theory (in the "not yet practical" sense of the word) against his better knowledge: "invisibly" attacking foes are tactical reality and recent past to him.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Nah. Popping out of nowhere is just like the transporter. From a certain point of view.

Invisibility isn't the only option.

 

Once again I think I'll go with what I'm sure the writers really intended: the Romulan cloaking device DOES consume a lot of power. It's why they can't shoot while cloaked.

Appearing out of nowhere (not being present at all and then suddenly being present) is not the same as being present but not being seen.

 

I'll buy that. There's no reason to think that any lack of surprise on the Romulans' part actually meant that they'd seen humans before.

I can see that BoT presents a premise that fans just aren't comfortable with. Both sides HAD to have seen each other, dammit!

 

Fair enough. It's just that the other obvious interpretation, that the shooting is the power-hungry action, is consistent with what we later learn of cloaks, while the apparent writer intent is not.

Then again, when we next "saw" a Romulan cloak in "The Enterprise Incident", it was reputed to be "new".

There is no practical difference from the viewpoint of our Spock-analogues, though. And "appearing out of nowhere" is tellingly what the cloak explicitly accomplishes in that other episode.

Sure, there are multiple possibilities. But only one outcome. And while Spock has a theory that invisibility gives the outcome in both episodes, it's not a particularly good theory if it is among the less likely ones and multiple other ways to "pop up" are known to the heroes.

Which is why this might be a premise worth exploring. Not yet another boring interstellar war where everything happens like on Earth's oceans (even if analogies and parables otherwise abound).

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yes it's strange isn't it! Kirk and Spock act like they have never come across a Romulan cloaking device before in The Enterprise Incident despite their encounters with cloaked Romulan ships in both Balance of Terror and The Deadly Years! Well we know they haven't seen the actual device before but they react to the news of one as though it is a brand new threat to the Federation!
JB

 

Luckily, the cloak in "The Enterprise Incident" is repeatedly called "new", allowing us to believe that there was an "old" one against which the heroes are comparing this one. And the comparison specifically points out that the new cloak thwarts "tracking", which the cloak of the first Romulan episode did not - that ship may have been invisible but she was not untrackable, especially during turns. (Supposedly, any maneuvering made "noise" the heroes could track, and this new model masks such noise.)

Of course, the writers made sure that the diaogue would also work for those who had never seen an episode of Star Trek in their lives. Good thing the didn't go further than that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

The problem with Enterprise Incident isn't just them acting like they haven't seen the cloak before..

...It's also that despite it being alien tech they have no real understanding of they were able to wire it into the Enterprise very easily and that the Romulans say "We can't detect them, we don't know the frequency!"

Really? You don't know the frequency of your own device and how to neutralize it?

 

All easily explainable with treknobabble.

 

For example:

That the cloaking device would be a black box that only needs a power cable plugged in is consistent with all the times we see actual cloaking devices ("Profit and Loss", "Emperor's New Cloak"). That Scotty took his sweet time finding the power socket is then sufficient verisimilitude for the relative complexity of the task.

As for "frequency", there's no mention of such. A cloak simply makes a ship invisible, regardless of whether it's yours or theirs. Must make it one hell of a task to attack in formation... Or a perfect explanation for why a fleet would decloak en masse in "The Die is Cast".

Timo Saloniemi