I don't remember- was the purpose of the BOP attacks on the Outposts designed to provoke a response so they could test the current state of the art Federation ship or were they just caught in the act?
Balance of Terror unbalanced - the Romulans never had any chance
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I 100% disagree with this statement.
Spacecraft need to be hot and heat has to go somewhere, meaning you will always be detectable by fairly trivial technologies. Unless you happen to be able to maneuver to keep yourself directly between the sun and your target and hope he misses you in the glare. But you don't get to "cheat thermodynamics." Sorry.
This is one of the (many) reasons I see Star Trek as more of science fantasy than science fiction. Doesn't mean I love it any less, but the science of it has always been sorely lacking.
--Alex
And I thank the heavens for that becuase it would be utterly boring if it was hard sci-fi.
The Romulans (in general) seemed to have such a low opinion of how far the Federation (or Earth) could have advanced that they felt reasonably confident they could take on anything they encountered. The destruction of the outposts was indeed a "throwing down of the gauntlet" that couldn't be ignored. But in the end all they could hope for was the element of surprise.
The cloaking tech was still rudimentary and did not render them completely undetectable. That was a potential vulnerability if your enemy knows what to look for. The limited range of their plasma weapon was also a vulnerability because it means they had to get up close to have any real hope of destroying their target.
The Romulan Commander quickly caught on to how outmactched they were and was prudent to know that retreat was the sensibile course of action. The Enterprise was faster, more maneuverable and its weaponry had longer range.
It's interesting that both Kirk and the Romulan Commander came to a similar conclusion albeit for somewhat different reasons. Kirk couldn't let the Romulans escape wth what they learned of Federation capabilities. And it also ssent a clear message that coming after the Federation was done at one's own peril. But the Romulan Commander also realized he couldn't return home with what they'd learned. Firstly Romulan scientists and engineers would unquestionably work on improving their hardware as well as work towards countering Federation capabilities or what they knew of them. There was also the possibility that hawks in the Romulan government could press for open war even based on the current state thinking if they sent enough ships counting on the element of surpise they could wreak serious damage and gain an upper hand. But the Romulan Commander seemed to know they had no real chance against the Federation even based simply on what they had seen in this one encounter: the Federation commander (Kirk) learned to adapt quickly to a seeming disadvantage and used his superior capabilities to his advantage. If Kirk was a reasonable example of Federation capability in combat then it made for a very dangerous opponent to challenge.
To all intents and purposes it really looks like the Romulan Commander sacrificed himself and his ship to prevent or forestall another war just as Kirk was prepared to sacrifice the Enterprise to stop the Romulans from escaping.
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It's a submarine movie. Those near misses are the depth charges the destroyer drops into the water detonating and damaging the sub even if it's not a direct hit.
Sure I do. I have a fridge right here.
There's no theoretical reason why a spacecraft couldn't hide its waste heat; it's all down to the ingenuity and skill of the builders. "Glare" can be made directional with almost trivial ease. Or it can be delayed. Or it can be used to fool or blind your opponent.
Space is the one environment where waste heat is easy to mask, because it won't heat up your surroundings. After all, you have none! You can quite personally and deviously choose what to do with your heat, where to put it, and what to leave visible to your opponents.
That's one plausible take, but then again...
...Why not? If they had previously been under the misunderstanding that they could defeat the Federation, then letting them return with the knowledge that they could not would be a good idea. Just making them disappear would leave the Romulans the possibility of thinking that the mission had been a splendid success until the point where some random hiccup developed, a hiccup no later mission would need to fear.
The ill-advised communication sent to the Praetor had already established that Romulans could blow up Earth outposts with impunity, and that invisibility and plasma weapons could be used as planned. Kirk could do nothing about that by destroying the Romulans afterwards.
And why not? The technologies involved in the mission were obvious dead ends now: minor improving would just guarantee the next disaster, which would be to the Commander's liking.
All things said, we have very little idea what the Romulans (or at least the sponsoring Praetor) intended with their mission. What we do learn is that the outcome resulted in the "no invasion" choice. But was the outcome a success or a failure? Did the Praetor actually want an invasion?
The odds seem a bit against that. Several outposts were neutralized, which means the Romulans were no longer besieged by them - but there was no breakout attempt of any sort. Only a single starship responded - but there was no plan for dealing with even that single vessel, let alone any wider Starfleet response. The Praetor seemed satisfied to leave it all at that. Which means he wasted his one silver bullet, alerting Starfleet to it, and negated the possibility of waging war with it. Perhaps that was his goal all along, to undermine any efforts of the warhawks? (Perhaps that's why he employed the like-minded Commander, and why the Commander followed him rather than some other Praetor?)
Timo Saloniemi
Listening to the way the Romulan Commander and the Centurion were talking it seemed pretty clear the Praetor wanted war. The failure of their ship returning my have given enough ammunition to saner heads among the Romulans to talk the Praetor out of any further incursions.
Or maybe someone just offed the Praetor to keep him from making any further costly mistakes.
Or maybe someone just offed the Praetor to keep him from making any further costly mistakes.
Hmm... How much later? The subsequent TOS episodes mentioning the Romulans were still both of the "We meet again - and we reserve the right to kill you at will again!" type. Nothing civilized about any of it: if the old treaty was mentioned, then merely in the context that it provides an excuse for the Romulans to kill Kirk, completely ignoring the fact that it also allows Kirk to kill the Romulans who are clearly the ones who were at fault first.
ST5:TFF shows a pseudo-diplomatic undertaking that just emphasizes that diplomacy with Romulans won't solve the crisis du jour or any other crisis. It is only in ST6:TUC that the possibility of doing real diplomacy with Romulus is suggested at all. And while TNG returns to that incident and its diplomatic repercussions, even it doesn't suggest any preceding opportunities for diplomatic dealings.
If so, it's not as if anything Kirk did or left undone would have mattered one iota. The Praetor could use both victory and defeat to launch the conflict; what transpired might in fact be his wettest dream ever, as it demonstrated the factual might of the Romulan military against Earth defenses while providing the casus belli, depending on which half of the mission the propagandists chose to play up.
We really have to postulate that the Praetor was a pushover and this mission perhaps his final gambit to retain power. In that case, any outcome would be his undoing, as his enemies would be the ones in command of the propaganda machine.
ST:ID is sort of the mirror image: a stealth attack engineered to fail perfectly serves the purposes of the Starfleet leader launching the attack. And again, nothing the victims (Klingons) did had much effect on the outcome, while the attackers (Kirk) played in the pocket of their evil leader (Marcus) despite best intentions.
Timo Saloniemi
Don't be facetious. A refrigerator doesn't "cheat" thermodynamics.
As for that wealth of environment you imagine could be used to hide your ship's waste heat, radiating heat into a vacuum, or dumping heat into some kind of medium, such as a gas or plasma, would also point directly back to you.
Or perhaps you want to feed us some technobabble about how your ship's reactors, engine and exhaust are hidden through a fold into another dimension? In which case, Albertese's comment about TOS being a favorite science fantasy still holds.
I think most tech-savvy viewers understand that gimmicks like the cloaking device are allegorical (e.g. submarine warfare), and should not be taken literally.
Yet that's all I need to hide my spacecraft from the enemy.
After all, what I need is a cold face to present to the enemy. The fridge creates waste heat like any machine, but it also pumps that, along with other heat, exactly where I want it: outside and behind the machine. The inside is the cold face I need: my enemy couldn't tell it from the face of an iceberg with his IR camera if he tried.
Obviously, it would not. Radiating heat into anything else might reveal my position. But in vacuum, heat won't make any sudden U-turns. If I emit it away from the enemy, it will never reach the IR sensors of the enemy. Never.
If I dump the heat in a medium, I can always create a separation between that medium and myself, eliminating all chance of tracking down where that medium came from. The medium can present a stealthy face for the time it takes to create this separation, just as my ship itself can.
Alternately, I can send the medium away from the enemy in the shadow of my vessel, so again the heat will not reach his sensors. Not until after it leaves the shadow, which is not as good going as with the simple radiating-away trick, or with the laying of refigerated heat-eggs, but still allows me to remain tactically stealthy.
I'd much prefer if the writer of the Atomic Rocket site got either a good grasp of physics or an imagination, and preferably a combination of the two. He seems to have a massive blind spot here for some reason.
Which is a separate issue from Atomic Rockets having their physics all screwed up. There's nothing theoretically impossible about being tactically stealthy in space. And being optically perfectly invisible / transparent isn't one of the requirements for that, although something close to that could probably be relatively easily arranged.
Timo Saloniemi
So from one direction, stealth, from another a nice "Here I am!" beacon. So all you'd need would to be able to predict 100% accurately which direction the enemy will be in. And for multiple enemies to be so good as to concentrate themselves in that same direction.
Uh, the nice point is that I certainly don't need to be 100% accurate. I only need to be 50% accurate or thereabouts (if I emit hemispherically), or 1% accurate (if I emit narrowbeam).
And if I do emit narrowbeam, I will much appreciate having this "Here I am!" beacon, because I can then use it for frying my enemies.
That's the fantastic advantage of space that people so often fail to grasp: lasers are invisible in space. But so are heat beams... Radiation traveling in straight lines is what makes stealth so damnably easy, and detection almost impossible.
"Multiple enemies in the same direction" is the tactical situation you definitely want anyway, and in space warfare, anything else would mean you have utterly failed in your command duty. With the distances involved, letting the enemy to slip past you would be unforgivable.
If we drop the tactics of real space warfare in favor of Star Trek ones (where invisible ships sneak past others like a submarine through a harbor), then we can stop talking about realistic space stealth, too, because the cloaking device is exclusive Trek reality, and rightly so.
Timo Saloniemi
And if I do emit narrowbeam, I will much appreciate having this "Here I am!" beacon, because I can then use it for frying my enemies.
That's the fantastic advantage of space that people so often fail to grasp: lasers are invisible in space. But so are heat beams... Radiation traveling in straight lines is what makes stealth so damnably easy, and detection almost impossible.
"Multiple enemies in the same direction" is the tactical situation you definitely want anyway, and in space warfare, anything else would mean you have utterly failed in your command duty. With the distances involved, letting the enemy to slip past you would be unforgivable.
If we drop the tactics of real space warfare in favor of Star Trek ones (where invisible ships sneak past others like a submarine through a harbor), then we can stop talking about realistic space stealth, too, because the cloaking device is exclusive Trek reality, and rightly so.
Timo Saloniemi
This is all pretty dubious. Where is all this medium? Are you talking about internal heat sinks? that's fine until it cooks your crew. Or are you ejecting the super-heated medium into space (in a way where your ships somehow remains directly between it and your enemy's IR scanners)? How much of this medium do you carry? You realize it wouldn't be replenishable. And if you are trying to approach as a cold ballistic object (See below) how do you eject your super-heated pellets without adding velocity to your own craft, thus accelerating and thus proving you are not a dumb ballistic object?
And you seem to fail to recognize the requirements of tactical combat. IF your target is singular and stationary, and IF you are approaching it from a perfect trajectory in which you can reach IP on a purely ballistic basis, then MAYBE your gimmicks will work.
But not necessarily.
In all likelihood, they will be scanning their sky for incoming meteors anyhow and will notice when a big one happens to be headed straight for them. And to reach a target ballistically means you had to set up your burn probably MONTHS in advance in order to be far enough away for your opponent to not have seen it. THIS IS NOT TACTICAL COMBAT as your enemy will not stand around waiting for you for months. Unless it's a base on a moon or something. But this will never be how ship-to-ship contacts work. Not ever.
If you are attacking another ship, you will need to maneuver, which means ejecting some kind of matter from your ship, usually in a big bright hot way. And odds are you will have to do so along vectors that will be facing your target. And any time you launch a weapon (even a laser) you will generating heat. A laser does it twice: the area of the ship around the lens will warm up and the target will see it when it strikes them. Which, if your laser is hot enough, shouldn't be a problem, as, if you did it right, you will kill the guy at that point, but my whole argument is that you will never get anywhere close enough to make use of your weapons without first making your position known well in advance.
So, in short, there ain't no stealth in space.
And, while you remind us that we're talking about Star Trek here, which IS my favorite science fantasy, where such magical nonsense is par for the course, you are arguing that stealth would be possible in real life. But it plainly is not.
--Alex
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Who says the Romulans(while cloaked) do not dump their waste energy into subspace?
With ftl sensors as the Enterprise has, couldn't they detect a beam of energy radiating away the BOP even if it was behind them?
With ftl sensors as the Enterprise has, couldn't they detect a beam of energy radiating away the BOP even if it was behind them?
^ You're mixing known physics with TREK's fictional physics. The Enterprise's sensors work however the author wants them to work. And to the best of my knowledge of TREK parlance, "subspace" refers to radio-like technologies. I don't recall it being applied to ship's engines, or waste management, etc. That would be like asking, "Can't the CO2 causing global warming be dumped into FM?"
Warp speed takes place in subspace. Has since TOS.
I don't know about since TOS. If you have a reference, I'd love to see it, as I recall none. But certainly since TNG. It has repeatedly and explicitly been stated that warp drive operates on a principle of nested bubbles of subspace energy.
That's what I remember. The first mention of warp drive in subspace for TOS that I can recall is in James Blish's novel Spock Must Die. And that's definitely post TOS.
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