Defiant and cloacking device from Romulans, why?

With the new defiant does anyone recall if the defiant kept the Sao Paulo's NCC reg number of did it keep its NX reg number

 

That depends. The hull shows the NX-74205 registry and the Defiant name, while there is a very detailed close-up of the dedication plaque showing the NCC-75633 registry and the Sao Paulo name. Since dialogue establishes that Sisko got "special permission" to change the name to Defiant, but nothing more, we can choose whether to argue that the graphics are accurate and the NX registry holds, or whether the graphics are in error and the NCC registry does.

The former does carry one disadvantage: if we really believe in the visuals, then hundreds of ships in this episode performed the exact same combat maneuvers that they did in previous episodes - including maneuvers leading to their total destruction!

Timo Saloniemi

 

That is just coincident.
Don't you ever hit your head the same way twice?

 

And die of it twice?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Cause and Effect?

 

Overall I think the lack of a Romulan on the station was a detriment to the show. They went to the effort of showing T'Rul in The Search, but then it was quietly dropped? I realise that the Dominion were at times able to detect cloaked ships, yet T'Rul's (or someone else's) presence could have offered us an insight into the Romulan culture over time.

I did hope that Cretak would offer this insight in season seven, but that went elsewhere pretty rapidly. Considering that the Romulans were part of the alliance against the Dominion, I felt their lack of presence compared to Martok, particularly in the Final Chapter.

 

Yeah. I didn't necessarily expect T'Rul to become a regular or anything, but to simply have her disappear after "The Search" was odd. For a little while I held out hope that another Romulan would replace her, but nope...

 

But for any logical continuity, she'd have to be on the bridge whenever the Defiant wanted to cloak, which means having a Romulan extra in dozens of episodes. It's a waste of money for little return.

I've gone with the theory that the Defiant's cloak wasn't anything the Federation wasn't aware of already. It wasn't a top of the line model, it was basically just an upgrade of the one Kirk stole a century earlier, using the same principles. It wasn't cutting edge technology.

The Romulans wanted intelligence, that was the whole point. After they tried to blow up the Wormhole in Visionary, I'll assume they got written reports only.

 

It was possible to write TOS episodes that did not feature Scotty - a dozen of them never did. The Romulan need not have been an extra, but a guest star, for more return. But the writers would be the deciders on that: could the character be "fattened" enough to be of dramatic use? They brought in Worf and found him stuff to do (even if by giving him make-work, which was a great gimmick in itself), but that meant less to do for others.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Or they could've just suspended the treaty of Algeron during the Dominion crisis. Like they suspended the Khitomer Accords. The Feddies knew how to build their own cloaking devices, and they could've gotten the tech from the Klingons if they wanted to. No, they went to the Rommies as a sign of good faith against a shared enemy. Not that the Rommies would ever return the favor or acknowledge the gesture.

 

Regardless, given that they made such a big deal of T'Rul's presence in "The Search", there should have been some explanation for why we never saw a Romulan there again, even if it was just "Nobody volunteered after T'Rul's unfortunate airlock accident."

 

Probably got hooked and debriefed by the Tal Shiar after she was spotted enjoying a jumja stick on the Promenade.

Romulans don't seem the types to let one agent fraternise with the Federation without a handler. Once the Defiant's crew had been trained to operate this cloak, they recalled their operative.

Maybe they sent someone out to service it in an annual basis, like a gas boiler?

 

One theory I heard floating around, the Federation does not "sneak". The Federation is not militaristic (Stafleet Navy notwithstanding) or Imperialistic; they are about peaceful coexistence and sharing and happiness and Root Beer (thank you Quark!). Until stuff like the Dominion War (and perhaps the Borg war) happened, there was no need for the tactical asset a cloaking device would permit.
The Pegasus Factor makes this quite clear; the Federation certainly had the technology to cloak ships if needed; they just never used it since the Romulan Treaty.

And whoever wrote above about the Romulans not "caring" about treaty violations; it was one of those things where they cared more about arm twisting the Federation into concessions than the consequences of those concessions.

 

The Defiant was originally being developed to fight against the Borg. There was an agreement with the Romulans for this one ship to have the cloak.

 

...and only in the Gamma Quadrant. They were tempting fate when they used in it the Alpha Quadrant vs. the Klingons, and they made a point of saying so (The Way Of The Warrior).

 

Yes I remember watching and thinking that they were violating their agreement by using the cloak the way they were.

 

we may ask why romulans let Defiant keep cloak device after the war began. Dominion may had take this bad.

 

The model on the Defiant only had to cloak the smallest Federation vessel, it might be a very old one that's been sitting on a shelf for years but works just fine for the Defiant.

Romulan ships of the line during the war like the Warbird would have had much bigger, more powerful and up to date cloaks with a lot of tweaks.

If they pulled their officer from the ship and let them keep it unsurpervised for years, I think it shows they weren't concerned. I'll bet you any modern Romulan ship could see right through it should the Federation use it against them.

But doing some checking, the Sao Paulo (Defiant 2) wasn't given one. So the Treaty dispensation only applied to the original ship, even the name change wasn't enough to get a second one.

 

One wonders if the story about the Defiant being a dedicated Borg-fighter weren't just another layer of smoke. Perhaps Starfleet instead designed a warship compact enough to be covered by one of the Romulan cloaking device copies they had in stock? But naturally had to go to the Romulans for the eventual cloak so as not to start a two-front war in "The Search".

Did the second Defiant really do (or fail to do) something that would have established a lack of cloak? If only ships of that design can be cloaked with the devices accessible to Starfleet (Klingon, old Romulan), then there'd be little point in making one ship in the 600-ship fleet invisible...

Timo Saloniemi

 

First Contact showed the Defiant taking a beating that was destroying other ships around it in a shorter time, directly to the hull with her shields down so I think we can assume multiple Defiant class ships would fair pretty well, dividing the Cubes attention.

Also they survived the Dominion War, took several more hits than an Akira taking back the Prometheus.

Something about that design is tough. The cloak was more to make sure it's stupidly enormous warp signature was hidden from the enemy until it could sneak close enough to attack.