Neither are submarines, strictly speaking. But submarines are specialized craft; cloaked vessels should be as well, whether or not they've been portrayed that way thus far.
Federation Cloaking Devises post Hobus
- Thread starter Captain Killy
- Start date
That was one of the dumbest things est in TNG. Would the US agree to not develop stealth but Russia and China could? That is obviously ridiculous. But yes, having supposedly agreed to all of this, maybe they would disregard this nutty treaty if there is no longer a credible Romulan govt.
Yes, then the US would proceed by not only not honoring that agreement anyway, but outproce both Russia and China together, spending trillions of dollars on stealth technology shrug their shoulders and declare that universal healthcare is too expensive.
Because that's the way the US rolls
Just when you got sick of the "Is Starfleet a Military" debate, a new argument rears its head to fandom:
"Are Cloaking Devices Military Technology?"
Personally, I think they are something other than military technology, or perhaps more than military technology. But I think Gene said something on the matter, which I'm going to keep posting repeatedly in this argument because Gene is Our Lord and Savior.
Well, submarines are common criminal technology nowadays. And sorta were back in the 1920s-30s already, for that era's going definition of submarine. All the more reason for Rios to possess the tech.
Beyond this purely hypothetical scenario so imaginatively outlined above, all arms limitation treaties are insane from the tactical point of view. Why did the US agree to limit its construction of warships in the 1920s and 1930s, quantitatively and qualitatively, in a treaty that massively favored its less industrialized enemies such as Japan? Why did it shoot itself in the foot in the ICBM race, only agreeing to have enough warheads to terminate all human existence thrice instead of sevence? Why was Hitler too afraid to ever use combat gas except behind closed doors? What happened to dum-dum bullets? Why so few weapons dedicated to eliminating the head of opposing state, who's a softer target overall than his or her million henchmen put together?
Agreeing not to develop cloaks is pretty sane in comparison. After all, agreeing not to field invisible weapons is by definition something you can't be seen reneging on...
Timo Saloniemi
Which brings us back to...freighters aren't submarines.
I think he is. Or at least it's not a submarine.
Another specialized craft. You can't just flip a switch and turn a car into a submarine...Timo said:
That's how anyone rolls. Russia and China would say "Sure, the US can have stealth, we agree not to develop it". Yeah, that's not how this works.
But this is the same Trek universe where they can have hundreds of transporter patterns of Data with his exact blueprints to the the atomic scale and yet, gosh darn it, no one knows how to make a Soong android!
That's odd since Data seemed entirely like himself everytime a transporter re-materialized him. LOL. Of course they DO know how to make Soong androids. It's easy. No problem. But we all agree to pretend that, dag nabbit! They just cant figure this thing out!
Well, there is precedence for this considering other attempts at creating soong type androids haven't ended well. B4 was a dimwit, Lore was a psychopath and Lal, who Data himself created, ended up dying from cascade failure. I'm sure building an android is no big deal, but imbuing it with a personality like Data or preventing it from suffering from cascade failure might have been.
Transporter patterns can only be held for so long before they begin to degrade (under normal circumstances) and can almost never be used for duplication of objects.
No it isnt Timo. There are big differences in all these cases. The US and Royal Navies agreed to a formula that put them at an advantage to Japan. The reason Japan agreed to it was that it allowed them to build alot more than they already had. The US did not say, the Soviets can have ICBMs, but we agree not to develop them. Hitler didnt use gas since it was publically announced by Churchill that if he does use them on the Soviets, the RAF will bomb German cities with gas bombs.
So no, there are NO examples of a state like the Federation agreeing to anything as insane as what they are supposed to have agreed to.
Not sure why that data could not be stored like any other data. And if the transporters sensors can reconstruct you why couldnt replicator sensors. There is no explanation for why you can send Data through a transporter, but not a replicator.
The producers determined that by fiat, so the transporter couldn't be used to clone living people and such.
Of course all you need to get around said decree is to have magical atmospheric disturbances that prompt your transporter chief to lock on a second annular confinement beam, which is then reflected back to the point of origin by accident (i.e. the Thomas Riker incident).
Maddox never said he couldn't duplicate Data. He just said he didn't know how to build Data. Duplicating him with the transporter wouldn't help there: he'd have to vivisect the duplicate, then, and that'd involve the very same legal hurdles as vivisecting the original.
Just as with sentient androids, the cloning of people is shunned as a thing, regardless of method. Transporter copies, in vitro replicas... The direct consequence is the originals drawing their weapons, and their colleagues cheering when they push the trigger. Clones are bad, just like sentient androids are bad. Except perhaps for brief periods that merely serve to assert the badness again.
Blah, irrelevantly small differences. It's insane not to crush your enemies when you can, and to hand over the means of crushing to them when you don't have to. Which is what is nevertheless being done all the time: the US naval might could have secured the Pacific had they not agreed to not building one, while simultaneously giving Japan a carte blanche for kicking up a fighting force that essentially outnumbered the US one (not being split between two oceans and all). The result? A war averted till a time when the US no longer was in the throes of a recession, while Japan was starving to death and in no shape to wage a war (which could probably have been won in a week had the US had some non-defective torpedoes available).
Giving up cloaking is no different from giving up ABM: its one benefit is curtailing of escalation, in a situation where escalation better serves the enemy. Or, as with the Washington and London treaties, in a situation where escalation would better serve you in the short term but is better avoided as a thing. OTOH, treaties forcing escalation are fine when you want an arms race for an arms race's sake, such as with SDI, so that your opponent is beggared to no gain while you... Well, you can take being beggared.
That everybody in Trek doesn't cloak, or nova-bomb, or clone, or go cyborg (even though all would be sensible things to do), is best resolved (for the sole purpose of providing diversity and character to the various players) by dramatic means with a healthy degree of verisimilitude. A seemingly insane arms limitation treaty fills that condition nicely enough!
Timo Saloniemi
Just as with sentient androids, the cloning of people is shunned as a thing, regardless of method. Transporter copies, in vitro replicas... The direct consequence is the originals drawing their weapons, and their colleagues cheering when they push the trigger. Clones are bad, just like sentient androids are bad. Except perhaps for brief periods that merely serve to assert the badness again.
Blah, irrelevantly small differences. It's insane not to crush your enemies when you can, and to hand over the means of crushing to them when you don't have to. Which is what is nevertheless being done all the time: the US naval might could have secured the Pacific had they not agreed to not building one, while simultaneously giving Japan a carte blanche for kicking up a fighting force that essentially outnumbered the US one (not being split between two oceans and all). The result? A war averted till a time when the US no longer was in the throes of a recession, while Japan was starving to death and in no shape to wage a war (which could probably have been won in a week had the US had some non-defective torpedoes available).
Giving up cloaking is no different from giving up ABM: its one benefit is curtailing of escalation, in a situation where escalation better serves the enemy. Or, as with the Washington and London treaties, in a situation where escalation would better serve you in the short term but is better avoided as a thing. OTOH, treaties forcing escalation are fine when you want an arms race for an arms race's sake, such as with SDI, so that your opponent is beggared to no gain while you... Well, you can take being beggared.
That everybody in Trek doesn't cloak, or nova-bomb, or clone, or go cyborg (even though all would be sensible things to do), is best resolved (for the sole purpose of providing diversity and character to the various players) by dramatic means with a healthy degree of verisimilitude. A seemingly insane arms limitation treaty fills that condition nicely enough!
Timo Saloniemi
I'm looking forward to the scene where he sends him an invoice and he says he can't pay it because he doesn't use money.
We all know the real reason that the Federation doesn't use cloaks: Gene's Brian Brophy's Vision.
Bingo!
You may have to change that square.
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