New uniform/Bashir changeling

[kkt]

A weapon like that would suffer a major inflation in strategic value if exposed through overuse. The Dominion might simply be much smarter than the Alpha Axis, and treat its cloakships like the Allies treated their Ultra intel decrypts in WWII, putting a lot of effort into hiding the very existence of the capacity.

(In contrast, the Defiant was probably given the crappiest cloak in the Romulan inventory, so that there would be little chance of the ship hiding from Romulans. Swapping that for a more capable Klingon unit might not have been worth the effort when it turned out Sisko did not have infiltration of the Romulan Star Empire topmost in his mind after all.)

Timo Saloniemi

The Romulans wanted to know as much as possible about the Dominion, just like the Federation. If the Federation is willing to risk their ship and crew to find out, and they have a Romulan officer aboard making sure they're not holding much back, they'd let the Federation use a good cloak.

 

[Timo]

Then again, we see the Defiant cloak isn't really up to snuff. Unlike Klingon ones, it seems to interfere with the use of transporters...

I doubt anybody in the RSE or Starfleet really thought Sisko would be coming back from his "The Search" sortie. If they did, they'd probably have put the good cloak on a good ship, rather than on a failed one!

Why did they send the Defiant? Purely because she was worthless and expendable for a suicide mission? Or because Starfleet knew shields were worthless at least for the time being and this was the only ship with physical armor on her (even though the writers of course hadn't invented the physical armor thing yet at that point)? Or just because Sisko insisted on going, and retained some sort of control over the Defiant to allow him to go even without full official sanction?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nakita Akita]

We're coming up on the episode on H&I where Garak and Worf are captured by the Jem Hadar and they discover Bashir is already imprisoned, which means that the Bashir on the station is a changeliing. We know this because the real Bashir is wearing the old style uniform. So when did they switch to the new grey shouldered uniform? Was it at the beginning of the season?

He's wearing a different uniform???
I never noticed that at all.
I guess I might notice if a character showed up naked but otherwise I don't think I notice what they are wearing.

 

[Nakita Akita]

I have a better question that I don't think has ever been asked.

HOW did they get Bashir from that conference to the Gamma Quadrant?

A Changling slipped into his room while he was asleep, had him beamed to a ship that was nearby, under the pretense of attending the conference. Then the Changling 'became' Bashir.

The ship waited until the conference was over a couple of days later and left at the same time as the other 400 ships.