I was watching Pegasus after not seeing for a few years. And, some thoughts occurred to me. I know the Federation was not allowed to develop cloaking tech. Even with just the phase shifter part of the tech it still could be a great defensive. So what if they can see you if their weapons and even their whole ship can pass through you unharmed. I couldn't think of a better way to shield yourself, and would've been of great help during the coming dominion war. Even if was just deployed on the shipyards. It could've shorted the war or at the very least saved many lives on both sides. There is some canon reason that the tech wasn't researched further or, was it just forgotten about by DS9 writers?
Phased Cloak thoughts
- Thread starter justaredshirt
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I like the idea, but doesn't the idea of the phased cloak really just revolve around being phased? Point being, it's not really a cloak at all. It's just being phased, sort of the same way the TNG crew was phased on Devidia II. They were invisible to the Devidians, as a result of being partially out of phase. I'm not sure how one could do that, & still remain visible
They were cloaked (ie: invisible) on top of being phased, while using the Pegasus cloaking device. They passed through the asteroid and couldn't be seen by the Romulan ship until they "dropped the cloak".
Though maybe the tech worked in such a way that the phasing created the cloak and they weren't separate things.
Though maybe the tech worked in such a way that the phasing created the cloak and they weren't separate things.
Romulans seem to have rather specific rules about invisibility - or, rather, about what sort of invisibility doesn't count. Primitive holograms to fool primitive tribes do not raise their ire, but anything with military value (i.e. anyhthing that can fool Romulans) appears to be against the treaty. It wouldn't matter how Starfleet achieves its cloaking effect as long as the effect is effective...
This "phasing" stuff sounds like as if it would be at the heart of most treknology. Go a teeny weeny step forward or backward in time like the Devidians and you are "phased", that is, rendered invisible and intangible to the world and thus capable of moving through solid matter - just like when you are transported (a process involving a "phased matter") or "phasered" to death... One wonders if the other two main branches of treknology, subspace fields and gravity control, aren't part of the "phasing" phenomenon somehow, too.
Timo Saloniemi
This "phasing" stuff sounds like as if it would be at the heart of most treknology. Go a teeny weeny step forward or backward in time like the Devidians and you are "phased", that is, rendered invisible and intangible to the world and thus capable of moving through solid matter - just like when you are transported (a process involving a "phased matter") or "phasered" to death... One wonders if the other two main branches of treknology, subspace fields and gravity control, aren't part of the "phasing" phenomenon somehow, too.
Timo Saloniemi
Like every other universe-changing invention in Star Trek, it was swept under the rug.
If phasing without cloaking was possible it could also be useless, it seems to be relatively easy to bring things or people back into phase, when it happened to Geordi and Ro all they had to do was flood Ten Forward with totally harmless particles and they were back. I think it's very possible tnat all it takes to force an enemy ship back into phase would be a modified deflector dish.
But even if they can't force a ship back into phase, if a phased but uncloaked enemy ship shows up then what? It can easily be tracked and followed by other ships, it may be intangible but presumably its weapons are useless too while phased. So it just sits there and can't do anything, not even spying because every bit of information they gather while completely visible would be known by their enemies.
But even if they can't force a ship back into phase, if a phased but uncloaked enemy ship shows up then what? It can easily be tracked and followed by other ships, it may be intangible but presumably its weapons are useless too while phased. So it just sits there and can't do anything, not even spying because every bit of information they gather while completely visible would be known by their enemies.
Not necessarily. The way it's explained in "Time's Arrow", one of the universes is lagging behind the other. Our two protagonists in "The Next Phase" might be lagging behind Picard and the others in the fashion of Stephen King's Langoliers - seeing the trailing ends of the actions of the regular heroes, the lingering afterimages. But when they see those, it's already too late to respond. And in some fantastic scifi fashion, they aren't just late from a particular event, they are totally late for every millisecond of their new, phased existence.
That they aren't late from gravity (the artificial sort that keeps them on the floors) may tell us something about the nature of phasing - but it may be just a matter of degrees. The heroes of "Time's Arrow" didn't sink through the ground, either, but they also didn't have the power to walk through the walls. Perhaps with a bit more phasing, LaForge would have fallen through the gravity forces just as easily as he pushed through the EM forces that made the walls solid.
That Ro thought she might be dead may not have been too far off the mark, either. Assuming, that is, that a person in her profession is likely to face death from the barrel of a phase weapon... Again just a difference of degrees, with the ghosts of phasered people made so thin that not even fellow ghosts can see them.
When the phase-cloak was used tactically in "The Pegasus", it seemed to have more penetrating power than in the "The Next Phase" scenario - no resistance at all from the thickness of rock, and no gravitic effects. Perhaps a matter of degrees again, with more protection against easy countermeasures simply because the knob was turned from 0.47 all the way to 11,000?
But the weapons no doubt can be de-phased at the flick of a switch... And the phased intruder won't flick the switch until the weapons are deep inside the soft belly of the enemy, well past his armor.
Why would that be an invalid mode of spying? "Ah, I see you are planning for your big secret offensive here. Never mind me, I'll just take notes and then go. Oh, you pack up and go as well? I'll come along, it's no bother, no, really, you don't even have to hold those thick armor doors open for me or anything. And I can see inside that briefcase and that pocket and the brassiere and... Oh, what an interesting mind you have! Mind if I map your neurons while I'm in there?"
Timo Saloniemi
Don't even really need it to be shipwide for that; I always assumed that's exactly what transphasic torpedoes were.
It's not hard to see why it disappeared, they probably deleted all the data on it and scraped it completely to avoid breaking the treaty with Romulus.
I find the phasecloakthing to be too much, Trek is science fiction but a device that makes you be there but not be there... too weird. That's more a Doctor Who thing.
There was no way to avoid breaking the contract, it had already been broken.
It wouldn't work, the romulans would never believe that all data was deleted because they wouldn't do it and honestly, neither would the federation. Picard and the D crew were a bunch of idealistic goody two shoes but not everyone in the federation or starfleet was like that.
How would you even delete all data when geordie gained a lot of knowledge by installing the cloak in the Enterprise, it's not like they plugged it without taking a good look at it. Even if Geordie couldn't rebuild it immediately he would have learned how it works in principle.
I think the most logical explanation of why it diasappeared is that it simply didn't work reliably. Sure, it worked for 30 seconds to get the Enterprise out of the asteroid but what if the cloak had a tendency to randomly shut down or bring parts of the ship back into phase after a minute or two.
Those seemed more about getting past shields, then blasting the hull.
Certainly phasing into a different "place" could allow them to get inside a ship.
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