Post-TOS Trek Movies: Can You Fire While Cloaked?

[Snaploud]

I'm trying to remember if we ever saw cloaked ships firing weapons post-TOS Trek movies. Obviously, there was that one prototype in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, but did any of the TNG, DS9, or Voyager era ships have that ability? Did the technology just disappear after that prototype?

 

[kv1at3485]

I don't think there's anything technically prohibiting about firing while cloaked. I suspect it's discouraged since firing defeats the purpose of the cloak. After all, presumably weapons fire doesn't appear out of nowhere for no reason! On the other hand, it would work rather well if you are guaranteed to disable the opponent in the opening salvo.

Nemesis shows what should be done against an opponent who decides to fire while cloaked: once he starts shooting don't let him slip away and make hit and run attacks, keep in contact, ping him with weapons fire so you always know where he is. Of course, nothing was stopping Scimitar from warping away and breaking contact and coming back...

 

[Unicron]

My impression has always been that you can't fire weapons while cloaked because they consume a lot of energy, and the cloak does too. The ship simply doesn't have an adequate amount of power to do both at the same time. The only exceptions have been specially modified ships like the Scimitar and the Dakron (Chang's ship). This makes some sense from a dramatic standpoint, and also keeps the cloak from being too great an advantage.

 

[cultcross]

My impression has always been that you can't fire weapons while cloaked because they consume a lot of energy, and the cloak does too. The ship simply doesn't have an adequate amount of power to do both at the same time. The only exceptions have been specially modified ships like the Scimitar and the Dakron (Chang's ship). This makes some sense from a dramatic standpoint, and also keeps the cloak from being too great an advantage.

This is the usual explanation, which makes the crew's reaction in TUC rather over the top - if it's a power requirement thing, a ship with a second warp core shouldn't have any issues at all - really too ridiculous a feat of engineering to come up with?
I always preferred the idea that the cloaking field would mess with weapons as it does light (particularly as phasers are beam weapons), and perhaps even reflect the fire back onto the ship. A similar explanation to the 'can't beam through shields' thing.

 

[Unicron]

I don't think simply adding a second warp core is the easiest solution, nor is it feasible on every ship.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, we aren't exactly told that cloaks would be particularly power-hungry. Indeed, we are led to believe the exact opposite: whenever we see a cloaking device (and even sometimes when we don't see one), it is only the size of a big suitcase at worst, and can be hooked up to any crappy old crate to turn her invisible. And when the Bird of Prey commandeered by our heroes starts to run out of power in ST4, the cloak is the last thing that remains operational. Nothing is ever said of it consuming a lot of power.

...Except perhaps as regarded the prototype cloakship in "Balance of Terror". But even there, we don't actually learn that the cloak would be the power-hungry thing. It might be the plasma mortar instead. Or then the ship just happened to have small fuel tanks, what with being a single-purpose prototype/testbed and all.

It seems that Spock's speculation about power consumption in that episode was just as misguided as Scotty's ideas about Romulan propulsion.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[matthunter]

It seems that Spock's speculation about power consumption in that episode was just as misguided as Scotty's ideas about Romulan propulsion.

They may have gotten it backwards, though - it's not the power drain caused by cloaking, it's that the ship has to operate on reduced power so that the cloak can effectively hide the power signature. Activate the weapons or shields and there's a big energy spike which a nearby ship could detect. We see the lights dim on the bridges of cloaking ships quite a lot, very similar to the "Gray Mode" on Voyager when they were low on power in Demon.

Of course, warp drive should also cause a huge energy spike, but since most scanning for ships at warp happens at long ranges, it might be that the cloak is sufficient to mask the warp signature under those circumstances, whereas a nearby ship might still detect it (like DS9 did with the Klingon fleet in Way of the Warrior).

 

[Timo]

Factors like that no doubt feature into whether a player in a given era and situation finds it worthwhile to cloak his ships.

It may well be that the sensors of the ST6:TUC era could not detect a cloaked vessel even if she had her weapons running hot and her shields on full. But once sensors improved, the rules of the game would change. It would still be useful to cloak the ship for infiltration missions, but it would no longer be practical to fire when cloaked because the mere arming of the weapons would negate the cloak.

After all, FWIW, the cloakships in TOS and TOS movies did not seem to attempt any sort of "silent mode" when going invisible. They only start doing that in the TNG era, and in DS9 out heroes finally learn (like Romulans apparently had learned long ago) that effective cloaking requires powering down several key systems.

Probably cloaks attenuate low to medium intensity warp fields sufficiently that they disappear in the background noise at long ranges, or at least become indistinct so that one can never tell whether it's a high speed warpship out there, or just another of those silly space mollusks or a sorry little explorer from some primitive, upstart culture. Sometimes partial cloaking is better than no cloaking at all. But when you really want to arrive unannounced, partial cloaking may be much worse than no cloaking: it ruins your entrance, and it hobbles you with all the extra effort, power drain, limitations on weapon preheating, whatnot.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

"Face of the Enemy" also mentioned that the cloak has to be precisely regulated in order to hide the ship completely at warp. Even a small variance could allow the ship to be detectable. That doesn't offer any info on the power consumption, but does suggest that even modern Romulan cloaks (which presumably are top of the line) are still finicky devices.

 

[darthgordon]

Yeah, the Scimitar was able to fire when cloaked in Nemesis.

My assumption was that it was always a combination of several things. The energy consumption of the cloak, the energy usage making it more possible to see them and the cloak itself which creates a field around the vessel capable of bending light and active sensor beams. Something like that could be difficult to fire through.

 

[Unicron]

The cloaks in Star Wars are described as being a "double blind" system - they make the ship effectively invisible on both sensors and visually, but also block communications and other emissions from the cloaked ship.

The Protoss in StarCraft seem to be on the opposite end of the spectrum. Their cloaks don't seem to use very much energy (at least compared to Terran cloaks), nor do their energy shields. StarCraft units can fire weapons while cloaked, but that's because these systems have their own independent reserves. Terran cloaks still consume energy to maintain the field.