Praetor Pontilus... WTF? TGTMD

[foravalon]

Admittedly I've just begun to read The Good That Men Do in my mad dash to get caught up before Destiny comes out, but I just read the section where Valdore is getting his military briefing on the failure of cloaking technology and how it's not possible to cloak an entire vessel yet and the reference to the disaster of the single prototype ship, the Praetor Pontilus, that made the attempt, thus setting the program back for decades...

So my question is, wtf are they talking about?!? Is this a reference to a previous book or just M&M being cryptic and odd again? "Minefield" came right out and showed us two hunky-dory cloaked ships which didn't seem easily detected or explodey. Are the authors saying these were both experimental prototypes, and the Enterprise just happened to stumble upon them amongst all the stars? Then perhaps they blew up soon after the Ent's departure? Or did the author's simply forget which I admit would be extremely odd since they made the blatant mention of the mines. I dont' even know what's going on here.

Sorry, I let my rant rest now, I'll continue enjoying the rest of the book.

 

[Sci]

Admittedly I've just begun to read The Good That Men Do in my mad dash to get caught up before Destiny comes out, but I just read the section where Valdore is getting his military briefing on the failure of cloaking technology and how it's not possible to cloak an entire vessel yet and the reference to the disaster of the single prototype ship, the Praetor Pontilus, that made the attempt, thus setting the program back for decades...

So my question is, wtf are they talking about?!? Is this a reference to a previous book or just M&M being cryptic and odd again? "Minefield" came right out and showed us two hunky-dory cloaked ships which didn't seem easily detected or explodey. Are the authors saying these were both experimental prototypes, and the Enterprise just happened to stumble upon them amongst all the stars? Then perhaps they blew up soon after the Ent's departure? Or did the author's simply forget which I admit would be extremely odd since they made the blatant mention of the mines. I dont' even know what's going on here.

Sorry, I let my rant rest now, I'll continue enjoying the rest of the book.

First off, take a Romulan chill pill, eh?

That's a new reference. The intent is to reconcile ENT's depiction of apparently cloaked Romulan ships with TOS's claim that Romulan cloaking technology was new and theoretical.

 

[Timo]

...Although the cards are still stacked against it. Even if the Romulans themselves came to the quick realization that their earliest invisibility experiments were on the completely wrong track and had no future, our Earth heroes would already have gotten their first non-sight of invisibility in "Minefield". It would never again be "theoretical" for them, but distressingly practical reality, even if they had no idea how it had been done, theoretically or practically.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

That's a new reference. The intent is to reconcile ENT's depiction of apparently cloaked Romulan ships with TOS's claim that Romulan cloaking technology was new and theoretical.

I've never seen why that needs to be reconciled. More than once, we've seen characters figure out how to penetrate cloaking devices (e.g. The Undiscovered Country) and then seen later characters unable to do so (e.g. in TNG/DS9). It seems implicit that there's a constant arms race between stealth technology and countermeasure technology, so that effective cloaks would be a "new" development more than once over the course of history.

Heck, that was implicit in TOS itself. The "Balance of Terror" cloak didn't fool "motion sensors," allowing a cloaked ship to be tracked if not precisely targeted, but the cloak in "The Enterprise Incident" was totally undetectable, even to the Romulans who developed it. So even in TOS alone, we're looking at two different levels of cloaking tech within the course of three years.

So I'd assume that's the case here: that we're talking about different levels of cloaking. The stealth technology seen in "Minefield" may have given optical invisibility, but still have been penetrable by other kinds of sensors (such as the future tech NX-01 used to penetrate Suliban cloaks). So the kind of cloaking tech that Valdore was talking about there may have been a next-generation cloaking system that would've been more comprehensive, perhaps the same kind of cloak seen in BoT, that's invisible to everything but "motion sensors."

 

[Timo]

The idea of an arms race is both inherent and explicit in the Trek history of cloaking - but "Balance of Terror" is fatally explicit in its insistence that it was the very beginning of that arms race.

Our TOS heroes are not surprised that the Romulans manage to hide from their newest sensors. They are stunned by the very concept that something could fool their eyes. It is only considered a theoretical possibility that invisibility could be achieved by any means, which certainly doesn't agree with the idea that invisibility would have been observed in practice at an earlier date.

No other episode directly suggests that "Balance of Terror" would have been Earth's first taste of invisibility, thankfully enough. So the fateful lines are limited to these two:

Kirk: "I don't see anything. I can't understand it."
Spock: "Invisibility is theoretically possible, Captain, with selective bending of light. But the power cost is enormous. (lifts eyebrow, perhaps bemused) They may have solved that problem."

Okay, so perhaps Kirk is a bit daft, or slept through the classes dealing with the multiple prominent 2150s encounters with practical invisibility screens. We can't always expect perfection from our heroes. But Spock appears ill educated as well, referring to a single theoretical possibility and then implying that the theory has never before been put to practice, as far as he knows at least. This is at sharp odds with his general knowledge of history. And although he does seem to have lacunae with respect to Earth history, the art of invisibility (or at least the related art of advanced visual camouflage) touched directly upon Vulcan lives during the Romulan attempts to incite war in ENT "Aenar".

So yes, I welcome any workarounds that remove or explain away the annoyingly unlikely "BoT" claim that invisibility would be news to our heroes as late as the 2260s. But I fear that to be convincing, such workarounds have to imply that our two favorite heroes were dangerously incompetent in their day jobs.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[foravalon]

Sorry, I let my rant rest now, I'll continue enjoying the rest of the book.

First off, take a Romulan chill pill, eh?

Thanks for the advice Sci, this little innocuous paragraph just set off a little Project Endgame in my brain. For the record though Romulan chill pills are still illegal so I may have to improvise.

 

[Christopher]

So yes, I welcome any workarounds that remove or explain away the annoyingly unlikely "BoT" claim that invisibility would be news to our heroes as late as the 2260s. But I fear that to be convincing, such workarounds have to imply that our two favorite heroes were dangerously incompetent in their day jobs.

Not necessarily. Spock said the power cost was enormous; that would mean it was impractical for a ship to remain cloaked for any great length of time, or to stay cloaked while in motion. The cloaked ships in "Minefield" seemed to fade in and out at relatively short intervals. And where there's enormous power use, there's enormous waste energy leakage, which would make a ship detectable in thermal wavelengths even if it's hidden in visual bands. That could be another part of the problem Spock was referring to; maybe the Romulans finally figured out a way to block their waste heat.

As for why Kirk seemed unfamiliar with it, it could be that the technology fell out of use after "Minefield" because Starfleet figured out how to penetrate it, and the Romulans weren't able to achieve the next theoretical breakthrough until a century later. Their technology could've been set back considerably by the war, just as human technology seems to have been in some ways.

Besides, the bottom line is, this is a work of fiction, and sometimes you just have to accept that something needs to be explained to the characters in order to explain it to the audience. BoT was the first episode to use the concept of a cloaking device, so naturally it needed to be explained there.

 

[David cgc]

I always figured that the part of the reason for the holographic drone was to fix that continuity error through the back door, by implying the romulan cloaks we'd already seen were actually holographic camouflage, and not the "selective bending of light."

 

[Turtletrekker]

^That's my interpretation as well.

 

[Christopher]

That explanation works as well as any. It still fits the idea of cloaking technology constantly advancing to stay ahead of countermeasures.

 

[foravalon]

I always figured that the part of the reason for the holographic drone was to fix that continuity error through the back door, by implying the romulan cloaks we'd already seen were actually holographic camouflage, and not the "selective bending of light."

^That's my interpretation as well.

And an excellent one at that considering those drones were seen to have cloaking capability as well as extensive holo-technology. Given this, I'd be more than happy to accept the tech seen in "Minefield" as holographic camouflage, possibly combined with more conventional stealth techniques, as opposed to the much more sophisticated and power intensive light-bending tech of the later centuries. This primitive cloak would be analogous to the tech that Starfleet uses in the 24th century for covert observation i.e. Insurrection.

I've always been under the impression that those red "invisibility" suits seen in that film were a form of projected holo-camouflage just like that used to mask the observation post and the holo-ship. I was a little bummed that this concept wasn't expressed in the Gard scenes of Mission Gamma. IIRC they basically described the suit there as a magic-tech personal cloaking suit which doesn't work at all for me. Kinda like that gun from "Field of Fire".

 

[JD]

I had thought the same thing about the suits too. Which Mission Gamma was that, because I don't remember them using the stealth suits in any of them?

 

[8of5]

I've always been under the impression that those red "invisibility" suits seen in that film were a form of projected holo-camouflage just like that used to mask the observation post and the holo-ship. I was a little bummed that this concept wasn't expressed in the Gard scenes of Mission Gamma. IIRC they basically described the suit there as a magic-tech personal cloaking suit which doesn't work at all for me. Kinda like that gun from "Field of Fire".

The Star Trek Fact Files went for the holographic option in their description of the suits.

 

[foravalon]

Spoiler: Spoiler to protect awesomeness of Mission Gamma plotlines

It's after the assassination of Shakaar when they're trying to find Gard, IIRC correctly he was hiding out using one of these suits I believe.

 

[KRAD]

I've never seen why that needs to be reconciled. More than once, we've seen characters figure out how to penetrate cloaking devices (e.g. The Undiscovered Country) and then seen later characters unable to do so (e.g. in TNG/DS9). It seems implicit that there's a constant arms race between stealth technology and countermeasure technology, so that effective cloaks would be a "new" development more than once over the course of history.

I hereby provide for free, a spoiler-free bit from my upcoming novel A Singular Destiny:

"Cloaking technology was in a constant state of war with sensors. One side develops a cloak that cannot be detected, so the other side develops sensors that could penetrate it. The most recent victor for the sensor side was the Dominion, who had developed antiproton scans that could detect cloaked ships.

"The [Klingon] Science Institute had been working for many turns to try to overcome the antiproton problem, and they finally appeared to have solved the issue..."

 

[captcalhoun]

ZOMFG! TEH SPOILERZ!!!! WTFBBQHAX?!?!?!?!?11/!?!/

 

[KRAD]

Oh, cut that out. There are no spoilers there. There would've been if I'd included the sentence before the first one quoted, and/or if I'd finished the final sentence.

 

[Deano2099]

Well now we know it involves the Klingons! We'd never have seen that one coming...

 

[JD]

Come on KRAD, you know you want to finish that last sentence.

 

[ncc71877]

Shinzon's cloak in Nemesis was suppose to be near perfect. And that Enterprise could not see them except for the spike from the thaleron(sp?) radiation. I have nothing to add, just an observation.

FWIW: I too assumed that the cloaks I Minefield had been retconned as holo-cloaks instead of light bending ones.

ncc71877