I would think that truly cloaking a planet is something that couldn't work. Not necessarily because of the power required an all of that...but simply because planets create gravity fields. I'd imagine that would be pretty easy to detect with sensitive, highly advanced 24th century sen-SORs.
But I doubt you can detect that difference at ultra long range & space is VAST.
If the enemy can't see you, they have no reason to go to your neck of space and scan for the difference in gravity.
Don't forget that they have that giant repulsor bolt that can shove a ship several light years away.
That will create a lot of mystery / superstition amongst StarShip Captains traveling in that area of space and randomly gets shoved into another area.
Kinda like the Bermuda Triangle.
Considering they couldn't find Aldea until Aldea uncloaked, I guess the technology must mask that too.
Though I guess if the attacker has data on the way the planet orbits its sun, then they could probably still calculate where the planet would be when they attack (roughly, at least)
I don't think that Aldea could be hidden very well in "When the Bough Breaks".
They are led by strange sensor readings to the Epsilon Minos system.
RIKER: What's our position, Geordi?
LAFORGE: The Epsilon Mynos system, sir.
RIKER: Thank you, Captain, you're right. I wouldn't miss this for anything.
TASHA: What's so interesting about this system?
RIKER: Aldea. Tasha, I'm surprised you haven't heard the stories about Aldea, the wondrous mythical world. Like Atlantis of ancient Earth or Neinman of Xerxes Seven. Advanced culture, centuries old. Self-contained, peaceful. Incredible technical sophistication providing the daily needs for all the citizens, so that they could turn themselves over to art and culture.
TASHA: Where is it supposed to be?
RIKER: That's the myth. Somehow, as the legend goes, the Aldeans were able to cloak their planet in darkness and go unseen by marauders, and other hostile passers-by who might rob and plunder.
TASHA: What a wonderful fairy tale.
http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/118.htm
Note that teh legend says that Aldea is within the Epsilon Mynos system.
I find it very hard to believe that the cloaking device around Aldea cuts off gravitational interaction between the planet and its surroundings.
Memory Alpha say that Aldea was hidden for "millennia" or for "thosuands of years", and I guesss that the episode itself says that.
Suppose that someone put a force field around the Earth that cut off all external gravity. Earth would continue travelling in a straight line and its path would no longer be bent by the gravity of the Sun, or by the gravity of the Galactic center.
As it happens the direction that the Solar systems travels in its orbit around the center of the galaxy is close to a right angle to the plane that the Earth orbits in. Earth orbits with a speed of about 29.78 kilometesr per second.
So Earth would leave its orbit around the Sun at a speed of about 29.78 kilometers per second, 1,786.8 kilometers per minute, 107,208 kilometers per hour, 2,572,992 kilometers per day, 939,785,328 kilometers per year, 9,397,853,280 kilometers per decade, 93,978,532,800.kilometers per century, and 939,785,328,000 kilometers per millennium.
That distance is about 0.099 of a light year. A small distance compared to interstellar distances, about 2 percent of the typical distance between a star and its nearest neighbor, but a long distance compared to interplanetary distances. I doubt that anyone would say that they were in the Epsilon Mynos system if they were that far from its sun.
And it turns out that the Aldean shield generator is destroying Aldea's atmospheric ozone layer, and the ultra violent ultraviolet rays from Aldea's sun are damaging the genes of the Aldeans.
The Astronomical Unit,or AU, is the more or less average distance between Earth and the Sun. If Earth was cut off from the Sun's gravity it would travel about 0.099 of a light year farther from the Sun every millennium. A light year is about 63,241.077 AU, so about 0.099 of a light year would be about 625.78 AU. The intensity of solar radiation falls off with the square of the distance, so at a distance of 625 AU the intensity of solar radiation would equal the radiaiton that Earth gets from the Sun divided by 625 squared, or one divided by 390,625, or only 0.00000256 as strong as the radiation Earth gets from the Sun.
I don't like sunlight much and wear protective clothing when I go outside, but even I wouldn't worry about the ultraviolet radiation outside at a distance of 625 AU from the sun. After all, the heated space suit I would have to wear in the vacuum outside - all the atmosphere having frozen solid - would block most wavelengths of radiation. And I wouldn't worry about any radiation penetating the buildings I was in either, since they would have to be heavily insulated and tightly sealed to keep the heat and the atmospehre inside
So it is my opinon that Aldea's cloaking device does not cut off Aldea from outside gravity. And so Aldea probably is still orbiting in its old orbit. If there are surviving records of Aldea's orbit it would be simple to calculate where it should be, even after thousnds of years, and bombard that position with your weapons if you want.
Even if there is no surviving record of Aldea's orbit, finding it shouldn't be too hard.
Of course all stars have circumstellar habitable zones where their planets receive the right amount of radiation from their star to have the right temperatures for life. So that means that Aldea should be somewhere farther from Epsilon Mynos than a spherical surface marking the inner border of the habitable zone, and somewhere closer than the spherical surfiace marking the outer border of the habitable zone.
And it is also a fact that the planets in a star system don't orbit in all sorts of widely different planes. Instead they all usually orbit in planes which are only slightly tilted compared to each other and to the plane of the star's rotational equator.
That also helps to greatly narrow down the possible location of Alda.
Since Aldea is not cut off from outside gravity it is probably still influencing the paths of outside objects with its gravity.
So to find Aldea all you have to do is calculate the orbits of the other planet s in the Epsilon Mynos system an dhow the orbit of each planet is slightly perturbed by the gravitational forces of the other planets, and predict the future posiitons of the planets And if a plant travels slightly faster or slower in its orbit. and arrives a tposiitns slightly off from where it should be, that planet must be perturbed by the gravity of some o ther body. The amound and direction of perturbing force will enable you to calculate the position of the perturbing object, in this case Aldea.
In the 19th century mathmaticians used deviations in the positions of Uranusa and Mercury to predict the existance and orbits of the planets Neptune and Vulcan (no, not that Vulcan).. Neptune was discovered as a result of those calculations, though it orbits the Sum much closer than was predicted.
The planet Vulcan, orbiting inside the orbit of Mercury, would have been found it it existed, and relativity provides an alternate explanation of the perturbatinos of Mercury.
And just how large or small were the perturbatinos of Uranus which convinced astronomers it must have been perturbed by another planet?
Here is a link to a question and answer about that:
https://hsm.stackexchange.com/quest...he-orbit-of-uranus-which-led-to-the-calculati
So I find it very hard to believe that anyone could ever mistake Ceti Alpha V for Ceti Alpha VI as in WOK..
In 1844 Friedrich William bessel deduced from wobbles of Sirius that it had a companion star, the two stars revolving around their center of gravity. That unseen companion star, Sirius B, was discovered in 1862. ON eof the methods used in the present time to detect planets of other stars is to note changes in the radial velocityof stars as they wobble around their common ceters of gravity with their planets.
There are several other methods of detecting exoplanets, and some exoplanets have been detected thousnds of light eyars from Earth.
Such methods should not be forgotten in the era of TNG.
In the TOS episode "The Way to Eden":
RINA: What are you working on?
CHEKOV: I am assisting Mister Spock in locating your Eden.
IRINA: Oh, now you are teasing me.
CHEKOV: I am not. These tapes contain star charts, and we project the orbits of the various planets here. By mathematical process, we determine whether or not they are affected by other bodies not yet charted.
Since Eden turns out to be inside Romulan space, they are using data about planetary orbits detected across the Romulan Neutral Zone and light years of space, or maybe data from long ago visits to those systems before the Romulans claimed them.
So I don't see how Aldea could have been hidden from those who wanted to find it.
