The Dominion War And The Phasing Cloak...

[Farscape One]

I know the phasing cloak was introduced in TNG's "The Pegasus", but this is specifically a DS9 question.

In the early part of the war, up until the Romulans entered, why didn't Starfleet try to make it work for a few ships? Even after they join the war, they could have negotiated with the Romulans to use it only for the war. I know they the Romulans wouldn't likely go for it, but why not try?

And even without that, why not try to negotiate for cloaking devices to be loaned for use during the war? Or the Klingons lending some?

This could have given the Federation alliance an edge much earlier in the war, and possibly stopped many more deaths from happening by winning the war earlier.

 

[Kronos]

Someone forgot where they left it.

 

[Timo]

We know the Feds have cloaks - we see the DS9 heroes use one, after all. Does that help them much? Not really - we see the DS9 heroes get caught basically every time anyway.

The early Dominion War episodes specifically point out that the Dominion has multiple ways of seeing through cloaks: antiproton beams for point-blank sensing, but also big planetary platforms for defeating cloaks across an entire sector. We also learn there's no way to keep the Dominion down for any length of time: whatever the Feds destroy, the Dominion can rebuild, despite being a mere beachhead force cut off from its home base.

Did cloaks (Klingon, Romulan) ever make a difference in the war? We barely saw them used. And even though that sort of follows from the definition, we should still see some significance to the fact that the Klingons and the Romulans were not shown cloaking against their Dominion adversaries beyond IIRC a pitiful two instances: Worf in Martok's ship ambushing a single bugship in the teaser of "Favor the Bold" (with the help of the visible Defiant), and again Worf in Martok's ship infiltrating a Dominion system on a supposedly suicidal flare-bombing mission in "Shadows and Symbols". Elsewhere, Klingon and Romulan ships remained visible, even throughout supposedly stealthy missions such as the escort job of "Sons and Daughters".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[kkt]

I haven't watched "Pegasus" in a long time - didn't the Federation agree to give up all attempts to develop a cloaking technology? Maybe they kept their word and would have been starting completely from scratch if they wanted to develop one for the Dominion War. And the Romulans certainly would not have given permission until after "In the Pale Moonlight". We know the Defiant's cloak was borrowed from the Romulans.

I don't expect cloaks to make a difference in big fleet battles. But they'd allow scout ships to learn things without being exposed themselves, and possibly a small fleet to move into position undetected.

 

[Timo]

Giving up on something that's invisible to begin with doesn't sound like a thing anybody would do for real... And it would take quite some effort to effectively scratch something already done, in a civilization where dusty old blueprints can be transformed into a physical weapon at the push of a button ("Field of Fire").

The value of cloaks might indeed lie in fields of application where the camera does not follow. Strategic positioning under cloak seems to be a Klingon thing to do (they are even stated to routinely cloak their civilian liners, in "Rules of Engagement", supposedly exactly to facilitate strategic redeployment when needed). But this is exactly the thing we see them not do against the Dominion, in the convoy of "Sons and Daughters" and in the supposed surprise attacks on Chin'Toka and the like. Even though they did humungous-scale strategic cloaking to get the drop on Cardassia in "Way of the Warrior"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Farscape One]

Good points, all.

But one thing we have to remember is the Klingon and Romulan ships were working alongside Starfleet ships. I think they remained uncloaked for two reasons.

First, to make sure their Starfleet allies don't collide with them. Second, it takes a second or two for shields to be up after decloaking, which the Dominion can fully take advantage of. Going in fully shielded seems the strategically better option, especially when you have a few hundred ships flying in with you.

 

[Timo]

The obvious answer to that would be to leave the Feds out of the formations. And if you have 500 cloaked ships, decloaking them piecemeal will probably inconvenience the enemy more than you - if they move against an emerging unit, they are outmaneuvered by a still invisible one, as in "Favor the Bold".

Were these things left undone for sheer political convenience, or are there more direct technical or tactical objections at play?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Someone forgot where they left it.

In the Big Pile of Forgotten Tech™, right next to the 100-year-old Spore Drive that makes the entire premise of the show obsolete and wide beam phaser settings that would have saved a lot of lives in "The Siege of AR-558"

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

The Dominion could easily track a ship under cloak, which puts it in a severely weakened spot as they don't have shields so would be easy targets. I raised in another thread about a phasing device, which would leave the ship visible but impervious to weapons fire.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

Is it possible that cloaking devices are not "plug and play?" It is possible that for best performance, the cloaking device needs to be designed to the specifications of each ship, and that installing a random cloaking device in the Defiant meant that the protection it provided would be less ideal than one specifically made for a Bird of Prey or D'Deridex.

 

[Timo]

Whenever we see the actual devices, they are indeed plugged in and played with, posing no complications worth dialogue. No doubt fine-tuning is an art unto itself, but I gather it would only be an issue in the rat race between the Alpha players. Against the Dominion, a cloak would have to perform a quantum leap. And everything about the war suggests that the Alpha cloaks just couldn't leap high enough.

I raised in another thread about a phasing device, which would leave the ship visible but impervious to weapons fire.

Can it do that, though? Every time somebody got phased ("The Next Phase", "The Pegasus", "natural" phasing in "Time's Arrow" etc.), they became invisible...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Those were phasing cloaks.

 

[Timo]

Well, nobody in "The Pegasus" suggested using a non-invisibility mode, either for leaving the asteroid or for revealing the ship's presence to the angry Romulans...

And invisibility seemed to be a pure side effect in the phasing of "Time's Arrow". I'd really like to think all this "phasing" stuff in Trek is related to the same phenomenon, including people phasered to invisibility by sidearms, and people phased to invisibility by transporters, warranting the common terminology.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bad Thoughts]

Whenever we see the actual devices, they are indeed plugged in and played with, posing no complications worth dialogue.

Considering there was only one time an alien cloaking device was employed without testing on a Federation ship, the sample size isn't there to support that statement.

 

[Timo]

To the contrary, I think the statistics strongly favor the plug-and-play aspect. Three times out of three, a compact cloaking device transplanted to a ship from a random culture works like a charm when installed by a non-expert. Furthermore, three times out of said three, the people involved trust their very lives on things working like a charm, and construct their plans on not needing any sort of outside help or shakedown time.

1) In "The Enterprise Incident", Kirk shoves the Romulan device on the surprised Scotty's lap and, a few minutes later, becomes invisible to the very Romulans he stole the thing from.
2) In "Profit and Loss", Quark donates an off-the-shelf-and-under-the-counter cloak to an academician and her two disciples and personally (in what can't be a full hour, even) plugs it into their Cardassian vessel so that they can escape the pursuing military which already has a warship waiting at point blank range.
3) In "Emperor's New Cloak", Quark and Rom steal a Klingon cloak, manage to turn the device itself invisible for the duration of the theft, and get the thing working even faster than Bashir thinks they could.

And never mind the bit where Kol's Klingons steal the secret of cloaking from T'Kumva and install it fleetwide in no time flat, suggesting there's very little to it after you get to possess either the device or its blueprints...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[WraithDukat]

Someone forgot where they left it.

It’s in the same place as the Spore Drive and Genesis Torpedo.