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The Making Of Star Trek....

QUOTE=Drone;11373802]
Well they did study it and used it covertly after the treaty banning it. At any rate that agreement was an important factor in negotiating a complex agreement between two longtime enemies to prevent a competitive advantage presumably. That certainly wasn't the case with the Kelvans' technology that no one else knew about and so wasn't consequent on any existing conflicts that the Federation was engaged in at the time. Why simply turn their backs and not utilize a gift like this if it turned out that there were no technological impediments in doing so. It doesn't really make sense if I'm understanding the rationale you are suggesting correctly.[/QUOTE]

Um in the TOS era there was no treaty banning it because the Romulans DIDN'T have cloaking tech in the Earth/Romulan War. "Balance of Terror" was the first time the Federation had encounter Romulan Cloaking tech (and yes, I know ENT retconned that a bit, but later Manny Coto realized the mistake and gave the Romulans some sort of holographic masking tech that allowed them to make their ships appear and other species ship types.)

I apologize that I didn't make clear that I perceived your reasoning as a generic rationale that could be applied to any such issue happening at any time in the Trekverse, not as a direct contradiction to the Kelvan incident in the TOS era. In my rejoinder, I was thinking specifically of events in the aftermath of the Treaty of Algeron, which I'm aware was not promulgated until early in the following century.

So, again if your meaning in using the example that you did was to illustrate a general rule that would reflexively be followed by Starfleet, my question still remains as to why the differences inherent with the Kelvans' technology would not be seen as an outlier that didn't have to hew to that practice. If there was no question of an implied moral dubiousness about using the system and it was not stolen from another culture, where would the problem be in taking advantage of it, given sufficient time for all of the ramifications of doing so coming to be understood by the Starfleet boffins?
 
technical details that weren't canonized until later, like the idea of the forward parabolic dish being a navigational deflector.
I thought that came from the Star Fleet Technical Manual?

No, it's called MAIN SENSOR in that.

Franz Joseph's blueprints (1973) called it the "main sensor and navigational deflector." He got every detail from TMOST, which called it the "main sensor-deflector" on page 191.
 
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