Clearly cloaks are not an instant-win advantage, or they would have been used as such.
But apparently cloaks
are an instant-win advantage in those battles where they are used. Except of course if they are used against the heroes of the story.
Nuclear-tipped ICBMs win wars in twenty minutes. They haven't been used for this yet, though. The reasons for similar failure to use cloaks to destroy worlds with total impunity might be equally complex.
The Breen used a cloaked strike against Earth and only managed major damage against SF headquarters and Paris, before their fleet was destroyed.
We don't know whether the Breen had cloaks. And why they only managed minor damage to San Francisco is a mystery of its own, as a
single shot getting through should have reduced that city (and most of the West Coast) into a smoking crater.
Remember, Chang and Shinzon's prototypes aside, no-one has ships that can fire while cloaked.
But decloaking and then firing should suffice for destroying planets. It worked against the Founder hideout world in "The Die is Cast", sort of.
Any new development isn't likely to enable complete victory before the enemy could develop countermeasures either...
...Although it's difficult to see how a development that allows for Earth to be destroyed would fail to enable complete victory. After all, even superenemies think that destroying Earth solves everything.
in TOS BOT, the romulan is detectable because the power drain of the device is to much for the ships reactor. If the ship stays stationary, everything is fine, if it moves you see the shadow on sensors.
Well, the latter is true, but not necessarily for the former reason. We never heard that the cloak would consume significant amounts of power - and most episodes and movies dealing with cloaks indicate that the opposite is true, and a flashlight battery probably suffices. (Spock did speculate on such a power drain, but what would he know?)
That's what the issue of cloaks is,incrase the size of ship to cloak, you increase the amount of emissions that need to be cloaked. and its a never ending loop.
Or then bigger ships can embark powerful cloaks more easily, explaining why the gigantic
Scimitar has a better cloak than any of the smaller Romulan ships Picard has previously encountered.
It was a violation of the treaty when the phase cloak was being worked on.
That probably depends on who's asking, and from whom. If Starfleet just called it the "tunneling drive" rather than "phase cloak", the wording of the treaty might not apply. OTOH, Romulans seem to be okay with the UFP using invisibility and camouflage technologies in general, such as holographic disguises - while certain specific invisibility shroud types make them very, very angry. We don't know the criteria by which they decide between the two reactions, nor do we know whether they would have evoked Treaty of Algeron in "The
Pegasus" or not. And whether they eventually did or not.
Whats worse, letting romulans capture an entire galaxy class starship and loosing one of 8 galaxy class star ships in existence at the time. Or letting them romulans crap quarters after seeing a galaxy class somehow go through the asteroid they trapped it in, and suddenly decloak in front and say hello?
Good question. The latter probably served UFP political goals and Starfleet strategies much better, considering Romulans appear completely tame and cooperative afterwards. A more positive outcome is difficult to postulate. Perhaps they were on the brink of filing a UFP membership application and the incident made them reconsider?
Timo Saloniemi
