Beaming while cloaked

posted on June 17th, 2009, 5:04 pm

Starfleet used to be unable to beam through Shields, but now they can. All it takes is the correct modifications and Romulan engineers are quite capable.

posted on June 17th, 2009, 7:47 pm

I'll go in order heh:

@ silent93: I dunno what ep thats from, any idea?

@ 1337_64M3R: Gamer dude, you got it. The cloak interferes, but assuming you know your ships cloak well a smart crew can compensate I'm sure. But as for with weapons, we've always heard about how cloaking is a huge energy drain going as far back as cloaking the enterprise with the stolen romulan cloak. Weapons clearly require power too. Im reasonably sure that any emissions by a cloaking device are only slightly greater than background level. Otherwise what would be the point? So they're not going to jam the operation of weapons. Transporters we know are delicate so maybe it annoys there. But if a cloak emits enough to screw with systems then its likely very easy to detect from another ship. And going back to the thalaron cloak. lets look at the script

" When the Scimitar decloaked there was a momentary spike in the tertiary EM band -- there -- You're not going to believe this but it's Thalaron."

It's not the cloak that they're detecting, its the Thalaron weapon generator. The Scimitar, had the best cloak ever, it had more energy supplied to it than any other, and that gave it the ability to do things other cloaks cant. Thalaron wouldnt be useful for a cloak (at least the way its described to us) as its a form of detectable radiation.

@Zexxon: Sorry dude didn't mean to be hard on you, just trying to set some misconceptions straight. As for how it works, no one knows really. We know it bends most of the EM spectrum around the ship. which is why with some cloaks theres a bit of a distortion you can see (ala ST6). We just don't know how... On the other hand the Tachyon Detection Grid was pretty well explained in an ep of TNG. It's not detecting stray tachyons emitted by ships. Its a dragnet, every ship has a beam to another ship and all the beams can be perfectly timed. If a cloaked ship travels through a beam, the receiving ship can tell the beam was distorted (even minutely)


@ Dominus: You got it

@ Mimesot: Because if you held back those signals everyone you tried to beam out would never come back.
A cloak can be modified to behave differently with different energy, logically. So i'm sure without a doubt that without much work they could allow for the directed subspace signal from a cloak to travel out of the ship. But again this would probably be detectable by other ships, so they wouldn't really want to do this.

@Tyler: Good call, id totally forgotten about this. But it's not quite what you think either. "Picard readies to attack the Phoenix but O'Brien offers to beam over to talk some sense into Maxwell. Riker cautions that the Phoenix captain won't bring his shields down to transport, but O'Brien replies that he knows how the Phoenix shields work, as it uses a high energy sensor system, which cycles every 5.5 minutes, with a window of a fiftieth of a second, and can get on board."
This only works if you know the shields of the destination ship very well, which wont work on true enemy ships. The Borg and the Dominion can beam through enemy shields perfectly well, we see them do that once or twice... But not the Klings, Roms, Feds. The Klings/Feds/Roms did learn to defend from that though "Some adaptations, including rotating shield frequencies, could inhibit this ability but not eliminate it altogether"

Like i said before, it is a constant game of cat and mouse with cloaks and sensors. Cloaking devices and techniques just a few years old are probably completely useless against a newer ship's sensors. For an exaggerated example take a look at http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Prophecy_(episode) where they used a Metaphasic sweep - Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki to detect an old cloaked Klingon ship.

posted on June 17th, 2009, 8:23 pm

Hmm, I seem to remember that the Enterprise during First Contact beamed up Worf from the Defiant. Although we never see the Enterprise's shields lowered, presumably they would not dare do so in the presence of the Cube (so maybe they beamed while shields were rotating... who knows).

posted on June 17th, 2009, 9:02 pm

@hawkshark

TNG - Reunification part 1, if memory serves.  Cloaked BoPs that were nearly the size of the Enterprise-D took Picard & co. to Romulus to look for Spock.  The same episode that showed that if you are as strong as a Vulcan, you too can use their special pinch, no telepathy required.

[HawkShark]

posted on June 18th, 2009, 3:41 am

Last edited by HawkShark on June 18th, 2009, 3:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

@ Dominus: Yea you're right here, but remember the Defiant didn't have shields, and year they just beamed through a rotation in the shields like O'Brien did. So yea, good catch but nothing new

@ Silent: I just re-watched the ep (one of the best). As for the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, doesn't Data use it once or twice too? Odo did it to guard in Paradise Lost. Seven of Nine did it in The Raven. Picard used it once as well. It has nothing to do with Vulcan tactile telepathy... As for the K'vorts, it's not that large, you can see it in the fly by. When Picard and Data beam over to the Klingon ship, it was not cloaked. The ship wasnt even cloaked til was near the neutral zone heh. So yea its in Unification part 1 when theyre beamed down to Romulus from the Kling ship... but like i said i cant even imagine why Cloaked beaming would be difficult, it would just give away your position.

posted on June 18th, 2009, 2:07 pm

Though i have to say, i find it a little odd, it seems so easy to get anywhere undetected with a cloak, that klingon ship in unification could have done tremendous damage to romulus before they could intercept. Remember that episode of TNG, where they found clues that any humanoid race shared the same ancestors ? One torpedo was enough to turn a class m planet into a lifeless rock.

I guess races that have cloaks must have figured out a way ro protect themselves from surprise attacks, otherwise the klingons/romulans had wiped out each other a long time ago (and a lot of others too.). 

posted on June 18th, 2009, 2:25 pm

Think of it as M.A.D. ... a cold war scenario of sorts.

[mimesot]

posted on June 18th, 2009, 2:58 pm

Last edited by mimesot on June 18th, 2009, 3:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Starfleet used to be unable to beam through Shields, but now they can. All it takes is the correct modifications and Romulan engineers are quite capable.

Then they could be able to prevent being borded as well, as jamming signals is much easier than transfering them without interactions (obstacles like hull, fields,...). I do not believe this is a good argument. On the other hand Beaming is proven impossible anyway, so one can porpose anything.

Because if you held back those signals everyone you tried to beam out would never come back.

Don't quite understand you there. The loss of infomation, if the target location or the way there is impossible to pass, is an obvious problem. One only transmitts signals, if he knows it was save. So if  you'd know you send something to an invalid direction, you will also know, that this will destroy the information, particularly the beamed entity. But this is no contradiction to natural behaviour. Maybe you can make this point clearer.

A cloak can be modified to behave differently with different energy, logically. So i'm sure without a doubt that without much work they could allow for the directed subspace signal from a cloak to travel out of the ship. But again this would probably be detectable by other ships, so they wouldn't really want to do this.

Well, if a cloak worked via metamaterials, you could possibly exclude certain wavelengths from that effect, if it wirks via space distortion it would not. If beaming and/or cloak rely on subspace, then save your words as this discussion has become absurd.

If subspace is accepted as reason for all stuff that is not possible to explain whithout critizism, then i propose following:

* Any enemy has a subspace field arout his ships, that lets me loose games, when I play borg.

* Dominus' cat can make subspace scars to his skin, that prohibit warp-jumps there, and that's why he never got bittn by fleas.

* The mimesots are currently developing a automatic subspace-weapon, that can diminish the number of chrisps in a bag, while I am playing FO

* Too much of the cheapest exuse ever, named subspace, can cause the game to become ludicrous.

posted on June 18th, 2009, 2:59 pm

Your opinion.

[mimesot]

posted on June 18th, 2009, 3:29 pm

Last edited by mimesot on June 18th, 2009, 3:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Opinion?, well, tell me what is more probable?

But surely I have not seen the many episodes, where romulans stated, that they would never ever invent a couter against bording, especially not whn thea are cloaked. They rather concentrated their aims on Thalaron and red matter. 

I know that the line, what is bearable and what necessary for feel (canon) and feel (gameplay) is a fine line and different for everyone, but some here never even consider a line.