Myles wrote:lol so if i understand what you're saying, you say that shields block stuff, and cloak blocks MORE stuff.
First, save your "lol" for someone else. Your undwillingness or maybe incompetence in disproving others conclusions does not allow you to make fun of them.
Myles wrote:so why would ships not fly around with their cloak on all the time?
Reason: As I said shields are a local and cloak is a global mechanism. In simpler words a cloak covers the whole ship and distorts a large volume of space around the ship. This costs extreme amounts of energy. A phaser is hitting just on one single spot. On that spot the distortion of space will be too low to effevtively bend away and dissipate the incoming energy. Most of the cloaking field will stay unused for the defending purpose.
A shield on the other hand locally concentrates all available energy on the spot where the weapon is hitting and the subspace field will have much capacity to dissipate the energy there. And thats why cloacs fail to defend a ship and shields do the job.
Further a cloak has a probably rather homogenous field compared to a shield in battle, which is reactive and has a high density only on the spot where it is being hit. So the incomeing fire, which will unfortunetly be focused quite vertical to the subspace field will not be bent much away from it's main direction as the gradient of the density will mot likly be in the same direction of the incoming fire. As a consequence it will hit the ships hull most directly, perhaps with some per mille reduced in strength. The more you deform the subspace field to fend off the fire the more the cloaking-efficiency will fall.
A gobal static system is always inferior to a local reacting system.
Myles wrote:you are implying that cloaks can block the same stuff that shields can, which is WRONG
And yes i'm implying that the cloaking device can in principle block the same stuff as a shield, but not to the same amount. Reason: see above.
Further Myles ... it is rather impolite to say someone's wrong without proving it. I can be wrong about StarTrek technologie, yes i believe that might happen, but I can argue why i think that I'm right using logic and canon, trying to form a gapless conclusion. Unfortunatly you don't .
Further your ignorance to the quite important detail that the "same stuff" belongs to the diversity of things and not to the power of stuff, is showing that you were not reflecting my post in an appropriate way.
The next point...
Myles wrote:cloaks have always been established to NOT block weapons fire or other stuff. cloaks ONLY block sensors/light so that you are invisible and unshielded.
...shows, that you don't count phasers and light to the same sort of things. Light is electromagnetic energy and according to the ST:TNG-TM a phaser is the beam of decaying nadion particles, which decay into high energy electromagnaetic rays (like mesons do). The reason the phaser was invented is that the technological developement showed hat lasers would never have the power to suffice StarTreks needs. A nuclear particle beam that devays to light was the solution.
Back on topic: If you didn't mean "stuff" of same power in your above wording, it shows that you didn't even cared to think about whats the difference between light and phasers on hitting a cloak. Thanks a lot.
Myles wrote:some ships can keep shields up while cloaked, the scimitar in canon for example, it kept weapons and shields working, probably cos they had the power to do so.
Indeed something like that is sounds possible when you raise shields beyond your cloaking field.
After all that was pure annoyance :hmmm:
