Is cloaked beaming a bug?

posted on July 24th, 2010, 1:58 pm

tl;dr

first of all, dont tell me what to say, i will lol at whoever i damn well please. your comment made me laugh

i'm not sure what any of your points were trying to say 

but u seriously need to calm down. you were very rude, and im not going to drop to ur level and be rude back.

i take my evidence directly from star trek, watch all the eps with cloak and u will realise that cloaks are only good for making ships invisible, not for protecting them from weapons fire.

this is what u said:
Cloaking devices globally manipulate spacetime around the ship to bend all electromagnetic (e.g. light and sensor stuff) around the ship and consequently everything else a shield keeps off too.

so cloaks bend everything a shield blocks? no they dont  they dont bend phasers or torps. they bend sensors and light.

here is something i found funny in your last response:
Further Myles ... it is rather impolite to say someone's wrong without proving it

fine, bring me a starship with cloaking device and cloak it and give me a starship with some photon torps and i will blow your cloaked ship up

your post seemed to me like you were saying cloaks can handle stuff that shields can, but we have clear evidence in star trek eps/films that they cant

if it meant something else then maybe you should have made your point clearer instead of being rude.

good day. (if you want to continue this pointless argument we can do it on pm or in another thread, lets not stay off topic)

posted on July 24th, 2010, 2:55 pm

Hmm, I think the core question is if the Devs intended for cloaked ships to be able to be transported to several seconds after they cloak. 

posted on July 24th, 2010, 5:25 pm

Hmm, I think the core question is if the Devs intended for cloaked ships to be able to be transported to several seconds after they cloak. 

More the question is if one wants to invest a large amount of time to 'fix' it.

In any case, cloak behaves inconsistently among episodes and series; cloaked ships can be detected when the device is misaligned. Even if the power source is extremely small, that extra bit of energy is detected. In fact we've seen it several times in the shows. Furthermore, sometimes the cloaking device is less than "perfect" and provides distortion. In the end, all that you are saying Mimesot is hearsay and is not possible to be disproven or proven in terms of Star Trek. It is unrealistic and we must simply decide on the basis of what we'd like to see and what we think is balanced.

posted on July 24th, 2010, 5:33 pm

Well from a pure cannon standpoint, we  can say that cloaking does not interfere with transporters, as on more then one occasion a ship has transported to/from a ship that was cloaked or in the process of cloaking.

posted on July 24th, 2010, 6:11 pm

I'd have to agree that it seems entirely possible for a cloaked ship to "beam" without being detected or having to decloak.  However given some of the detailed arguments here, I'm starting to believe their should be an error factor that might allow for a cloaked ship transporting to be spotted or become visible to the ship it was "beaming" aboard.  We've probably all heard that the transporter causes a noticeable energy surge that is sometimes detectable.  Perhaps an error method should be put in place to correct for this.  Romulans on the low end of detection, Klingons and others on the higher danger end.

Regards,
-Grey

[mimesot]

posted on July 25th, 2010, 7:36 pm

Last edited by mimesot on July 25th, 2010, 8:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.

but u seriously need to calm down. you were very rude, and im not going to drop to ur level and be rude back.

Myles, it is no problem, when someone posts a different opinion upon some topic. Neither it is a problem if someone explizitly counters someone, no matter if one says another is wrong about facts or in his behaviour. But if one does so without resoning his opinion it becomes a problem as it is a sign of disrespect. Or isn't it disrespectful, when one thinks he doesn't need to argue his point where every one else has to, to be conceded being right? This is no ladies talk (not meant to be sexist) where you post things without realation to the post before. Especially as you call someone wrong it is a discussion and discussions without proves are ridiculous.

You can say I'm wrong about cloaks ... disproving me with canon is pretty easy, I know some of the unfortunate episodes myself. You may call me rude ... show me which lines contain insults. Perhaps I'd call you a whatever, a glass of cranberry juice - wouldn't make much sense as long as i can not prove it.

I'll never calm down, as this is a question of communication's fashion. I believe way of disputing has always to be reflected to avoid a forum from falling into a statement vs statement swamp, in which the one is credited belive, which uses the more offensive phrasing.

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this is what u said:
Cloaking devices globally manipulate spacetime around the ship to bend all electromagnetic (e.g. light and sensor stuff) around the ship and consequently everything else a shield keeps off too.

so cloaks bend everything a shield blocks? no they dont  they dont bend phasers or torps. they bend sensors and light.

I still say yes, they do, because phasers are of light like light itself. As I explained later, the local capacity makes the difference.

Strike on a shield. The shield most instanly creates a heavy distortion at the place where the fire comes in. The status of a ship's shields lowers when the fire counters the distortion while the distorion dissipates the energy. If the fire is too long and/or strong the distortion will break down and the fire will pass on to the hull and do direct damage. A cloak has a small allround distortion active all time. Now you will imagine how long it will take till that distortion breaks up at the point the fire hits.

So when I say a cloak bends most everything around ths ship, I'm not in contradiciton to canon concerning e.g. phasers. The function to bend everything will probably fail after a few nanoseconds (whereas a phaser fire lasts around one second) - so it will have worked at least for a short time and the ship will be hull damaged as the shielding effect of the cloak is beyond the treshold of measure accuracy.

The question is how strong are the transporter beams. If they were a tenth of a phaser they'd penetrate the cloak even in a brute force beaming.

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Concerning beaming while cloaked: I always implied that this is a beaming towards a cloaked enemy vessel. There you won't know any dynamical parameters of the stealth field. The stealth field nost probably stretches space in an area most probably formed like a nutshell to provide an analoga to an area of negative fraction index, some idea that was known in times when TOS was created. Still it means that there is one single point that the field will not be able to hide.

Ok, i think next to noone will be able to imagine what I'm jabbering about. To imagine the effect of a cloaking field, just imagine a windchannel, whith an elliptical object in it, which repreesents the inner space of the cloaked area. Usually sources of smoke of coloured fumes are placed in the channel. The wind carries the fume and forms parralel streams (representing beams of light and other things) until they reach the surrounding of the "vessel". Most streams will make their way around the ship and finally recover the positions they had before (mostly, and only if turbolences are not too high. The only things that might perturbate in free space are gravitational waves, so a grav-wave may be a good way of detecting a cloaked ship. Well we already havethe graviton detevtion grids). All beams havi the same position and diretion before and after the object is equal to the object being invisible.

But there is surely one beam (if you make enough of them) that vertically hits the object and disperses there. Which beam that is depends if the geometry of the object, meaning the geometry of the stealth field. Through this single point you could, though the dispersion is quit high, channel a transport beam or whatever. If you know where that point is, and that is most impossible to be known for anybody but people on the ship, you can beam from and toa cloaked vessel. So beaming betwenn allied vessels migh be possible, but I believe enemies that usually don't have a spy on the ship would not be able to do so.

[Arash8472]

posted on July 25th, 2010, 9:08 pm

Last edited by Arash8472 on July 25th, 2010, 9:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

i think it should not be considered a bug b/c if you cloak your fleet and enemy is transporting you have 2 (or more) options, use ALL your cloak ships to transport onto cloak ship that is being boarded OR Decloak and fire on enemy while shields are down OR  quickly hit 's' on keyboard to stop, and it immediately stops all transport from enemy (and yourself) OR you can go the opposite direction of the enemy till you are out of transporter range


so here is another question: when you hit stop on your ships that cuts transporter/stops ships from firing for a few moments, is that considered a bug?

posted on July 25th, 2010, 9:44 pm

To mimesot, I think the argument here is not weather a ship can be beamed on while its cloaked but rather while the ship is in the process of cloaking. If you were to beam pople on a ship while its cloaked then once the ship is fully cloaked you would just lock on to your men already there and beam more people over, seems to make pefect sense. And we have cannon proof that cloaking devices DO NOT block transporter beams, if they did the second that cloaking field became active transporters would be useless the way you describe it, however with that TNG episode with Troi on the warbird we see that isnt the case, also the episode with Riker on a FULLY CLOAKED bop getting its captain beamed off using a emergency beacon. Clearly cloaks provide no protection against beaming.

posted on July 25th, 2010, 9:54 pm

I think if you have one man over there you can probalby beam ober to a cloaked ship, i agree. On the other hand think of all the problems they have with meaming ... every third VOY episode something is prohibiting beaming and is jamming the signal and somethng has to be recalibrated and compensated manually, and blablabla. Thinking of this i doubt that, if even natural phenomena cause so much trouble, a cloak mus be quite a problem too, right?

posted on July 25th, 2010, 9:56 pm

A cloaking device tends to screw with sensors, so unless you got a homing beacon inside before cloak, you'd be unable to target the Transporter.

Anyone else see how that could be troublesome?

posted on July 25th, 2010, 10:09 pm

I think Equinox's example is by far the strongest example that we've seen so far of it working

posted on July 25th, 2010, 10:46 pm

Well in the example with troy, the cloak was in the process of being activated, then thecommunicator should suffice to focus the beam sharply enough to track her out.

Which episode does the riker-example refer to?

posted on July 25th, 2010, 10:50 pm

Most likely the one where he was an exchange officer aboard a Klingon ship if it's the one I'm thinking of.

[mimesot]

posted on July 25th, 2010, 10:51 pm

Last edited by mimesot on July 25th, 2010, 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hehe, probaly ... any ideas how that episode was called?

Any possibility that the transport beam is not an EM or a subspace signal? If it was e.g. tachyons or some sort of things.

Any ideas how the rematerialisation process could possibly work out, when thetransporter is so far away?

[Tyler]

posted on July 25th, 2010, 10:52 pm

Last edited by Tyler on July 25th, 2010, 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

A Matter Of Honor (). Riker gave the captain of the IKS Pagh the transmitter and he was beamed onto the Enterprise while cloaked.

Just looked it up to see if I was thinking of the right one.