What are you talking about? Every one of 'em has a bulging brain tumor.
Good gad, Old Fellow, you’ve been at the Gin and Tonics again, have you?
Not to worry, Jeeves has this thing made of raw eggs and pepper sauce that will straighten you right out.
Right Oh.
Also from a portrayal point of view, what fun would be watching an invisible ship fighting another invisible ship? “Oh, look a blank starfield, oh look, ANOTHER blank starfield” exciting…That’s why you had to have at least one that wasn’t cloaked.
Good point, and probably why they forgot about the cloak in TOS except for The Enterprise Incident.
TNG had one episode about cloaking in season 7. I can’t watch it without getting furious.
Riker’s old Captain comes aboard and they go salvage parts from The Pegasus. It was involved in a experimental cloaking accident 12 years earlier. Romulan’s show up and Riker cloaks the Enterprise to get away.
Unfortunately Star Trek’s feel good message that everyone is nice and loving takes over. Riker uncloaks and reveals a critical Federation military secret to the Romulans. Because it’s the right and honorable thing to do. :rolleyes:
I call it treason. Riker should have been shoved out the nearest airlock and used for photon torpedo practice.
I love Star Trek, but that episode pushes my buttons. It is so sanctimonious.
I can’t understand Rodenberry’s sanctimony about the alleged perfidy of hiding. Taken not very far, soldiers can’t use cover.
But Rodenberry must have understood the concept of the submarine, which is essentially the same thing as a cloaked ship. Good guys use them!
There was something along those lines in a novelization of “Star trek 3: The search for Spock” that I remember reading - it included passages from the Klingon captain’s POV as he discovered info about Genesis and flew off, under cloak, to the Genesis planet.
Turning on the cloaking device was described as a very stressful experience for all aboard the ship, and just occasionally, it drove one of the crew crazy. 
Actual reason: Federation ships look cool on-screen. Cloaked Federation ships…don’t.
The Enterprise gets a lot more screen time than anything Romulan; try replacing all those great visuals with empty space. Doesn’t work.
Everything else is just an attempt to justify this.
All true. I also didn’t buy there would actually be a mutiny by the ship’s crew over the illegal cloaking experiment. Strong protests, resignations, a report sent to the Federation President and leaked to the press when the Pegasus returned, sure, whatever. But a mutiny?
Well, he got very, very sanctimonious. IN fact, when it comes down to it, he spent way too much time in Hollywood soaking up the atmosphere. And even TOS was intended (by him) to be waaaaay more like TNG, and thatw as back quite a while. But for TOS he didn’t have complete creative control like in the early days of TNG.
Could be a lot of fun, actually - would basically turn it into a submarine battle. Das Boot has some excellent, tense battle scenes, as have many other submarine movies.
TOS “Balance of Terror” essentially was a riff on submarine movies. And I suspect that the idea of a cloaking device was invented by the writers to justify using the submarine tropes.
Of course. And The Enterprise Incident a great idea for another episode. After two good TOS episodes, the cloaking device, like time travel, would be used by authors wanting their stories to be as good as TOS. 
I think you have a point, if it was only because the experiment was illegal.
Mix in some genuine concerns that this phase-cloaking stuff might end with the horribly painful deaths of all on board, and I think it’s easier to credit the mutiny stuff.
(Of course, you could then file the fact that the mutineers managed to do just that to themselve when they tried to disengage the cloak under ‘I for Irony.’)
So then why didn’t the mirror universe Starfleet have one? Or did they? (I just reread Dark Mirror and I’m having a bad habit of visualizing people with goatees now).
I don’t remember any reference to cloaks in the Mirror Universe until DS9, when there was an episode with Quark and Rom carrying a cloaked cloaking device through the hallways of the station (giving the actors a nice opportunity to use their mime skills to imply the presence of a heavy object).
Why would the Enterprise have been cloaked most of the time, anyway? Even if we ignore the silly claims that Starfleet isn’t a military organization, neither Kirk’s ship nor Picard’s was primarily engaged in operations that would have required it to be invisible.
Not entirely true. Traditional “money” had been rendered worthless by the invention of the replicator but the Federation had been using “credits” in TOS.
Who were introduced during Roddenbury’s reign as executive producer and just happened to have discovered a substance that cannot be replicated.
I’ve been trying to remember. Were any of the alien ships in Voyager cloaked?
I recall the Maquis spy (she was Romulain) tried to help her Kazon bf get cloaking for his ship. I think it failed.
The Borg were too bad ass for cloaking. They just flew right up and assimilated everybody.
Cardassian, surgically modified to look like a Bajoran.