I lost my message board spel checker. You still might make some sense of that post, though…
That’s a good hypothesis but I think it would be more akin to French navies not using radar instead. It’s a defensive mechanism that others use and thus give them a huge advantage when they don’t use it themselves.
Well, that’s a good way to view it too, Aes. Early in WWII, radar was perfected by the British but the Axis (and others) were lagging behind in their technology.
I seem to recall a type of radar deployed by Germany’s U-Boat fleet that had an unfortunate side effect. It allowed for triangulation of its beams (?), thus making them easy targets for British and Canadian planes to find. Was it called MECOM or something like that?
Maybe a combo of these two ideas would translate well to the Trek universe.
The Borg didn’t use cloaks because they didn’t have to. Most of the species they assimilated were overrun incredibly fast and had few defense capabilities. The only species the Borg had trouble with those in The Federation, who collaberated to defeat the Borg. Since the Federation had extensive knowledge of Borg technology, developing or assimilating a cloak device was not a top priority. Another reason is effeciency. A cloak device for ships the size of Borg Cubes would have taken up too much space and required too much maintanence. Besides, The Borg were a collective. The loss of a ship or a few ships because of the lack of a cloak was no big deal. More could come in.
TV-show-wise, it happened because Trek is a show of social futurism, not technological prediction. The writers evidently found more interest in creating distinctive alien races with different kinds of technology than in crafting five dozen races, all of whom presented precisely the same kind of threat. It’s the same essential justification that the transporter was developed, so we didn’t see endless shuttlecraft scenes where they flew down to a planet’s surface and dinked around on expensive “outdoor” sound stages looking for the frickin’ door to the Labyrinthine Death Arena Of The Evil Blue Guys.
Story-wise, I can’t think of very good justifications for it, but I could come up with some convoluted apologies. The Ferrengi probably would want cloaking devices for use in smuggling and sales and shipping, but there are probably more efficient ways to smuggle merchandise than to cloak an entire ship.
The Cardassians, in my best guess, are a militaristic race and for them the most important element is a visible show of force, whereas the Romulans try to conceal their true might and sandpeople always ride in single file… wait a tic, wrong apology. Maybe the Spoonheads just figure it’s best to have lots of military vessels be constantly visible—morale, perhaps, or to intimidate its people, or just to Be Seen. They are coolly deceptive, so perhaps not all of their visible Just-To-Be-Seen warships are always war-ready; that’s just a guess from someone who gave up around the time of Deep Space Nine.
And I promised myself I would never post in a trek tread. Well, he goes. The best
reason I can think of is that the Romulans use a different process to achieve warp speeds than do others(an artificial Quantum singularity if I recall). This form of energy may be “talor made” to powering a cloaking field. It also seems that at some point there was some “colaboration” between the klingons and the romulans. That may be why the Klingons also have the technology.
Having a nuke as a trump card is a great stategic advantage. Anyone can find out the basics of how to make one in the world book encylclopedia. The actual building of said device is alittle more difficult. This may be why others do not have a reliable mass production cloaking device.
But I,m just guessing.
Gerb makes a good point about the powerr requirements, and is correct about the early alliance between Klingons and Romulans.
Some poking around various sites and books got me this:
The Aldeans cloaked an entire planet. (When the Bough Breaks TNG)
Except for an experimental Klingon Bird of Prey (STVI:TUC), ships cannot fire weapons while cloaked. Due to the extreme power requirements of cloaking, apparantly. (Balance of Terror TOS, The Search DS9)
Defensive shields do not work while cloaked, same reason. (Face of the Enemy TNG)
Cloaking devices are illegal under Bajoran law. (Profit and Loss DS9)
Ferengi have at least been in possession of cloaks, including a small personal device. (Profit and Loss DS9)
Gene Roddenberry’s attitude towards cloaking the Good Guys™: “Our people are scientists and explorers - they don’t go sneaking around.” (The Star Trek Encyclopedia*)
Don’t forget the Scimitar in Nemesis. It could also fire while cloaked.
Was the Vulcan Spy Temple in ENT Season I cloaked? I can’t remember.
Did nemesis’ cloak still work in the nebula? That’s one of the things Okuda talked about earlier.
I think they were racing to the nebula to defeat the Scimitar’s sensors a la Kirk in TWoK (and to get to the Federation fleet on the other side of it) but never got there.
I didn’t see ENT’s first season so I don’t know.
I don’t think so, as I recall, the spy installation was simply hidden beneath the temple. Maybe there was some technobabble about its emissions being shielded but I don’t think there was any “cloaking” involved. But then again, shielding non-visible EM radiation from view can’t be too different than shielding visible EM radiation from view.
The canonical answer is that nobody else has been able to develop one. In the original series Klingons and romulans were allies. The Romulans developed the cloak, we can guess they gave it to the Klingons rather than the Klingons developing it independently.
Kirk stole a Romulan cloak, But the Feds couldn’t reproduce it.
In a Next Generation episode, (almost 100 years later) Picard discovers a secret and illegal attempt by the federation to produce their own cloak. It was a disaster , the ship involved was wrapped around the insides of an asteroid.
In Deep Space Nine the Romulans supplied a cloaking device to the Federation to use against the dominion. They were unable to make their own.
It seems that the Romulans are the only ones who figured out how to do it.
Not exactly…we saw that the Federation was able to build a “phase cloak” about ten years before TNG. It had some problems, and was illegal for the Federation to own and operate, but they were able to do it.
The Federation was also able to cloak a small, barge-like craft in Insurrection. We don’t know where the cloak came from.
The Breen were also able to use cloaking devices. They may have bought it from the Romulans or Klingons, true, but they might have developed it themselves.
It’s possible to think of the Cloaking Device as being analogous to real-life Stealth technology, which only the United States uses to any significant degree. Why only us? For one thing, it was expensive to develop, and expensive to maintain. Other countries, like the U.K. or most of the larger NATO powers, probably could develop it on their own. (Actually, they have.) Heck, Russia and China probably could, too. But they don’t use it. Why? Because, valuable as it is, it’s too much of an investment of funds and infrastructure to be worthwhile. Or they might not need a stealth program for what they use their militaries for. Or it might not fit their strategic doctrine or their budget—why buy one Stealth Bomber, when you could buy 200 MiGs for the same amount of money?
Of course, we also have to remember that we’re talking about the United Federation of Planets, here. I mean, bless their Functional Pure-Communist little hearts, but they’re not the best military planners. That, and they’d sell out their grandmothers for the promise of peace. Their signing away of Cloaking Tech with the treaty of Algeron would probably be like the U.S. agreeing to abandon Stealth in order to get SALT II signed.
Peter, look at my previous reply to see what canon actually implies about cloaks. Other species do seem to have developed them.
maybe they give you cancer. or give other people cancer. or weaken subspace, or some other sort of futuristic enviromental disaster.
in that way it would explain why it was illegal, and explain why only bad guys seem to bother with it. it could have some sort of massive externality that makes it less useful than it seems.
One nifty thing about cloak technology: If you use it well, then nobody else knows that you have it. If the Ferengis, for instance, had cloaked smugglers, how would we ever know? Surely, they wouldn’t brag about them, since it’s a lot more profitable to keep them secret. Other species might have them as well, but use them with restraint, to keep the secret from getting out. An analogy might be how the Allies sometimes had to refrain from using Enigma-coded information, lest the Axis learn that we’d cracked it.