Useful Trek Tech Poll

[Starglider]

Wars cloaks, at least the double-blind Stygium ones, don't seem to show the same properties - the only option for detecting them is a CGT, period.

Technically, they should show up on passives as black holes in the background. IF one happens to be looking in their direction and there should be something for the passives to detect, that is.

As I understand it, the difference between a 'cloak' and mere 'stealth' is that while stealth limits emissions and reflectivity, a cloaking device actively transmits (e.g. tunnelling photons from one side of the ship to the other somehow) or emulates (i.e. Culture cloaks, which are just spherical holograms of the background) background radiation. Basically, stealth ships try to be invisible against a black background, while cloaking devices usually make a ship invisible even if it's sitting on the ground in broad daylight. Trek cloaks obviously replicate the visual spectrum background EM (though not necessarily well - the protagonists spotted the distortion of the Klingon cloak in Trek III) and block radar-frequency reflections, but who knows about other parts of the EM spectrum or more exotic technologies (they seem to defeat active subspace scanners of a comparable tech, at least until extra technobabble is deployed).

AFAIK, all Wars cloaking devices are visually undetectable in daylight or against a starry background, so they also transmit or replicate at least some of the background EM spectrum. There might be a 'black hole' effect on some other form of scanning, but if it was significant Wars sensors would already exploit it and Wars cloaks would be rendered useless (at least at close range). Since we see cloaks being used effectively at close range, I think such effects must be either negligable or non-existent.

David kept the fact that he used protomatter (which seemed to be banned in the Federation) secret when he shouldn't have. There's no indication that he knew it wouldn't work;

So? He still lied about not using protomatter, if only by omission.[/quote]

Sure, but that's not strong evidence for Genesis not working. Incidentally apparently there's some really serious wanking of the genesis tech going on in the 'Genesis Wave' series of novels, but thankfully those aren't canon.

When working on trek power systems. Given that a single Acclamator MTL bolt would require the perfect anihilation of in excess of 9 tons of reactant with a Warp core I doubt that power generation would be a problem.

True, energy is a lot more abundant and seemingly cheaper in the SW galaxy.

Though if Wars science could ever reliably duplicate the conditions of that Riker-cloning freak accident, perfect instant replication of luxury goods (and for the less scrupulous, troops) would be extremely valuable.

Except the luxury goods would stop being luxurious unless it's hideously expensive/unreliable (same thing, really), and if it's no longer a luxury what's the point of indulging in (or selling) it?

There are plenty of real life goods which have a production cost way below their sale price, but which are kept desirable by artificially limited supply and clever marketing. Perfect, cheap replication of absolutely anything (people included) would completely transform any society, even one as advanced as Wars, but that's extreme speculation better left to completely separate universes (e.g. 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect').

The only way I can rationalise the Federation 'tachyon detection grids' working is that the warp wake from the Romulan ships (which is presumably much bigger than the ship itself) interfere with the beams, as the chances of a cloaked ship interrupting a beam (for the kind of grid we saw in 'Redemption') are miniscule otherwise. Imperial ships are unlikely to be detectable by this method.

Actually checking the canon the 'tachyon grid' tech is even more worthless than this; Voyager manages to penetrate an implausibly dense grid by 'adjusting our shields to refract the around the ship beams without interrupting them'. If the muppets on Voyager can defeat this tech with some technobabble and a few hours of messing with the shields, I expect Imperial engineers are going to laugh at it.

[Batman]

AFAIK, all Wars cloaking devices are visually undetectable in daylight or against a starry background, so they also transmit or replicate at least some of the background EM spectrum. There might be a 'black hole' effect on some other form of scanning, but if it was significant Wars sensors would already exploit it and Wars cloaks would be rendered useless (at least at close range). Since we see cloaks being used effectively at close range, I think such effects must be either negligable or non-existent.

As my interpretation of the way Wars double-blind cloaks work (in spite of the way its workings were described in the novels) would indeed have rendered the Ukio ploy in TTT impossible, I withdraw the point.

David kept the fact that he used protomatter (which seemed to be banned in the Federation) secret when he shouldn't have. There's no indication that he knew it wouldn't work;

So? He still lied about not using protomatter, if only by omission.

Sure, but that's not strong evidence for Genesis not working.

I never said it was. It IS however clear evidence that Marcus was lying. That's all GR said.
Besides, there's no evidence AT ALL for Genesis working as advertised in
the first place what with it never having been used properly.

[Starglider]

I never said it was. It IS however clear evidence that Marcus was lying. That's all GR said.

Granted. They actually acted a lot like the various SDI proponents arguing for their highly speculative research programs - not technically lying, but stretching the truth and omitting inconvenient facts in their desperation to get serious funding.

Besides, there's no evidence AT ALL for Genesis working as advertised in the first place what with it never having been used properly.

True, Genesis and the Scimitar cloak both come under 'only valuable to the Empire if a string of highly dubious assumptions hold'. There are a few planetary-scale cloaks in Trek, all episode-of-the-week wonders from advanced races, which seem to defeat at least long-range Fed scanners. Again that's a capability that would have some applications in SW if it actually worked against SW tech, but there's no way to know whether it would or no.