What If: A War of Cloaked Vessels

[Baffalo]

This is a "What If..." scenario, and my question is this:

Suppose that Gene never put in his stupid rule that "The Federation doesn't skulk about" and actually allowed the Federation to develop the cloaking device or copy it from the Romulans in The Enterprise Incident? Further, suppose that Kirk's actions in The Enterprise Incident resulted in a war between the Federation and Romulans, both sides now able to produce cloaking devices and send ships out with them. What would this war (no joke intended) look like?

[Enigma]

Similar to a war between the Klingons and Romulans.

[The Romulan Republic]

Lots of ambushes. Not a lot of fighting in deep space. More stealth raids and attempts to draw the enemy into an ambush by attacking something they'd have to defend or planting false intelligence. I suspect that kind of fighting would favour the Romulans because it seems to be how they're used to operating.

[Darth Tanner]

Battles would only take place around fixed assets that can't be hidden, mining colonies and the like and would resolve around ambush and counter ambush.

Assuming of course its not just whoever gets their alpha strike on the enemy home world/critical infrastructure in first, although even during the Dominion War the Romulans/Klingons seemingly gave up their cloaks to fight with Starfleet in pitched battles the Klingons were able to infiltrate a BoP all the way to Romulous to sneak Picard and Data to meet Spock - I would have assumed the Romulans would have had better cloak defences that Starfleet with its sensor nets across the starfleet border seeing as they would understand the technology more.

[Simon_Jester]

Lots of ambushes. Not a lot of fighting in deep space. More stealth raids and attempts to draw the enemy into an ambush by attacking something they'd have to defend or planting false intelligence. I suspect that kind of fighting would favour the Romulans because it seems to be how they're used to operating.

Also because the Federation is just plain bad at taking the offensive; they're very much a reactive power when it comes to military strategy.

[The Romulan Republic]

If so, that changed during the Dominion War. The Federation took part in at least three major offences by my recollections, not counting raids against infrastructure.

[Elheru Aran]

It would be essentially submarine warfare in space. Cloaked ships carefully fending about in the dark, trying their damnedest to detect other cloaked ships, while at the same time doing their best to not be detected themselves. When another craft is detected, hit them with overwhelming force as soon as you decloak (unless you've lucked onto the firing-while-cloaked trick that the Klingons figured out). Lots of detection equipment scattered all over space, calibrated carefully to detect unusual emissions, gravitional anomalies (you can't hide mass, after all) or visual peculiarities such as distortions of the starfield.

[FTeik]

It would be essentially submarine warfare in space. Cloaked ships carefully fending about in the dark, trying their damnedest to detect other cloaked ships, while at the same time doing their best to not be detected themselves. When another craft is detected, hit them with overwhelming force as soon as you decloak (unless you've lucked onto the firing-while-cloaked trick that the Klingons figured out). Lots of detection equipment scattered all over space, calibrated carefully to detect unusual emissions, gravitional anomalies (you can't hide mass, after all) or visual peculiarities such as distortions of the starfield.

Only that cloaks can't be kept up constantly and that they have to be dropped, if vessels want to fire their weapons (Chang's BoP from ST:VI seems to have been a one-time-thing despite proving, that you could develop cloaks, that allowed firing while active).

[Eternal_Freedom]

Um you forget the Scimitar from Nemesis that could quite happily fire while cloaked, and could apparently have it's shields up too.

[lord Martiya]

After over a century of development from this setting's scenario.

Aside for that, I think the Feddies could have somewhat of an advantage in this fight:
1)by this point, a number of Romulan ships are still the "Balance of Terror" BoP. That have a number of defects: fusion powered, so with less staying power if they need to even come close the antimatter-powered ships of the Federation (both in combat and in terms of keeping the cloak active); their main weapon, the so-called plasma torpedo, is ludicrously powerful but goes through their energy reserves like mad; Federation ships are way faster than those;
2)Romulan antimatter-powered ships are made by the Klingon, who Klingon could easily increase the prices or even cut the supply of ships and spare parts depending on what they believe will benefit them the most or what the Organians say about the peace they're currently enforcing between them and the Federation;
3)Romulan infrastructure about antimatter would be relatively immature (we don't even know if they have the ability to mass-produce it or buy it from the Klingon, thus being subjected to the same issues as with the ships), and less able to support the antimatter-powered ships;
4)in terms of missile weapons (that should be able to be fired even under cloak, if the trouble was only with powering the cloak. Even then, they're a better weapon than the plasma torpedo: with them you can get a lock on the target, drop the cloak, fire and recloak, while the plasma torpedo needs to drop the cloak and then charge the weapon if you don't want to spend a lot of time charging it with what little energy the cloak and the other systems leave for that) the Federation has the advantage: they can supply their ships with photon torpedoes, while the Romulans seem to have phased out their nuclear weapons (I recall the commander in "Balance of Terror" not being sure they had one on board. May be guessing too much) and would have only recently started building photons.