Does Star Wars have phasing cloak technology?

[Chris Parr]

I know they have cloaking devices, since they were mentioned in Empire Strikes Back, but are there any mentions of them taking that technology further?

I was just asking because I recall a couple of episodes from TNG that used a phasing cloak ("Pegasus" and "The Next Phase") that could make a ship or just a couple of people invisible and intangible - which would provide some serious advantages to anyone using it, I would think, since it's a step up from the standard cloaking device which only makes a ship invisible.

Okay, that's all I've got for now.

[Chris Parr]

I know they have cloaking devices, since they were mentioned in Empire Strikes Back, but are there any mentions of them taking that technology further?

I was just asking because I recall a couple of episodes from TNG that used a phasing cloak ("Pegasus" and "The Next Phase") that could make just about anything invisible and intangible - which would provide some serious advantages to anyone using it, I would think, since it's a step up from the standard cloaking device which only makes a ship invisible.

Okay, that's all I've got for now.

[Chris Parr]

Sorry, thought I was editing the post when I was really quoting it. So - I screwed up on that and I'll own it.

[Elheru Aran]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Probably not. There was a bit of exotic tech in a Boba Fett comic in the 90s, a magical hoop which acted as a teleporter (step through one hoop, come out of another, wherever it was). But that's about as far as Wars has ever gotten with that kind of thing.

That's not to say that it hasn't come up in some bit of EU material somewhere, I stopped keeping up with the EU sometime in the mid 00s. But I don't think phasing technology has ever come up in Wars.

[tezunegari]

I know they have cloaking devices, since they were mentioned in Empire Strikes Back, but are there any mentions of them taking that technology further?

I was just asking because I recall a couple of episodes from TNG that used a phasing cloak ("Pegasus" and "The Next Phase") that could make a ship or just a couple of people invisible and intangible - which would provide some serious advantages to anyone using it, I would think, since it's a step up from the standard cloaking device which only makes a ship invisible.

Okay, that's all I've got for now.

In one word: no.

The cloaking technology shown in Star Wars is based mostly on Stygium crystals preventing signals to leave the cloaking field and bending detection signals around the object and this has severe drawbacks.
One is that while the cloak is active the ship is essentially blind which make them mostly useless for widespread military and espionage use.
A force user might use it as Mauls Scimitar was equipped with a cloaking device.

Unless you are Thrawn and have access to a crazy Jedi Master (clone) and can coordinate the actions of the cloaked ships.
Thrawn used a cloaked ship to fake a new type of weapon that can penetrate planetary shields at one point and used cloaked asteroids as Siege weapons (placing them in orbit of Coruscant to force them to keep the planetary shield active, effectively trapping the world)

[Lord Revan]

As people have stated "cloaks" in Star Trek and Star Wars aren't the same thing.

While cloaking devices in both universes perform more or less the same basic function aka the reduce the ability to detect an object (be it ship, base or something else) to a point it's basically invisible to both the naked eye and sensors, how they do that is very different. This results in very different limits and benefits from using cloaking devices.


In essense one must remember that a cloaking device isn't a magic charm you enable but a peice of technology with limits on its used based on how the wanted result was achived. Just because a peice of technology uses the same name doesn't mean it is exactly the same device especially when the term is something as broad as "cloaking device".

[Chris Parr]

As people have stated "cloaks" in Star Trek and Star Wars aren't the same thing.

While cloaking devices in both universes perform more or less the same basic function aka the reduce the ability to detect an object (be it ship, base or something else) to a point it's basically invisible to both the naked eye and sensors, how they do that is very different. This results in very different limits and benefits from using cloaking devices.


In essence one must remember that a cloaking device isn't a magic charm you enable but a piece of technology with limits on its used based on how the wanted result was achieved. Just because a piece of technology uses the same name doesn't mean it is exactly the same device especially when the term is something as broad as "cloaking device".

Oh, I know that - and you get a very similar situation even in just the Trek-verse with the "warp drives" used by the Federation and the Romulans, with the Federation starships using antimatter to power their warp drives and the Romulans using a miniature singularity. So - different technologies but essentially the same result, kind of like Trek and Wars cloaking devices, right?

(By the way, before anyone gets on me for being some kind of "Trekkie Wanktard" for suggesting that phase/cloaked ships might give the Federation an advantage, I should say that I'm well aware that there were certain Force users (The "Dark Lady" I think she was called) who possessed an ability to phase using the Force, and Darth Vader still managed to off her.) So being able to phase a ship may or may not give the Federation an advantage.

Anyway, I should have realized the answer to my question even before I posted for one very simple reason - "Navicomputers". I mean, think of it - if they could just phase their ships through obstacles they wouldn't need to do any course calculations because they wouldn't have to worry about bouncing too close to stars or flying into supernovae, right?

So I apologize for wasting your time with my silly question.

[Batman]

Who says the damned thing works FTL? Or more than 20 minutes at a time without exploding? Or doesn't cost about twice as much as a Death Star?
Or isn't limited in the range of materials it can phase through? Or any other number of reasons they can't use it for that?
Just because they have to go around stars and such doesn't mean they can't have a phase cloak. Mind, I'm not aware they do have one they very well might.

[Chris Parr]

True, that.

[Lord Revan]

Yeah as Batman pointed out just because a peice of technology exist it doesn't mean it doesn't have any limits. "Silver bullet" technologies pretty much don't exist, in pretty much 100% of cases where there seems to an "easy fix" that would cause massive paragrim shift in the universe it's generally best to assume "there's limits to the technology we don't know that prevent that" then that you made some sort of massive discovery.

[Solauren]

The only known example of phasing in star wars was a Force Power.

Specifically, the Dark Woman had the ability to pass through solid objects (and a bunch of other really exotic force powers).

No known example of that sort of technology exists.

[Chris Parr]

Okay, thanks a lot for the information. Wasn't quite sure since I stopped paying attention to the EU after that whole "Legacy of the Force" thing.

[Elheru Aran]

Okay, thanks a lot for the information. Wasn't quite sure since I stopped paying attention to the EU after that whole "Legacy of the Force" thing.

Yeah, if you stuck with it that long, that was pretty much most all of it