Firing while cloaked. What happens

[MrAnderson]

The Romulan super ship and the Klingon super Bird of Prey both were unique in that they could fire while cloaked.

So what happens when a normal Bird of Prey or a Romulan Warbird fires its weapons while cloaked? Does it cause the cloak to fail? Does the ship have insufficient power to do this?

Has this ever happened in an episode?

[Master of Ossus]

The ship appears to simply have insufficient power to do this.

It has never been attempted in an episode, but that's the explanation they give us.

[MrAnderson]

The ship appears to simply have insufficient power to do this.

It has never been attempted in an episode, but that's the explanation they give us.

If that was the case though couldnt you get around it by loading a low power weapon onto the Warbird?

Load her up with 100 megaton bombs. She makes a run while cloaked and drops it 5 miles from the enemy ship with a 5 second fuse. A Warbird should have enough spare power to open a cargo hold or release a bomb clamp.

[Master of Ossus]

If that was the case though couldnt you get around it by loading a low power weapon onto the Warbird?

Load her up with 100 megaton bombs. She makes a run while cloaked and drops it 5 miles from the enemy ship with a 5 second fuse. A Warbird should have enough spare power to open a cargo hold or release a bomb clamp.

You should be able to, but it's never been done. The reason they always give is power constraints.

[Embracer Of Darkness]

If the technical manuals, etc. are the slightest bit canon then apparently the weapons would reflect onto the ship... Sounds utterly absurd.

[Ted C]

The Romulan super ship and the Klingon super Bird of Prey both were unique in that they could fire while cloaked.

So what happens when a normal Bird of Prey or a Romulan Warbird fires its weapons while cloaked? Does it cause the cloak to fail? Does the ship have insufficient power to do this?

Has this ever happened in an episode?

In "Face of the Enemy", there was some implication that the Romulan warbird Khazara could fire while cloaked, although that implication was never verified. Troi (disguised as a Romulan Tal'Shiar officer) discouraged the captain from attacking the Enterprise by pointing out that they wouldn't be able to cripple the Enterprise in a single salvo (indicating that firepower might be reduced when cloaked, as well) and that the Enterprise's return fire would destroy them because their shields were down when they were cloaked.

Both "Face of the Enemy" and Generations indicate that shields go down when a ship cloaks. It presumably doesn't happen instantly, though, since we saw disruptor blasts flaring off the shields of a cloaking Bird of Prey when Kurn saved Gowron's bacon at the end of "Redemption, Pt 1".

The BoP in The Undiscovered Country didn't seem to be shielded, hence it took heavy damage from a single hit by a homing torpedo.

Way back in "The Enterprise Incident", Kirk had Scotty plug a captured Romulan cloaking device into the shield system of the Enterprise. Presumably when the shield system is being used to cloak a ship, it can't effectively block inbound energy blasts and projectiles at the same time.

The Scimitar's major advancement, then, seems to be its ability to remain shielded while cloaked.

[Embracer Of Darkness]

Snip (sorry).

If the "can't be shielded when cloaked" thing is the actual issue then it's logical to assume that they won't fire when cloaked because they would give away their position.
You'd also have to ask, however, why they can't be shielded when cloaked... Is it a power problem, something to do with the shield being detected? Personally I don't know. I also feel the need to point out (once more) the idiocy in the technical manuals, saying that the weapons would be reflected back at the ship... Anyone else seen this?

[Death from the Sea]

Snip (sorry).

If the "can't be shielded when cloaked" thing is the actual issue then it's logical to assume that they won't fire when cloaked because they would give away their position.
You'd also have to ask, however, why they can't be shielded when cloaked... Is it a power problem, something to do with the shield being detected? Personally I don't know. I also feel the need to point out (once more) the idiocy in the technical manuals, saying that the weapons would be reflected back at the ship... Anyone else seen this?

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country the BoP can fire while cloaked and when she fires the light from the torpedoes briefly reflects on the surface of the ship. It is also interesting that they only fired torpedoes and not disruptors, I guess torpedoes would take less energy to launch than to power up the disruptors.

[MrAnderson]

Snip (sorry).

If the "can't be shielded when cloaked" thing is the actual issue then it's logical to assume that they won't fire when cloaked because they would give away their position.
You'd also have to ask, however, why they can't be shielded when cloaked... Is it a power problem, something to do with the shield being detected? Personally I don't know. I also feel the need to point out (once more) the idiocy in the technical manuals, saying that the weapons would be reflected back at the ship... Anyone else seen this?

In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country the BoP can fire while cloaked and when she fires the light from the torpedoes briefly reflects on the surface of the ship. It is also interesting that they only fired torpedoes and not disruptors, I guess torpedoes would take less energy to launch than to power up the disruptors.

The novelisation of Star Trek 6 says shields were not raise because Kang did not feel it was necessary.

[CDiehl]

Would it not be simplest to design a ship with a second power source, either to run the shields or the cloaking device? It's such a simple solution, yet neither the Romulans nor the Klingons thought of it. They've had at least a hundred years to design a ship to take two power plants, but they never bother to address the source of the major weakness of their major advantage. Unless it turns out that conventional shields and cloaking devices cancel each other out, I can't imagine why they are that stupid.

[Stravo]

Its always been stated from day one (Balance of Terror) that the cloak is an enormous drain on the power reserves. The reason why power cells have not caught up is that cloaks are consatntly upgraded to defeat Federation counter measures and as they get upgraded they take yet more power so its a viscious cycle with the power generation technology unable to keep up with cloak demands, thus you have the constant weakness that they cannot fire because they simply do not have the power to divert to weapons without dropping the cloak. (My theory BTW)

The BoP in ST6 and the Scimitar are notable exceptions. (Why the Klingons in over a hundred years were unable toi duplicate what Chang did is beyond me)

[BenRG]

All we know for sure from the canon is that it would take far more power than the cloaked ship has available to fire its' weapons while cloaked. I assume that this means that one of two things would happen if you tried it:

1. Because you are using more power than you have, all your high-power systems (such as the weapons and cloak) would be short-changed. You would have the cloak 'ripple' (as it does when lower-power systems like active communications or matter transporters are used) only in a far more dramatic way. The ship would probably be partially visible for the duration of the firing sequence until the cloak re-sets. Worse still, the weapons would be working at lower power. With disruptors, this would be an annoyance. With a photon torpedo, it could be fatal (60MT quantum bomb stuck in the launch tube, anyone? )
2. The massive overload could precipitate a melt-down of the notoriously-unstable matter/antimatter reactor.

So, how did Chang and the guy in 'Nemesis' get around it? The simplest explanation is usually the best: Both starships were massively over-powered, with a much smaller crew and less-complex non-tactical systems (like long-range sensors and communications). This might explain why Chang's BoP blew up after being hit only by a dozen torpedoes (none of which penetrated the hull, IIRC). Such an over-powered ship would neccessarily have a reduced safety margin and would, basically, be a reactor accident waiting to happen.

[Yogi]

Also, the Enterprise was able to detect a radiation surge before the ship fired. Perhaps for "normal" ships, the act of powering up weapons would raise a red flag on sensors even if the ship was cloaked.

[kojikun]

i like how the cloaked warbird was illuminated by its own torp. that kind of hints that the properties of the warbird were altered to make it transparent to external light, but the light from the torp was altered similarly so it could actually reflect off the warbird. and it looked cool.

[Admiral Johnason]

The ship appears to simply have insufficient power to do this.

It has never been attempted in an episode, but that's the explanation they give us.

There is some canon evidence to support this. In ST III, Koor ordered power transfered from cloak to weapons, so apperatently there wasn't enough to go around.

[Sea Skimmer]

If that was the case though couldnt you get around it by loading a low power weapon onto the Warbird?

Load her up with 100 megaton bombs. She makes a run while cloaked and drops it 5 miles from the enemy ship with a 5 second fuse. A Warbird should have enough spare power to open a cargo hold or release a bomb clamp.

Firing a modern anti ship missile takes a couple watts to tell the missile to ignite its booster. The whole premise that they cannot simply shove missiles out of a tube is quite stupid. But then so are many other trek starship features.

[Lord Poe]

In "The Enterprise Incident", the cloaking device Kirk steals must be plugged into the Enterprise's shield system to work. That's probably why there's no shields; the cloak is a diferent kind of shield.

[Admiral Johnason]

In "The Enterprise Incident", the cloaking device Kirk steals must be plugged into the Enterprise's shield system to work. That's probably why there's no shields; the cloak is a diferent kind of shield.

Then why can it be shot through?

[StarshipTitanic]

It shields against different things (light, sensors).

[Gandalf]

Could the lack of shield thing be because a shield could be detcted, therefore making the whole thing pointless?

[Sea Skimmer]

Could the lack of shield thing be because a shield could be detcted, therefore making the whole thing pointless?

Maybe, reducing emissions should make a cloak more effective. However as I recall we've seen holo decks used on a cloaked Romulan ship, and those would draw alot of power.

[Gandalf]

Could the lack of shield thing be because a shield could be detcted, therefore making the whole thing pointless?

Maybe, reducing emissions should make a cloak more effective. However as I recall we've seen holo decks used on a cloaked Romulan ship, and those would draw alot of power.

Sorry but what ep was that?

[AdmiralKanos]

If the cloak has an enormous power draw, then it must also dump a great deal of heat into its environment in order to avoid cooking its contents.

I really wish sci-fi writers would pick up a physics textbook sometime. Fucking first and biggest law of thermodynamics, and they don't know it.

[kojikun]

Mike, you should do a big-giant-list of engineering mishaps and things to watch for in scifi shows.

[BenRG]

If the cloak has an enormous power draw, then it must also dump a great deal of heat into its environment in order to avoid cooking its contents.

Maybe that was the secret of Spock's heat-seeking photon torpedo? After all, it needed something to get it close enough to pick up the BoP's sub-light drive exhaust emissions.

Certainly the BoP has large heat sinks (that is what the big black ribbed things connecting the wings to the body are, according to one or two semi-official sources I've seen). Maybe that is why the D'Derex has such a large surface area too.