Yawn.......let me know when I can walk naked into a junior high school girl's locker room undetected. Then I'll consider being impressed.

another "we made a cloaking device" announcement?

i bet they're just crying Wolf 359.

Algernon and Charly unimpressed.

The Treaty of Algeron is no longer valid since Romulus exploded.

PsyLord: The Treaty of Algeron is no longer valid since Romulus exploded.

While my brain hurts from you using past tense to refer to future events, I admire your will to ignore the new timeline.

DubyaHater: Yawn.......let me know when I can walk naked into a junior high school girl's locker room undetected. Then I'll consider being impressed.

That's more useful than an invisibility cloak would be on a battlefield. The actual military application of such a device would be somewhere close to nil.

Knara: PsyLord: The Treaty of Algeron is no longer valid since Romulus exploded.

While my brain hurts from you using past tense to refer to future events, I admire your will to ignore the new timeline.

Parallel universe, not a new timeline. Well considering that the Treaty of Algernon would also be a future event then, no foul in creating a cloaking device now when the treaty hasn't even been proposed in the first place.

PsyLord: The Treaty of Algeron is no longer valid since Romulus exploded. was blown up by the Remans

I work at UT and know people who work on this, or at least I did until they dropped out of sight a while back.

PsyLord: Parallel universe, not a new timeline. Well considering that the Treaty of Algernon would also be a future event then, no foul in creating a cloaking device now when the treaty hasn't even been proposed in the first place.

From a fan's point of view, it's 6 of one, half a dozen of another.

/from this TOS/TNG fan, it's heresy either way
//though the fact that the new movie went off the rails about 1 hour in doesn't help
///still confused about why you'd drydock a starship on land / in a gravity well

Dug up the actual paper on arXiv, if anyone's interested. It's solid work, but still limited in application so far. The main problem is that the test fixture is "small", meaning it's not very large compared to the wavelength of the 3GHz microwaves used in the test. The test cylinder is not quite two wavelengths long; and if you want to hide a plane (or even part of one) you'll need to get this to work on a fixture that's a lot larger than 2 wavelengths.

The authors are pretty up front with this though, and state right on the first page that the goal of the experiment is TMz mode scattering reduction. This is all well and good; it's just not really 3D cloaking if you don't address all other propagation modes except to say that they're negligible to begin with using this geometry. Cloaking an 18cm diameter sphere would have been a much greater feat. Still, props to them for getting the damn thing to work at all.

Junior Officer: Captain! The Klingons have used a cloaking device! We can't see them!
Captain: Switch to thermal scans and target the Klingon vessel shaped heat signature.
Junior Officer: Target locked!
Captain: Fark that ship and everyone on board.

/my biggest probelm with cloaking devices.

But fark has all but assured me there are no intelligent people in Texas.

chuggernaught: Junior Officer: Captain! The Klingons have used a cloaking device! We can't see them!
Captain: Switch to thermal scans and target the Klingon vessel shaped heat signature.
Junior Officer: Target locked!
Captain: Fark that ship and everyone on board.

/my biggest probelm with cloaking devices.

So... you are of the opinion that the cloaking devices only worked on the visible spectrum?

ronin7: chuggernaught: Junior Officer: Captain! The Klingons have used a cloaking device! We can't see them!
Captain: Switch to thermal scans and target the Klingon vessel shaped heat signature.
Junior Officer: Target locked!
Captain: Fark that ship and everyone on board.

/my biggest probelm with cloaking devices.

So... you are of the opinion that the cloaking devices only worked on the visible spectrum?

Or are you referring to the actual devices being worked on? but setting it in the world of star trek to catch me off guard?

chuggernaught: Junior Officer: Captain! The Klingons have used a cloaking device! We can't see them!
Captain: Switch to thermal scans and target the Klingon vessel shaped heat signature.
Junior Officer: Target locked!
Captain: Fark that ship and everyone on board.

/my biggest probelm with cloaking devices.

Cloaking devices mask nearly all radiation, or at least dampen it. It's Star Trek technology so don't think too hard about how it does it.

What we know about cloaking technology is anecdotal in canon. We know from Star Trek III that the cloak isn't perfect, as using the visual interpretation of sensor data on the main viewer, Kirk and Sulu were able to notice the "distortion" of the cloaked Bird of Prey around the Genesis planet.

We also know from Star Trek 6 that it doesn't totally cloak all radiation emissions, but "dampens" it. Spock comments that this doesn't help them against Kang's Bird of Prey that can fire while cloaked, because "by the time we're close enough to detect it, we're ashes." It does not, however, prevent superheaded/ionized gases that are used while ships in the Star Trek universe are on "impulse" power (non-warp propulsion), which is how they defeat it in that movie.

But it's Star Trek. You can't think too hard about the technology because you'll just hurt yourself. That's one of the ways that VOY got out of hand, by relying on technobabble for central plot points, as opposed to just using it as a way to skim over the tech that enabled the plot.

ronin7: ronin7: chuggernaught: Junior Officer: Captain! The Klingons have used a cloaking device! We can't see them!
Captain: Switch to thermal scans and target the Klingon vessel shaped heat signature.
Junior Officer: Target locked!
Captain: Fark that ship and everyone on board.

/my biggest probelm with cloaking devices.

So... you are of the opinion that the cloaking devices only worked on the visible spectrum?

Or are you referring to the actual devices being worked on? but setting it in the world of star trek to catch me off guard?

Well according to the way its explained it is only visible that made their ship invisible, it would still put off thermal signature which would make the cloaking irrelevant in 99.9% of the battles in any star trek series.

Knara: Cloaking devices mask nearly all radiation, or at least dampen it. It's Star Trek technology so don't think too hard about how it does it.

Knara: chuggernaught: Junior Officer: Captain! The Klingons have used a cloaking device! We can't see them!
Captain: Switch to thermal scans and target the Klingon vessel shaped heat signature.
Junior Officer: Target locked!
Captain: Fark that ship and everyone on board.

/my biggest probelm with cloaking devices.

Cloaking devices mask nearly all radiation, or at least dampen it. It's Star Trek technology so don't think too hard about how it does it.

What we know about cloaking technology is anecdotal in canon. We know from Star Trek III that the cloak isn't perfect, as using the visual interpretation of sensor data on the main viewer, Kirk and Sulu were able to notice the "distortion" of the cloaked Bird of Prey around the Genesis planet.

We also know from Star Trek 6 that it doesn't totally cloak all radiation emissions, but "dampens" it. Spock comments that this doesn't help them against Kang's Bird of Prey that can fire while cloaked, because "by the time we're close enough to detect it, we're ashes." It does not, however, prevent superheaded/ionized gases that are used while ships in the Star Trek universe are on "impulse" power (non-warp propulsion), which is how they defeat it in that movie.

But it's Star Trek. You can't think too hard about the technology because you'll just hurt yourself. That's one of the ways that VOY got out of hand, by relying on technobabble for central plot points, as opposed to just using it as a way to skim over the tech that enabled the plot.

According to some nerd book I read it was just visible, heat could not be cloaked.

That treaty has bound the Federation's hands for 50 years and left us vulnerable to infiltration and attack by both the Romulans and the Klingons! We're just looking out for our best interests!

steamingpile: According to some nerd book I read it was just visible, heat could not be cloaked.

None of those books are canonical. Obviously it masks heat, or what you're talking about would have been thought up by the folks trying to track them.

After all, heat is just another kind of radiation.

Knara: steamingpile: According to some nerd book I read it was just visible, heat could not be cloaked.

None of those books are canonical. Obviously it masks heat, or what you're talking about would have been thought up by the folks trying to track them.

After all, heat is just another kind of radiation.

yes but the wavelength might be too long for this effect to manifest.

MaudlinMutantMollusk: I KNEW it!

/Obama is really a Romulan

Don't be silly, His granfather was Romulan, hes only one quarter.

DubyaHater: Yawn.......let me know when I can walk naked into a junior high school girl's locker room undetected. Then I'll consider being impressed.

skyotter: another "we made a cloaking device" announcement?

i bet they're just crying Wolf 359.

Today IS a good day to pun!

Knara: steamingpile: According to some nerd book I read it was just visible, heat could not be cloaked.

None of those books are canonical. Obviously it masks heat, or what you're talking about would have been thought up by the folks trying to track them.

After all, heat is just another kind of radiation.

Its a cloaking device, not a heat shield. Even if it did shield heat just coming out of cloaking would give away their position enough to fark them up since every time in the show/movie they were right in front of them.......

You know what, I dont care anymore.

steamingpile: Knara: steamingpile: According to some nerd book I read it was just visible, heat could not be cloaked.

None of those books are canonical. Obviously it masks heat, or what you're talking about would have been thought up by the folks trying to track them.

After all, heat is just another kind of radiation.

Its a cloaking device, not a heat shield. Even if it did shield heat just coming out of cloaking would give away their position enough to fark them up since every time in the show/movie they were right in front of them.......

You know what, I dont care anymore.

heat = radiation

And, as I said before, if you really that *that much* about scifi technology you really gotta spend some time outside.

Technically, heat in a vacuum is radiation. Conduction and convection don't really have much to do w/ radiation, but in space, yeah, all you really get is radiation. The Predator's cloaking suit is much more difficult. It's probably why he uses the heat vision so much; hard to hide the air temperature differences around your body when you use the suit.

One thing I wonder, is if anyone's developed special gravity well sensors. Starships are pretty big, and their gravitational pull, while really small, wouldn't be non-zero. Especially if you're far enough away from any big source (like a planet).

steamingpile: Knara: steamingpile: According to some nerd book I read it was just visible, heat could not be cloaked.

None of those books are canonical. Obviously it masks heat, or what you're talking about would have been thought up by the folks trying to track them.

After all, heat is just another kind of radiation.

Its a cloaking device, not a heat shield. Even if it did shield heat just coming out of cloaking would give away their position enough to fark them up since every time in the show/movie they were right in front of them.......

You know what, I dont care anymore.

Yeah, but cloaking implicitly implies being hidden from detection. Given that the technology of today possesses pretty advanced heat detection, one could logically assume that spaceships in the future do too. So, any device that can cloak ships obviously has a way of masking heat signatures. The same logic can be applied to gravity well sensors.

That said, even when I was a kid watching next gen I never understood why Picard had such a stick up his ass about following that treaty. Really, why anyone in Starfleet did. I remember thinking that Admiral Pressman (I think his name was, without looking it up) was the only sane man in the room. I mean really, how stupid do you have to be not to develop something as militarily advantageous as an effective cloak? Cultures throughout history who have done that have not fared well.

/was only later that I really put some thought into Roddenberry's vision of the future. Sure, I like star trek just as much of as the next nerd, but the guy had some really dumb ideas about human nature.

Interestingly enough, Boeing's PhantomWorks was given many millions of tax dollars in, IIRC, 2004, for the first fieldable prototype of an active plasmonic metamaterial "cloak". They didn't say in the document if it was a mockup for radar cross section range testing or a flyable aircraft.

/it was also specified to be able to generate faux Dopplers instead as a free side effect - zero dopplers or negative ones.