Graham Kennedy wrote:
Is it, though? If light hits a mirror from one side, it reflects, but not so much from the other. Cloaks that bend light around the ship may in and of themselves do nothing to stop, say, your IR signature leaking out.
Unless it bends light on the entire spectrum
Consider that in ST VI, Chang's cloak did absolutely nothing to stop the engines leaving a trail behind the ship constantly. In DS9 the Romulan cloak was said to allow "a slight subspace variance" to radiate at warp speeds. We know that cloaks won't perfectly bend Tachyons around them, as that's how a tachyon detector grid works against them. We know that a cloak can hold a residual charge of tachyons if the ship using it blasts out a big load of them, making it visible. We know that even in TOS they were able to detect the ship's movement in spite of the cloak, just not very well.
And we know that all of this can be corrected for, making a 'perfect cloak' that the E-E couldn't see through no matter what.
In theory Chang's cloak defects should affect all cloaked ship, at least at impulse speed, even the Scimitar (unless they developed new propulsion methods unknown to the Federation).
It seems obvious to me that bending the light around the ship is only a small part of what's involved in cloaking. There's all sorts of other stuff you need to do to make your cloak good. And it's an arms race - you make a better cloak, the Federation makes better sensors, and so on. Which is pretty much how stealth works in the present day, actually.
This is certain ... after Nemesis the federation suddenly found itself vulnerable to a Romulan attack, and it is conceivable that a strong impulse to develop new sensors to counteract this risk started immediately.
McAvoy wrote:For me the cloaking device is just a interesting piece of tech since it seems to be a plug and play device. You'd think there would be alot of modifications to the ship to use the cloaking device even if it's for a brief time. I mean something like what the device does, you would need to go back to the docks to heavily modify the ship.
Not all changes must necessarily require dismantling the ship, rather I might think of incompatibility between technologies that could interfere with use.