TechMemo:Cloaking Device:Gravitic
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Star Fleet Engineering
Bureau of Starship and Starcraft Technology
Star Fleet Engineering
Technical Memorandum
Stardate: 90513 (15 May 1997)
Edited: 130807 (7 August 2001)
RE: Gravitic Cloaks
Gravitic cloaks are a proven standard in stealth technology. They provide a low chance of detection while allowing most shipboard activities to proceed as normal.
Gravitic cloaks work by using artificial gravity generators to bend light and other electromagnetic radiation around the ship. This causes the matter of the ship not to register on another ship's sensors. The cloak must be finely tuned to ship's systems to work properly. Additionally, the cloaking device must be carefully adjusted to insure that the gravity waves that it generates in order to cloak the ship are not detected.
As a consequence, the gravitic cloaking device uses a large amount of computer time and power. This means that a cloaked ship may not engage in combat. Shields and weapons system have insufficient power to operate while the ship is cloaked. Additionally, shields produce large scale gravitic disturbances which cannot be hidden by a cloaking device.
The warp coil emissions are the most difficult to hide. Since the warp drives use gravity to bend space around the ship, the faster a ship is moving, the more difficult it becomes to effectively hide the ship.
This type of cloak has been employed successfully on a wide range of Klingon and Romulan ships for well over a century.
