Cloaked ships and warp flash?

[Eryx_uk]

We've seen that when a ship goes to warp that we get the warp flash in the distance. Would a cloaked ship cause the same effect or do you think that the cloaking technology would cancel that out?

I'm guessing the later otherwise it would be an obvious way to detect a cloaked ship entering warp.

Thoughts?

[Dan Gurden]

To be honest I always assumed the 'warp flash' as a cinematic twist over something that would be visible to characters... Which would match your second hypothesis...

Mind you if you want to detact a cloacked ship you should set sensors to detect the wake and displacement from the deflector shields, which should effectively show a nice big hole in galactic noise and debris where the cloaked ship is, after all if they turn the deflectors off they could end up crippled by a microscopic fragment of debris...

Been trying to work out the defensive counter for that one for a couple of years now.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Presumably the cloaking field would have to envelop the warp field in the first place, otherwise the subspace distortion would be detectable.

[Dan Gurden]

Presumably the cloaking field would have to envelop the warp field in the first place, otherwise the subspace distortion would be detectable.

Thats rather the point. In my mind it would be like cloaking a naval ship in water... Invisible and undetectable, but you could see the displacement in the water, a 'Hole' as it were...

Using deflectors to make space travel safe would be even more-so as this field is projected forward and pushes any dangerous materials around the vessels path... This must be detectable or the cloaking device would have to be so powerful as to project along the vessels entire flight path aft power levels that would probably nullify the cloak...

One of those things that dont make too much sense.

[The Tatterdemalion King]

Thats rather the point. In my mind it would be like cloaking a naval ship in water... Invisible and undetectable, but you could see the displacement in the water, a 'Hole' as it were...

Well, presumably the side of the boat projecting the image to those above would have to be dynamically created to fill in that gap, and of course it would only really work when the ship isn't in motion.

Most of what I've seen about cloaking systems in development apply it to ground vehicles and individual soldiers, though.

[Dan Gurden]

and of course it would only really work when the ship isn't in motion.

We appear to have got back to the original query?

Perhaps if the cinematic flash is visible its only visible from a stationary position, and frankly once a vessel at warp causes a starlight flash amongst the star-scape, should it be noticable then it would be so far away as to no longer be an issue?