Starfleet Jedi

I have much reason think this.. Why did Starfleet send USS Enterprise E alone to stand gourd in Romulan Neutral Zone. Starfleet would not do that unless USS Enterprise E had the able to pick starships while cloaked. Also in Star Terk Nemesis how Geordi La Forge been able tell Commander Ricker no way to penetrate cloak Scimitar. USS Enterprise E had equipment aboard that allow them pick up Starships when they are cloaked.Beyound there way have we never seen any Sovereign-class starships during Dominion War.

There are methods to detect cloaked ships. The problem is that most ships can avoid these tricks if they're far enough away. The Scimitar however, was sitting right in front of them. As far as sending in the Enterprise E alone, it's rather a thing for the Federation to take a risk for the sake of peace. And of course, as far as the Enterprise went, it was a pretty safe risk given it's the fastest ship in the fleet (ie, most warbirds can't reach warp 9 as of early TNG) and has the most impressive display of firepower (one launcher would do serious damage to a warbird), not to mention the speed and grace that makes the warbirds look like dying ISDs.

All in all, it's not that the Enterprise E was designed for taking out warbirds, so much as it was designed to be badass. The scanning thing however, is probably standard by now. The Neutral Zone on the UFP side has outposts designed with those things built in.

The reason the E-E was sent to the RNZ was not because of anything necessarily special about that particular starship, though it is a powerful ship in it's own right, it was stated specifically because Starfleet was uncertain about Captain Picard, who as you may recall, was assimilated years before.

At any rate, the outposts along the RNZ are equipped so that they can form a sensor net that can detect when cloaked starships cross the border into Federation space, though it is possible that the Federation also may have adapted the Dominion anti-proton scanning for use on their own starships. But even if they did, there is little indication that it would have been effective in countering something as advanced as the Scimitar's cloak, which not only hid it from all sensors, but allowed it to fire while still cloaked, and even maintain shields.

More than likely, as the backstage information states, the Sovereign class was designed to fight the Borg just like the Defiant class was intended to.
-Mike

The trouble was that Enterprise was relying solely on passive sensors when looking for Scimitar hence Geordi's complaint that the cloak is "perfect" and doesn't leak any tachyons. As soon as it dawned on Picard that he could try active scanning by firing phasers in all directions Scimitar was located. What is stopping the Federation from installing "radars" that emit low level phaser radiation?

There is, of course, zero evidence that the E-E's targetting sensors are only using passive scanning. And I'd wager that a cloaking device that would fail to any old active scan would be pretty lousy.

More logical would be to assume the Romulans cloaking device doesn't just bend visible light but other e/m radiation, such as scanner beams as well. Hence, when you use your sci-fi radar equivalent thingy your active beams will be bend around the target (or alternatively scatter) instead of reflecting back.

Obviously, such a technique would have limits and something more potent than the average radar system -such as say, a phaser beam- might actually pierce the system rather than be deflected by it.

I'am not sure where you get the idea that targeting sensors and the like are "passive" systems, Kane. We know sensors on an Intrepid class starship require at least 5-10 terawatts as per VOY's "Good Shepherd", and can scan across multiple light years in what appears to be real-time, or near real-time (as per many, many episodes from TOS to VOY). So the passive part is out and we have to conclude that sensors may require a good deal of power, and they are probably working by bathing a wide area in a relatively diffuse amount of subspace or other technobabble radiations. Easy for cloaking devices to bend it around and keep a starship hidden.

As Roondar also points out, the phaser beams are a pretty tightly concentrated thing and were being fired in random directions in the hopes of setting off a shield impact. Not suprisingly, the E-E had many more misses than hits in detecting the Scimitar, and even with a shield hit, the Scimitar can move quickly and get out of the way before a full weapons strike can be directed against it.
-Mike

I'm aware they posses active sensors however they don't seem to use them when fighting cloaked ships instead relying on catching radiation that leaks through the enemy cloak as Geordi attempted to do.
I still don't see why active radar-like sensors based on phaser radiation wouldn't work. They are obviously reflected by Scimitars shields or cloaks it's only a matter of scale and intensity; they decrease the intensity of the phaser beam and increase the sensitivity of the sensors that pick up the reflected phaser radiation.
A wide, low level phaser radiation would keep Scimitar constantly visible so there would be no way for it to move out of the way.
Littering solar systems with probes that emit such radiation would also make it impossible for the Romulans to make a sneak attack at Earth like they tried in Nemesis.

I don't see anything in using phaser energy that makes any particular difference here other than it is directed in a vastly more concentrated form than the energy of the sensor beams. You need to show, by dialog or other canon information, that specifically only some unique property of phaser energy regardless of concentration allows it to defeat a cloaking shield.

As for active sensors, it's been pretty well established that sensor beams from a starship are active as this scene from TOS' "Return to Tomorow" indicates:


SPOCK: Captain.
KIRK: Got something?
SPOCK: Sensors registering some form of energy deep inside the planet.
SARGON: Your probes have touched me, Mister Spock.

So if the E-1701's sensors were merely passive, they could not have detected Sargon's energy they way they did by "touching" him through more than 112 miles (180 km) of rock.

A passive sensor, would be something like an infrared camera, or a gamma ray spectrometer that would sit there and let the radiation it is designed to register hit it's detectors without doing anything else. An active real life sensor is something like a LIDAR laser or a RADAR that actively beams it's energy and hopefully get a reflection from whatever it is that is being scanned comes back to the dish or other receiving apparatus. The sensors Spock used in "Return to Tomorrow" seem to be of the latter category since they are actively beaming energy down through many kilometers of rock in a planet, and could actually contact the energy that is Sargon and then in some fashion return that information back to the E-1701 for Spock for analysis in apparently real time.
-Mike

Kane Starkiller wrote:The trouble was that Enterprise was relying solely on passive sensors when looking for Scimitar hence Geordi's complaint that the cloak is "perfect" and doesn't leak any tachyons. As soon as it dawned on Picard that he could try active scanning by firing phasers in all directions Scimitar was located. What is stopping the Federation from installing "radars" that emit low level phaser radiation?

Actually, I highly doubt that. There are ways to spot a cloaked ship, given its location is known. One such method is the antiproton beam method that the Dominion was first seen using and was later seen in use by the Cardassians to find the Defiant. Given that this technology was easily used by Cardassian warships within hours of knowing that a highly armed cloaked ship was running around their territory, I would suspect that this sort of stuff is standard aboard the Enterprise E, especially given that the Enterprise is one of the many ships that has patrolled the Neutral Zone often. TNG and TOS establishes that the ship is often on call to respond to such threats.

So it's likely that no form of known sensor reading could spot the ship. As for firing...well, we didn't know that the Scimitar could shield itself while cloaked and what's more they'd be risking the Captain's life in the attempt, not to mention that the ship's exact location may not be the same.