Sea Skimmer wrote:Now if you want a real brain wrecker for this, how is it that Klingons came to accept the cloaking device as honorable and worthwhile, compared to mounting more guns on the ships?
Well, the cloaks appear to have arisen during the 'TOS movie' era. During the TOS era itself, you have smooth-forehead Klingons who seem a lot less obsessed with the "HONOR GLORY PATH OF THE WARRIOR" stuff, which didn't really start to take off again until at least the era of Star Trek VI and maybe not even then.
Maybe the cloaking device was a product of that period, and well... Klingons who use cloaking devices
win, and winning is glorious, so it must be okay, right? Plus, standard Klingon ships can't fire while cloaked, so you have to uncloak and see the whites of the enemy's eyes before you blow them up. Honorable, right?
And after a generation or two, cloaking devices are traditional, and who wants to argue with tradition, especially when it would probably result in them getting their asses kicked in a space battle?
Plus, quite frankly I can't understand why anyone in Star Trek who hasn't explicitly promised not to would ever NOT use cloaking devices on ships that could conceivably need to sneak up on someone. It's just a good idea all around for military purposes, and for that matter for peaceful purposes if you're trying to avoid conflict either through deterrence or through denying potential aggressors any easy targets.
So for me, the question isn't "why do Klingons use cloaking devices," it's "how come the Cardassians, the Borg, pretty much the entire Delta Quadrant, the Dominion, and so on
don't?"
Sea Skimmer wrote:The Klingons probably have plenty of scientists who don't fall prey to collaboration problems the warriors do, precisely because a scientists they would not be seen as competition for leadership. And thus unworthy of being murdered in ritual combat.
This is very true. And we've actually seen, I think, references to, say, the logs of a Klingon research vessel whose captain talks about how he goes out to 'struggle with the unknown' and brings back 'spoils' of observational data or whatever. I forget where that comes from.
I'm sure the Klingons have a functioning research and engineering establishment, it's inconceivable that they could function as a starfaring society without one.* The Romulans, likewise, the Cardassians likewise, and so on. But it's very much plausible that the Federation has simply pulled ahead of them over the 200 years or so between
Enterprise and the DS9/VOY era, because having a bunch of Vulcan scientists working on how to build a better shield generator is probably going to end better than hiring a bunch of Klingons to do the same thing.
Somehow I find myself picturing this:
http://www.whompcomic.com/2011/08/01/th ... t-klingon/
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*For an example of a society that really
has lost the intellectual wherewithal to be a star-traveling species in Trek, look at the Pakleds.
Incidentally, my pet theory to explain them is that they went down the route of 'appification' past a point of no return. We see today a trend toward making advanced technology easy to use, with touch-screen interfaces that replace a lot of words and detail with big friendly icons to do the things you're most likely to want them to do.
Extrapolate this trend far enough and it becomes a problem, because at some point the average member of your society ceases to perceive the
need for complexity beyond the level of canned interfaces and "there's an app for that."
Eventually, the
last generation of competent Pakled technologists strove to make their technology so easy to use that even a complete ignoramus could operate it. Unfortunately, this isn't sustainable. Some number of generations later, you have barely-literate Pakleds flying around in run-down ships that run on scientific principles they don't understand, trying to kidnap better-educated aliens to make essential repairs and upgrades. And the future of the galaxy is determined by the power-users who understand and tinker with their hardware, in order to improve upon it.
Obviously this is utterly noncanon and probably contradicts some canon somewhere, but I like it.