It is possible that the Lexington and Excalibur were employing spoofing measures to fool the Enterprise's sensors as a test of M5's capabilities. Or that for a target as small as a starship a certain interval of scanning is necessary to identify the vessel as something other than a contact. It may be that a higher resolution protocol is needed to provide detailed information and that until it is activated the sensors only give raw contact data on movement, bearing and position.

---

When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

If TNG is any indication, Fed ships rely heavily on transponders to identify other ships. If the Lexington and Excalibur switched off their transponders, they'd be hard to identify from a distance.

---

"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776

"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"

I know that in Voyager they identify by hull design.

Again voyager. in the couple episodes where they are under ground voyagers sensors can pick then up, and even transport with enhancers. but they can only scan through few kilometers of rock. As an example when the flier crashes and goes into the planet their sensors can't pick up the ship they are so far down, they only pick up there fires and some debree.

That's most likely because the Delta Quadrant is basically a mishmash of shit. There's no coherent government over half of it and no way to enforce transponder standards. And Voyager was from the Federation who wouldn't have the ability to read Delta Quadrant transponders anyways. I'd like an episode quote for that so I can look it up as well by the way.

Any episode w/ the vidians, but yeah I gotta go look for a quote

---

"It's Time to Kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm all outa bubble gum"
~Duke Nukem

In TNG they can identify ships by hull design, as well, but not a large distances. With transponder codes, they can identify ships that are still light-years away ("The Wounded"). Without transponder codes, they often fail to even detect other ships until they are within a few light-minutes or light-seconds distance ("Haven", "The Battle", "Peak Performance").

---

"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776

"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"

Curiously enough, in "The Hunted" they seem to be unable to detect Roga Danar's "life signs". However, they are able to detect his mass and shape, as that's what Picard orders a lock on. Since he's a biologically modified Angosian supersoldier, that indicates that somehow a living being can be engineered to completely spoof the Federation's life scanners.

Later on in the episode, the internal sensors of the ship cannot follow him as he's running hither and yon throughout the Enterprise, which is odd because they used his mass to locate and transport him earlier; I think he might have been using the ship's crew to "mask" his presence.

---

X-COM: Defending Earth by blasting the shit out of it.

Writers are people, and people are stupid. So, a large chunk of them have the IQ of beach pebbles. ~fgalkin

You're complaining that the story isn't the kind you like. That's like me bitching about the lack of ninjas in Robin Hood. ~CaptainChewbacca

As I recall, Roga Danar was specifically spoofing electromagnetic sensors. They might have been able to detect his mass, but without the appropriate electromagnetic signatures, they were unable to identify him as a living being.

The internal sensors may have more limited capabilities than the main sensor apparatus; there would seldom be a need for powerful analytical sensors in the ship's jeffries tubes. Presumably, without the electromagnetic signature of a living being, the remaining sensor capabilities were unable to track him.

---

"This is supposed to be a happy occasion... Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
-- The King of Swamp Castle, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"Nothing of consequence happened today. " -- Diary of King George III, July 4, 1776

"This is not bad; this is a conspiracy to remove happiness from existence. It seeks to wrap its hedgehog hand around the still beating heart of the personification of good and squeeze until it is stilled."
-- Chuck Sonnenburg on Voyager's "Elogium"

as to the line of site, in ST2:TWoK, after kirk is beamed back up from regulus, spock shows him a sensor diagram showing the enterprise and the reliant on opposite sides of the planetoid.

But the Reliant doesnt seem to have this feature.

This could simply be a computer representation of what they beleive to be the current status.

Or mabye they are bouncing a sensor signal off the spacelab.

But if they do that, why doesnt Kahn?


From what ive seen of the different series, electromagnetic or gravametric waves seem to interfear with ST sensors. But then, voyagers sensors seemed to be able to punch through this interfearance whenever it needed to. and then not work at all in the next episode.

But voyager sucks ass, except possibly scorpion 1&2

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2.2E32 joules of planet shattering kaboom

More likely it was a representation of orbital status based on partial data from Regula I's tracking sensors, which would read the other ship's orbital velocity and altitude.

As to why Khan didn't try to bring up such a reading... Recall that he's brilliant, but inexperienced.

---

When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

Considering that Khan spent most of his objective life frozen in a tube from the 20th till 22nd centuries aboard the Botany Bay and then only had a few days to look at the Enterprise before he and his crew were unceremoniously dumped on on a planet, "inexperienced" is a good word. Khan could give a good game due to being a genius, but it's important to remember that he only had a few days to acquaint himself with the modern world, which even for a genius is a tall order.

Compared to Kirk, who's not a genius but has many many years experience, he's a novice when it comes to space warfare and simply didn't know the moves.

---

"Show me an angel and I will paint you one." - Gustav Courbet

"Quetzalcoatl, plumed serpent of the Aztecs... you are a pussy." - Stephen Colbert

"Really, I'm jealous of how much smarter than me he is. I'm not an expert on anything and he's an expert on things he knows nothing about." - Me, concerning a bullshitter

This is actually quite normal behavior for EM and matter beams.

Interaction cross section is very strongly a function of momentum, especially around resonances.

For example, if you send out an X-ray beam a little below and then a little above resonance with one kind of nucleus, you can pick out the distribution of one kind of atom in a sample (Anomalous Grazing-Incidence X-ray Reflectivity, known as AGIR).

Similar tricks can be done with electrons. Transmission Electron Microscopes are often fitted with equipment for such measurements.

Even when you're not actively trying to take advantage of some resonance effect, you need to keep this in mind. It's easy to see carbon nanotubes in a TEM if you use an accelerating voltage of 80 kV, but if you pump it up to 200 kV, you need to get much tighter focus to see them at all.

That could be a problem, as they are not sensitive enough to pick up the plasma exhaust from a cloaked ship. Unless they are picking up the light from the fires? That wouldn't work for a stove, though. Funnily enough, I don't remember the stove one, what exactly happens?

On a more original note, I got much amusement from reading how someone called Avogardo thought that you could determine the masses of ships using gravity. Would a better theory be that the subspace radar pulse thing isn't all reflected off a surface, but some penetrates first, thus allowing one to gauge density (and therefore mass) by the amount of radiation reflected? I know that in real semi-transparent materials, light rays scatter rather than reflecting back to the source from within the medium, but subspace is really weird like that. Can someone tell me if I'm speaking nonsence here? I could look for some quotes to support this (I would look for numerical quantification to an accuracy impossible with a simple estimate), but if the theory isn't possible anyway, there doesn't seem much point.

"Mudd's Women" —the Enterprise's sensors tagged a heat source on the surface of Rigel XII and identified its location as Chief Miner Ben Childress' quarters, which is how they found where he and Eve McHuron were. The reading showed up on Farrell's board and Spock identified it as a cook-stove.

---

When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

Damn, that's awkward. How can the sensors have the resolution to tell even which house it comes from, but not be able to use this to target weapons in combat? It would be preferable to find an explanation that doesn't rely on falling back to starfleet being idiots, if such is possible. Would there be any sort of time delay, which would logically prevent targetting of a moving ship?

You could suppose that a heat source on a planet's surface is a relatively stationary target and more-or-less continuous for the duration of its operation. As for determining which house it came from, they could cross reference the grid location with their charts of the mining camp.

As for the emissions from a cloaked target issue, possible difficulties would include the relative motions of both targets, random changes in motion, material density of the gaseous trail (which would be much thinner than most gas cloud formations in deep space) particulary if the cloaked ship is not using a great amount of thrust to move at impulse (if its subspace/antigravity field is operating constantly). It could be that these parametres changed in the thirty years between the time of Kirk's 5-year mission and the Battle at Khitomer, requiring a different solution than what was available then. (as an aside, during the time of TOS, the Enterprise's sensors were able to track the particulate matter from ion and nuclear engined craft by reading trace radiation in those trails {"Spock's Brain", "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky"})

It could also be the case that nobody thought to devise a sensor to track gaseous emissions from a cloaked vessel since other methods of passively sensing a cloaked ship existed and, up until the building of Chang's prototype BOP, a cloaked ship could not fire weapons, so the necessity wasn't seen.

---

When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

I'm not sure about their being other methods to track the ship being a good one, because if there were, why weren't they using them? They took a real pounding because there wasn't any way for them to detect the klingons.

IIRC, the cloaking generator has high power requirements, and this is what usually prevents cloaked ships from firing (I'll see if I can dig up a quote for that); therefore the exhaust plasma must be pretty energetic (although not actually glowing, of course), as it is the only way for the ship to dump it's waste heat. Yet they can't use IR for the target lock? That is the problem I was referring to. You may have something there with the density of the gas; when dispersed it will be less intense, but over a wider area. This would mean that the target profile from an IR scope would be much bigger than the ship itself, and targetting the ship from this would only be of limited use and you would still basically be firing blind. Hell, they may even vent the gas at high speeds to spread it out more, thus increasing the target even further.

OK, did any of that make any sense, or am I just spouting bullshit at this point?

It could be the case that Chang's prototype BOP was an attempt to solve several of those problems, which rendered tracking methods known in that period useless or far less effective. By the time of TNG, a different set of solutions to the problem had to be implemented since the Romulans developed several methods to further mask their cloaked ships and presumably so did the Klingons.

---

When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

Does seem alpha quadrant sensors tend to be easily fooled. Peak Performance has been mentioned a few times here, and for good reason.
DATA says in the ep

"I have several examples of Commander Riker's battle technique. At the Academy, he calculated a sensory blind spot on a Tholian vessel and hid within it during a battle simulation. And as a lieutenant aboard the Potemkin, his solution
to a crisis was to shut down all power, and hang over a planet's
magnetic pole, thus confusing his opponent's sensors."

Worf was also not only able to spoof the Enterprise's sensors which create the visual image of a romulan ship on the view screen.. but are also able to pull the same trick on the Ferengi.

Also, how many times in star trek have you heard them talking about mimicking some other species warp signature or masking their own signature or even masking their warp trail entirely.

Cant help but remember the Enterprise A flying what was prolly rather deep into Klingon territory to rescue Kirk and McCoy in which the Klingons had detected the Ent, but where completely incapable of identifying the fact it was not of Klingon origin.

What ever Star Trek sensors may be capable of, they seem to have just as much they are incapable of as well a number of things that can be used against them. Another nail in the coffin of the pro trekkie side in the VS debate one would think... not that it needs any more.

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Bah weep grah nah weep ninny bon

Worf was able to do that because he "had knowledge of the Enterprise's security system" —in other words, he knew the backdoor to exploit to fool the Enterprise's computers. The situation with the Kreecta is less certain, and may have been a case in which the Hathaway had looped back after its seeming destruction, and the Ferengi assuming that it was another Federation starship on an attack vector.



I do not recall any instance of warp-signature mimickry. We have seen that the Romulans learned to mask their engine emissions to further hide their ships while cloaked. But in "Tin Man", the Enterprise was able to pick up trace readings of a cloaked Warbird which was running at maximum warp and causing its emissions to leak out past the stealthmasking and the cloaking field.



It could be the case that, in that time period, the sensor suites of Klingon monitor stations only had the capacity to read raw contact data but had no transponder-ID or distant identification capability; hence the necessity of opening contact to demand the ship's identity.

---

When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

I was recently watching TNG Schisms, and one thing that struck me was the apparent lack of cameras in the Enterprise's internal sensors. In the episode, they pick up what they think is an exploding conduit in an engineering section, and then they open the door and are surprised to see everyone going about their business as normal. They have to check with the Mk I Eyeball to see that this is the case. Surely, a camera in that section would have been helpful there. Similarly, when we see Riker getting sucked into the vortex in the same episode, you'd think a camera would have been helpful in telling everyone what was going on (granted, I can see why they might not put cameras in private quarters).

Also, in the episode with Roga Danar, sure they couldn't detect his "lifesigns" (whatever those are), but he is visible. A camera should have been able to pick him up.

Apparently, the Enterprise has some fancy internal sensors ... but no internal cameras. Very odd.

The "lifesign" detectors also apparently don't detect body heat, unless maybe Roga Danar is actually cold-blooded like a reptile. Which kind of makes you wonder exactly what this "lifesign" they detect consists of. Biomagnetism?

Actually, they do —visual evidence of the dilithium chamber breach is shown to Norah Sattie in "The Drumhead". It would appear that cameras are set up only in certain areas of the ship but for some reason not everywhere; which is strange since visual communication shipwide is certainly feasible.

---

When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

A Maquis ship pulled the mimickry stunt in "Defiant", imitating the Defiant's warp signature while the real ship ran cloaked. It wasn't perfect - Sisko noticed differences between the decoy and the real ship, but it was enough to fool the Cardassians.

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Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe - Albert Einstein

I love this paradox you would think that with the number of times that personal where abducted from the Enterprise their computer would keep a running count on the personal if nothing else.

I recently watched "Balance of Terror" on TV.com, and the romulan sensors where truly terrible as they could not find the Enterprise, after it turned off "most" of its systems. Very funny episode, as there are several "whispering" scenes which make you wonder why they are being very quite "sound does not travel in a vacuum. And all the power is not off Gravity is still working, as are sensors. (sadly I am not sure if this topic has a real answer, the writers make them as good or bad as they "need" them to be.)