Starfleet Jedi

Well, we've seen them in the canon now.

The following is based on the post here in the TCW review thread.

A ~135m long and roughly tubular-shape Republic prototype vessel is cloak-capable in the episode "Cat and Mouse"[TCW2]. The vessel's volume is perhaps 4000 cubic meters given its length and slenderness (the design reminds one of the Discovery from 2001), implying that it may not be significantly more voluminous than the Falcon or Twilight. This may suggest that length is somehow critical for cloaking, given that no ship as small as the Falcon is supposed to have a cloaking device per Needa in the original trilogy.

Regarding the capabilities of the cloak:

a. No visual distortion, even when touched on the hull by a Jedi hand.

b. No detection by Separatist ships (including Munificents, a Providence, and Trade Federation battleships) using standard scanning despite a hull-grazing pass of a Munificent. Even when the presence of the cloaked ship was known and the vessel had recloaked, scanning was ineffective until Separatist Admiral Trench's magnetic signature trick was employed. After that they had the ship on sensors without difficulty.

c. The ship cannot fire any weapons while cloaked, including "torpedoes and anti-aircraft cannons". When preparing to decloak and fire torpedoes, mixed within the torpedo firing prep lines was a note about diverting power. This may imply that Star Wars cloaks can't fire due to cloaking device power drain.

d. When detection was feared due to a close pass by fighters and bombers, Anakin ordered all systems and engines powered down save for the cloak, implying the possibility of some sort of signal leakage when these systems were functioning.

e. Cloak activation/deactivation requires only a couple of seconds, involving a luminous blue sparkly-bolt effect like electric arcs over the hull. However, after cloak deactivation, 15-35 seconds is apparently required to reactivate the cloak, at least after firing a full four-tube torpedo volley (it was 35 the first time, 15 the second).

f. Per Admiral Trench, any stealth ship could pass the Separatist blockade easily. This strongly suggests that cloaking devices are both rare (otherwise no one would bother to try to blockade) and rather effective (otherwise they'd be able to detect them readily).

And, though I neglected to mention it in the other post, yes you can see out from inside the cloak.

Basically, the cloaking device is akin to what one would expect from watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

The Separatist admiral had used "tracking torpedoes" to destroy cloaked cruisers in prior engagements, but he'd only had a few engagements with cloaked ships, and the description suggests these ships were large cloaked vessels. All signs point to cloaking being sufficiently rare that these battles were few and far between.

His use of tracking torpedoes to destroy cloaked ships seemed confusing to the Republic, which apparently never determined how he did it until now (the magnetic signature issue that Anakin guessed).

So, now we've seen it. Thoughts and impressions?

My view is that we're clearly seeing Star Wars cloaking tech being well behind Star Trek cloaking.

Borrowing from Chakoteya:

N'VEK: There is one possibility. In order for a ship to remain undetectable while cloaked, the radiative emissions from the warp engines must be precisely balanced. The ship's Engineer is a sympathiser. He may be able to slightly misalign one of the nullifier cores. It would create a small magnetic disturbance in space whenever we were in motion.
TROI: Good. Do it.
N'VEK: The effect would only be intermittently. They might not even detect it.
TROI: If it's the best we can do, we have to try it.
N'VEK: Anything more would be immediately registered on the Bridge. Even this slight misalignment may be detected.

In other words, only when the Romulan cloak was intentionally screwed with would you get a magnetic signature, and even then only when the ship was in motion.

Counterexamples welcome.

The Falcon volume of 4,000 m^3 seems quite a bit off. It can be pushed to that range or higher, if you assume it's a solid, uniform cylinder of 35m x 5m, which would give us 4,800 meters cubed. But that is way too steep. The main saucer at maximum possible diameter is 24 meters. Assuming 5 meter height (a bit tall, but still workable), you get 2,261 m^3. But that again assumes a uniform cylinder, rather than what the Falcon's saucer hull is; two shallow height domes sandwiched together. It will lose quite a bit of volume. So 2,000 m^3 would be the total volume of the saucer section, mandibles, gun turrets, cockpit with raised cockpit access tunnel, and the two side tunnels. Without good screencaps of the prototype ship, it's hard to work anything out, so I'll reserve judgement on that. But 120-135 meter long vessel would probably be the lower limit, or as you surmise, is the ideal shape, and thus lowest length that the cloak will operate over.
-Mike

You've anticipated me beautifully, good sir. Yes, I'd been a little worried about the Falcon volume, since (like the ISD) a tiny difference in the thickness of the rim will have huge implications for the whole ship, and I simply could not remember anymore the quality level of the LightWave model used back in the day. (At the time, I was so excited to be getting anywhere back then that I wasn't necessarily as careful to ensure that the model was a precise representation of the actual movie ship (many of them are based on whatever blueprints could be found or are otherwise just crap if you're going for precision rather than "ooh pretty, looks like such-and-such").)

Recently, I'd found that the Jedi Twilight came in at a bit above the Falcon's existing volume listing, which didn't seem like a bad thing. And the ships were similar in length (but with the Twilight, to my mind, being a more slender but taller box compared to the wider hamburger shape of the Falcon), so I had been feeling more comfortable about it.

But after estimating volume for the cloak ship and being troubled by the implication, I had decided to revisit the issue, just like you have.

To get a quick first-pass idea of whether I was off or not, I simply put the best SketchUp models of the Falcon and Twilight together at scale to see what they looked like together. I was surprised that my previous mental comparison was so very off . . . the Twilight, even just the main "box" with cockpit and all, is really very much thicker compared to the Falcon than I was originally thinking. (I really suck at doing SketchUp in my brain.)





So until last night, I had yet to do much volumetrically with the Falcon models I had found, all of which were going to require extensive internal clean-out (a time-consuming process). But I picked a very good-looking model that corresponds very well to the data and images in the article here and cleaned it out.

The result? 1716 cubic meters . . . less than half the old figure. Chances are the old Falcon model had a rim that was too thick.

The SketchUp ship has a mandible height of one meter, a total hull height in the center of five meters, a docking-port to docking-port width of 24.5 meters, and she's 3.3 meters tall at the point where the cockpit begins to slope downward for the windshield. All those are based on an initial length of 35.32 meters, which per the article above is probably half a meter too long (I did all the work before finding the article). However, given the model's simple lines (it's missing all the greeblie-stuff), the volume figure is probably about right.

I hate revisions that large, especially since the ISD just got altered to a similar extent, but them's the breaks . . . ideally I should've cross-checked all the old LightWave values mathematically, but oh well. It's a start.

Thanks for the final kick in the pants to get it done!

The Twilight is what your configuration versus volume theory rests on right now. At least that ship can be straight-forward measured in volume as a rectangular box, not accounting for the angled shape of the nose, or the large, deployable fins, we get approximately 4,000 meters cubed.

Now that I've seen some okay-ish screencaps of the Republic prototype ship from a couple different angles, I'm roughly estimating it is no less than 100 meters long based on a screencap on Wookiepedia showing a couple of people standing under the forward command module section while the ship is docked in a hanger bay. Also among the screencaps is a shot of the vessel in mid-cloaking, which does show the blue arcing effect, but also it appears that there is a slight distortion effect as well, though not as pronounced as some Trek ships when they cloak. Another possible thing I noted is that in some views of the ship, along the spine it appears as though there are some raised panels, possibly part of how the cloaking system projects whatever it does, thus if that observation holds up, it would indicate that configuration is essential and hence Captain Needa's "no ship that small" refers more to the length than how big it is volume-wise.
-Mike

Sorry, should've provided these anyway:




I'm waiting on the 720p version before declaring firm values, but these will do for now (and ah, how the times change . . . I remember when screencaps measuring 640 by 272 would've been awesome.)

By my reckoning, the shadow of the nose of the ship is more or less directly beneath the nose, but I assumed it wasn't quite that far given the light source locations and potential distortion therefrom.

The clone standing by the forward foot is 25 pixels tall, and he's pretty much standing beside the widest part of the nose section, which looks to be at its widest just a smidgen back from the cockpit windows. From there I'm estimating 214^2 + 76^2 = x^2 for the distance to the nose from that point, or 227ish pixels. Assuming the trooper is 1.9 meters tall, that's 17.26 meters, give or take.

That same distance is about 48 pixels in the side view, so for the whole ship at 398 pixels or so the total length of the craft is 143 meters.

(I originally used 50 pixels for the length of the nose section, hence the 137 meter value previously obtained. But your meterage may vary here. Suffice it to say that it almost certainly can't be less than 120 meters, which is the value I got when I measured strictly off the other picture (not realizing at the time that there was more skinny-engine-area past the fattest part of the engine area).)

The main issue for volume at that point is the skinny middle of the ship. When characters are shown against the open door it looks like it must be very short in height, maybe four meters (though it seems to be a little wider than it is tall). However, compared to the forward shot and a shot a few moments later, it appears it can't be less than about five meters, and preferably six. And using the side shot, where I'm reading it at 19 pixels, it would be about 6.8 meters.

So the value I came up with is nothing more than a very rough estimate. Based on a tube 130 meters long by 5 meters in diameter, with about 15% wiggle room for the fatter sections fore and aft, I might get 3,000 cubic meters. But if the center section is even 25% wider than it is tall (which appears to me a minimum estimate), then the volume I'd get (plus 15% wiggle) is 3,650 cubic meters.

But as I said, I suck doing SketchUp volumes in my brain (which is kinda funny since I seem to do well with spatial orientation . . . oh well), so it's possible that the true value is no more than 3,000 - 3,500.

In any case, I'd have to be pretty far off in order for the Twilight volume (which I obtained by SketchUp and have visually checked for completeness of reading, which was not possible with the old LightWave plugin) of 4,600 cubic meters to be beaten by this thing.

Well, I built the damn ship.

My first scratch-built model in SketchUp. (Sort of, anyway . . . I ended up using the cockpit bubble of an NX Class Shuttlepod, but since I'd had to completely re-do that bubble (and thus it was mine anyway) I'm calling this a scratch-build.)

And it sucks, naturally. But all in all, it's not too bad.





The result? 3,900 cubic meters. That's in the neighborhood . . . my engine area is too short, so I'm missing some, but I also overdid the torpedo launcher area, and maybe the cockpit height . . . but then again, my taper from the cockpit backward is too short, so I'm missing some there, too. The middle tube section is also just a guess (that says 5.56 meters, by the way, not 5.9). So . . . yeah, I dunno. It's in the neighborhood.

Ah, crap. The shadows on the floor are very deceptive.

The reason my cockpit hangy-downy-torpedo-and-footpad part is in the wrong place is because the shadow is being cast at an angle . . . the hangy-downy thing is not actually on the same line as the widest part of the hull.

Meaning 17.25 meters isn't gonna be right from the cockpit forward . . . it's gonna be less. So the ship'll be less, too. I'll work on better measurement shortly.

For an example, an 80 meter ship using the existing model would come out to 812 cubic meters. That would pretty much blow Needa out of the water.

Quasi-false alarm.

The landing foot emerges from the front face that also houses the torpedo launchers . . . the front of the hangy-downy part. So the foot itself is actually very close to the widest part of the cockpit, and thus the clone is standing about where I thought, and thus the Republic Stealth Ship probably is still north of 130 meters.

Sorry.

But after some shape revisions due to the new angles of the 1080p screenshots I've acquired, the current volume at 135m length is 3,650 . . . a change of 9.4%. The engine area's still too short, and the tube is unchanged, but everything else is improved.

Is it just me or was this cloaking device entirely unoriginal? I mean, the ship had every weakness and a few advantages that the ST cloak had. It looked like they just looked up the ST version and then cut and pasted.

I was watching this little clip here on YouTube, and the Seperatist commander refers to the shields as "thermoshields", which are not only bubble shaped, but even glow like TNG-era ship shields do! And what the hell is this with freaking flares that can be used to spoof torpedoes? How crappy is your missile weapons when they can be diverted off by something as unsophisticated as that?
-Mike

The bad guy immediately recognized a cloaking device.
I'd expect that much from nerds, but...

What!? A competent enemy commander who knows his business! Who'd have thought!
-Mike

The point is that he's not baffled by the existence of that tech. He immediately recognizes it.
Now, sure, he could be super competent and his hobby would be collecting stamps about cloaked ships of the past, but I didn't watch S2 yet.

Besides, do they say why that ship is so long?

No, it's not stated as to why the ship is so long, or is configured the way it is. Near as I can tell, not only is the ship designed by the production stafff to look like a homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey's U.S.S. Discovery, but has some elements of Space:1999's Eagle Transporter.
-Mike

IIRC, based on the episode commentary Filoni shared that Lucas said he wanted the ship to be "small", and there was some discussion of giving it a pencil shape.

(So it just so happens that they seem to have made it long enough to work out nicely volumetrically.)