Cloak coverage draws poor parallels to Star Trek

The Chronicle's recent comparison of the "invisibility cloak" to the "Starship Enterprise's cloaking device" suffers from yet another case of inaccurate reporting in the media-fueled hype of the so far benign research project ("Duke scientists work to imitate 'Star Trek,'" Feb. 20). It would be more appropriate to attribute the cloaking device to the Romulans or any of the other races that used cloaking technology regularly; while some of the various incarnations of the Enterprise have used a cloaking device on isolated occasions as a temporary measure (Most notably the original Enterprise in "The Enterprise Incident"), no Enterprise was permanently outfitted with one aside from the alternate future "Enterprise-D" in "All Good Things...". (Of course, in the canonical timeline the Enterprise-D was destroyed in "Star Trek: Generations" years before the events of "All Good Things..."'s alternate future take place.) Moreover, the Federation was not bound to develop or implement cloaking technology under the Treaty of Algeron, the terms of which span three of the five TV series. Associating the cloaking device primarily with the Enterprise is misleading and a disservice to both the continuity of the Star Trek universe and the United Federation of Planets.

Greg Filpus

Pratt '09