Editing Cloaking device (section)

==Fictional origins==
{{Main|Cloak of invisibility}}
Cloaks with magical powers of invisibility appear from the earliest days of story-telling. Since the advent of modern [[Science fiction]], many variations on the theme with proposed basis in reality have been imagined. ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series|Star Trek]]'' screenwriter [[Paul Schneider (writer)|Paul Schneider]], inspired in part by the 1958 film ''[[Run Silent, Run Deep (1958 film)|Run Silent, Run Deep]],'' and in part by ''[[The Enemy Below]],'' which had been released in 1957, imagined cloaking as a space-travel analog of a [[submarine]] submerging, and employed it in the 1966 ''Star Trek'' episode "[[Balance of Terror]]", in which he introduced the [[Romulan]] species, whose space vessels employ cloaking devices extensively. (He likewise predicted, in the same episode, that invisibility, "selective bending of light" as described above, would have an enormous power requirement.) Another ''Star Trek'' screenwriter, [[D.C. Fontana]], coined the term ''"cloaking device"'' for the 1968 episode "[[The Enterprise Incident|The ''Enterprise'' Incident]]", which also featured Romulans.

''Star Trek'' placed a limit on use of this device: a space vessel cannot fire weapons, employ defensive [[shields (Star Trek)|shields]], or operate [[transporter (Star Trek)|transporters]] while cloaked;<ref>{{cite book|title=The Star Trek Encyclopedia|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=cbYf2l7gczUC|last1=Okuda|last2=Okuda|first1=Michael|first2=Denise|date=1999| publisher=Simon and Schuster | isbn=9781451646887 }}</ref> thus it must "decloak" to fire—essentially like a submarine needing to "surface" in order to launch torpedoes.<ref name=S1Ep9.NYT>{{cite news  |newspaper=[[The New York Times]]
|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/12/arts/television/star-trek-discovery-season-1-episode-9-recap.html
|title=Star Trek: Discovery, Season 1, Episode 9: Sloppy Showdowns
|quote=The Klingons have to decloak to fire 
|author=Sopan Deb  |date=November 12, 2017}}</ref>

Writers and game designers have since incorporated cloaking devices into many other science-fiction narratives, including <!-- Please don't add more pop-culture examples of cloaking devices. This article is about the real-world development, not a crufty list comprising every game they've ever appeared in! A link to this article doesn't necessitate a reciprocal link. -->''[[Doctor Who]]'', ''[[Star Wars]]'', and ''[[Stargate]]''.