How exactly do the Klingons justify using cloaking ships, a strategy which necessarily involves sneaking up on an enemy and catching them unaware? Wouldn’t sneak attacks conflict with their notion of honour?
How exactly do the Klingons justify using cloaking ships, a strategy which necessarily involves sneaking up on an enemy and catching them unaware? Wouldn’t sneak attacks conflict with their notion of honour?
To add to the other comments, honour is a notion that only ever hold among peers. You respect a peer with honor, but a lesser one doesn’t deserve honours. A honourable knight is buried with the honours, but a lowly peasant isn’t. A knight doesn’t have any trouble running down a peasant with its horse. But against a knight he will go down from his horse to fight his honourable peer.
There is an idea of valour in this. When you fight someone of equal value, then resorting to easy tactic doesn’t prove your worth against him, you merely used a loser tactic. But against someone you and everyone know is lower, no one care, you’re already doing him the honour by merely fighting him. A lower enemy doesn’t deserve a honourable fight.
This concept of value and how honour only apply to someone of equal or higher value is important to understand.
Applied to Klingons, they would be stupid to not use a technology like stealth. The question is whether they use it among themselves in fights where honour is a matter.
Oh indeed there are situations where honour doesn’t matter. If you need to kill a whole family (for matters of bloodline and right to a crown for example) then you’ll deal with honour later.