Posted by: MarcAFK
« on: July 14, 2017, 07:44:54 AM »I like the percentage idea.
"A Cloaking Device will reduce enemy Active Search Sensor range against a ship equipped with it."It works currently by making the ship appear "smaller" to enemy sensors. This means, for the most part, they're completely ineffective against low resolution sensors.
What else should it do??
It would be rather interesting if cloaking tech flatly reduced the range of active sensors trying to see it by a percentage, sort of like how ECM affects fire control."A Cloaking Device will reduce enemy Active Search Sensor range against a ship equipped with it."
It'd make it possible to ingress into the currently impenetrable resolution 1 bubble that commands the near-combat meta, while making higher resolution sensors a touch more valuable, as they'll counter the range-reducing effects of cloak by their potency versus whatever they're sized to detect.
Current split between ECM and cloaking seems good and halfway realistic to me, I wouldn't extend ECM to affect detection.It would be rather interesting if cloaking tech flatly reduced the range of active sensors trying to see it by a percentage, sort of like how ECM affects fire control.
Imo, Cloaking has bigger problems than ECM as currently implemented: most of the time, splitting things into smaller packages is more efficient than cloaking/thermal reduction tech. While the upcoming version includes some additional economies of scale, I doubt this will change significantly.
Currently there are niche uses: you can split up a destroyer's armament over a squadron of fighters/FACs instead of fitting stealth tech, but you can't do that if the payload is one huge sensor. One stealthed sensor vessel coordinating fighters/FACs is quite effective, but with the upcoming change to sensor scaling that will probably not be worth the investment.
ECM does not hide anything, so it should be mixed or combined with cloaking. I would prefer it to be more "realistic". The current system is a simplification but works well - ECM reduces the range of fire controls until they "burn" through the electronic haze and ECCM counters that. Having worked on that field once upon time, that's a pretty good approximation of the system.
ECM really has two functions - to create white noise so that sensors can't make out the details and then jamming fire controls so that they cannot achieve target lock and/or guide missiles to target. I don't know if it is possible to put the white noise effect in Aurora.
What about if ECM reduces the effective tonnage of a contact by 10% per level. So not only does the displayed tonnage look like 9000 tons instead of 10000 tons, but also the actual range the contact is picked up at is the same as if it was 9000 tons anyway.
So I guess when active sensor checks are done you would look at a contact's ECM level compared to the active sensor, then look at the tonnage, adjust it for ECM, then check if it's in range ?
ECM reduces the targeting range for fire controls. Sensors are completely unaffected.