Cloaking

[Thrake (OP)]

75% cloacking on a 10k ton ship means: - that the active sensors will detect it as if it was a 2.5k tons ship?
- or that the ship will need to be 75% closer of the active sensor to be detected than a ship of the same size without cloaking?

[Iceranger]

The first case.

[Ri0Rdian]

Don't forget to pair it with engine thermal reduction tech. Don't wanna end up with stealthed ship that is easily detected on thermals like happened to m.... my friend. 

[Droll]

Cloaks reduce the size of the ship with respect to detection. That means your ship will be at best as stealthy as a size 6 missile. So keep that in mind when approaching ships with AMM sensors.
Cloaks also do nothing for emissions so passives can still see you as usual.

[Thrake (OP)]

Don't forget to pair it with engine thermal reduction tech. Don't wanna end up with stealthed ship that is easily detected on thermals like happened to m.... my friend. 

Then you can tell your... friend that failure is part of the learning process. He learned a valuable bit and now he can share it

Thanks guys. That's more limiting than I hoped, but I can still imagine creative ways to blow things up with the help of cloaking

[Iceranger]

Don't forget to pair it with engine thermal reduction tech. Don't wanna end up with stealthed ship that is easily detected on thermals like happened to m.... my friend. 

Then you can tell your... friend that failure is part of the learning process. He learned a valuable bit and now he can share it

Thanks guys. That's more limiting than I hoped, but I can still imagine creative ways to blow things up with the help of cloaking

In some use cases, using cloaking without thermal shielded engines is perfectly fine.

One of such case in my fleet is to protect the high valued sensor platform. Such ships have all sorts of sensors on it and are obvious targets for the enemies. Putting a cloaking device on such ships can significantly hinder their ability to active lock on them from a long range. More ever, the cloaking device affects missile fire controls the same way it affects active sensors. So firing long-range missiles at such 'cloaked' but clearly visible ship can be difficult.

[xenoscepter]

Cloaking also pairs well with shields, since shields can be turned on and off like Active Sensors. Merely mounting them doesn't affect your visibility in any way, but they can be a damn sight more powerful than armor in some cases... especially for those times when you just need to throttle up and get the hell out of Dodge City.

Remember too, that the old "Lol. Just turn off the engines." trick no longer works in C#. If you aren't familiar with it, in VB6 you could just slow down to 0 km/s and become invisible to Thermal Passives. In C# you have a minimum Thermal Signature which is tied to your maximum engine output... 10% of it IIRC. So Thermal Reduction is much, much more essential than it was before.

Even moreso now that both Active and Passive sensors got a buff in C#, so some Deep Space Tracking Station plopped down on some God-Forsaken, air-less hellhole will happily detect your expensive and highly-specialized stealth ship from an in-ordinate distance. Although the NPRs don't abuse this... at least not like players do, so if your not a PvP person don't worry about it as much.

[QuakeIV]

Its not really fair to call scattering sensor stations around abusing the mechanic, that is practically exactly how you are supposed to do that kind of thing.

[Ulzgoroth]

Sensors got a buff? That seems like the opposite of all the change notes I've seen.

Isn't sensor range now going as the square root of sensor strength rather than being linear?

[Iceranger]

Small sensors (size, not resolution) indeed got a buff.

[Ulzgoroth]

Small sensors (size, not resolution) indeed got a buff.

Well, that would have to follow since if x<1 sqrt(x) > x.

But I wouldn't think Deep Space Tracking installations qualified as small? They're pretty powerful sensors.

[Jorgen_CAB]

Small sensors (size, not resolution) indeed got a buff.

Well, that would have to follow since if x<1 sqrt(x) > x.

But I wouldn't think Deep Space Tracking installations qualified as small? They're pretty powerful sensors.

They were allot more powerful in VB6 than now...

[Michael Sandy]

In VB6, there is a niche for minimum sized cloaked missile ships, (around 40-60HS) as successor to a strike fighter role.  Strikefighters work by launching from outside effective enemy missile range.  But as sensors and fire controls increase in power, it becomes a lot harder to make fighters small enough to also mount a fire control large enough to hit the enemy from beyond the enemy's AMM range.

Cloaked missile ships use much longer ranged missiles, because they can carry much larger fire controls while having cross sections on the order of a fighter.  Being undetected isn't as important as being untargetable.  Unlike fighters, cloaked missile ships are large enough so that the mass for ECM and ECCM does not prohibitively affect performance.

An issue for cloaked ships in Aurora4x is that it is only useful if you can get the ship distinctly smaller than the enemy's MFC resolution, and therefore the most effective cloaked warship is the smallest possible.  Interestingly, as technology increases, cloak efficiency and minimum sized cloak combine so that the minimum sized cloaked ship remains about the same.