Why can't I shoot

[Griswel]

I appreciate all the explanations and advice.  Thanks again.

[Paul M]

Your welcome, glad I could sort out the confusion for you and best of luck on the next fight.  It was useful to me as well, as this is the first chance I've had to see cloaking in action and it seems to work considerably better than I would have thought.

[Jorgen_CAB]

You asked about sensors on your fighters.  My personal view is that any combat platform should be able to independently acquire, and localize any target it is intended to engage.  People do what you did and put all your sensor eggs in one basket only because min-maxing works in games where the stakes are non-existent and the enemy is predicatable and stupid.  There isn't a combat ship on this planet that doesn't have radar, radar detectors, and IR systems.  Sonar systems are semi-optional but most combat ships have some sort of sonar system.  In my view, yes your fighters (and Destroyers) should have an active sensor system onboard.  Otherwise if your carrier/cruiser is killed the rest of your ships and fighters would be mission killed, not to mention rendered utterly blind and shortly thereafter destroyed by the enemy.

This is quite important when I play as well and also why I like to play with multi-faction games in general. Both politics, the people, resources and every ship becomes important in some respect. There will always be a stake to consider and every loss or win will matter in some meaningful way.

One of the biggest problem with putting different sensor system on the ships though is that you can't activate them individually, this certainly detract form the RP flexibility and is one thing I would like to have changed. Sure you can put hangars on your ships and then produce active sensors as smaller satellites and activate them independently, but this is something I don't like to use if I can avoid it.

Currently I instead use hangars with smaller fighter or FAC sized craft equipped with larger resolution sensors and fit at lest 250t hangars to almost any ship at 5000t or more. Ship themselves is only equipped with resolution 1 and 5 sensors as a permanent sensor suite since they give of rather small EM emissions and the resolution 5 can be used to fire missiles at shorter ranges of all else fail. If I could fit a resolution above 20 sensor on my ship and turn it on individually I would use it for completeness sake.

[Paul M]

I would like to see it possible to active individual sensors and to set them for intermittent operation though in practice you can do that manual if you are in a battle and stuck with 5s turns.

I have EW/SAR pinances in use but they are primarily intended to extend my missile engagement envelope.  The detection range of the wolvers active sensors dwarfs the range that they could passively detect my ships so the NCN sees little point in trying to hide our sensor use.  The current search sensor is 11.6 m km range, resolution 60 and has a GPS of 1800.  The NCN would detect their own ships at a range of 22 m km.  The missile sensor has a GPS of 14 and clearly isn't a significant consideration.  Unfortunately the enemy has a resoulution 4 sensor with a 30 m km range so even my pinances are unable to hide.