Viability and shape of dangerous stealth ships?

[Plazmatic]

I've recently attempted to make decent size stealth ships (300 - 500 mass) and I've found that when talking about only a invisibility system, it takes too much power to possibly power anything in this range permanently at inefficient power shapes (IE not a circle or cube) and if you want to put radar-jammer, interior, hulls, decent guns, or small shielding, forget about it. I've been trying with all different kinds of power configurations, attempting to make ships appear like Stealth Bombers, but the shape just doesn't lend its self positively to volume vs surface area ratio (important for lots of power production). Sleek designs surprisingly are not good for stealth in starmade. I've also noticed that virtually all weapons have the same damage vs power usage ratio, 10 per one point of damage, making strategic stealth weapons I wanted to know if any one else has been able to get past these hurdles and any suggestions for decent power generation/ what sort of weapons are good for stealth ships.

 

[Criss]

I'm suspecting stealth will get a rework and result in something similar to jump drives.

 

[Viridis00]

Stealth requirements are high because of the benefit of stealth, however there has been little or no real change to stealth mechanics since their inception. I think a lot of players want changes to be made.

Right now, if you want a stealth ship you're not going to be able to give it much hull. If you want weapons/utilities, you're going to need to make big ships made of mostly power blocks, and no hull.

 

[toric55]

back before round ish planets were in, (I've been gone a while) i made a complete stealth ship that would unleash a point blank garage of AMCs and then restealth and run. it did not look very good, in fact, i only had 1 layer of armor on it to keep mass dow. as for shape, it was basically a 20*20*5 piece with a tail coming out the center or one face. (kinda a solar sail design.) this allowed me to make a set of extremely efficient reactors. (i think i had 5 reactors, eatch having a 20*20*30 "reaction volume")

 

[Snk]

back before round ish planets were in, (I've been gone a while) i made a complete stealth ship that would unleash a point blank garage of AMCs and then restealth and run. it did not look very good, in fact, i only had 1 layer of armor on it to keep mass dow. as for shape, it was basically a 20*20*5 piece with a tail coming out the center or one face. (kinda a solar sail design.) this allowed me to make a set of extremely efficient reactors. (i think i had 5 reactors, eatch having a 20*20*30 "reaction volume")

That doesn't sound that ugly. I wouldn't mind fighting that

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Here's my stealth ships, they are fairly old so no new shields or weapons yet, not sure about their combat viability.

Spoiler: Stealth ships

 

[Rohen]

I can not really say that i tested combat stealth ship on a vanilla server.
However due to custom config changes (increased power generation for example) on the server i played it was possible to perma cloak smaller ships.
We are talking about 30 block long and wide craft but they were able to have a nice design, full hull and some interior as well.
Those small craft are not good at scratching the hull of a capital ship, but proved to be quite good in taking out turrets up to the same size of the stealth ship, bigger turrets proved to be more difficult to damage.
The used attack pattern was fly in cloaked, fire missiles at extreme close range to prevent anti missile turrets from shooting down the missiles and instantly cloak again. The ship was visible (but still radar jammed) for one to two seconds.
((the plan was to take out the missile defence turrets to make way for the torpedo boats))

How ever one thing became noticeable.
Currently there is no counter against stealth.
(Yes you can still detect that the stealth ship is in the same sector as you but you need to be actively looking for it and have no way of determine where exactly it is.)

Your automatic turrets wont fire at it, manual operated turrets would need to be looking in the right direction to even have a remote chance to hit it, heat seeking missiles are to random and will most likely hit your own turrets than anything else. Hoping for a luckshot by spraying the area around your ship is no save way either.

So its a bit frustrating to be under attack by those ships, as you can not do anything about it.

So i am all for the option to redesign stealth and cloaking.
Maybe with the option that like in Star Trek the cloaked ship does not have shields or even a reduced visibility. It should have some drawback to make it balanced.
(Think a bit of a submarine here where you have to use a periscope to look whats going on on the surface)
But it would be a good thing if the scanner would help you to pick them up or mark them for a short while when they are close to you so you get a chance to be able to counter the stealth to be able to fight back somehow. (maybe a setting in the scanner to scan for Cloaked ships, so you still need to be actively searching for the cloaked ship)
If it is getting changed like the jump drive or scanner (cloak computer and cloaker blocks). it could be a good idea to have it for example charge before you use it. so the enemy has a chance to hit you before you recloak, or if the scanner in one ship has more blocks than the cloaker blocks in the other ship, the scanning ship can detect the other on a larger distance , or you need more cloaker blocks per mass of your ship to counter the scanner.
Something like that to balance it.

(a bit off topic: but i also think we need something to counter the enemies jump drive, to prevent them from escaping)

 

[vernes]

The problem with stealth ships is that the 'excess stealth performance' (number of blocks you can add that will be cloaked without draining your power) is a percentage of the size of the reactor configuration.
So to have enough excess stealth performance to cover a rather large weapon array, you need a really big (block efficient) reactor.

 

[Mr. V]

The problem with stealth ships is that the 'excess stealth performance' (number of blocks you can add that will be cloaked without draining your power) is a percentage of the size of the reactor configuration.
So to have enough excess stealth performance to cover a rather large weapon array, you need a really big (block efficient) reactor.

Every block in the ship drains the power for stealth ... Even Power modules can wind up hurting your stealth capability if they're not part of a large enough and efficiently built reactor I put together a spreadsheet specifically to crunch math earlier this year for power generation on perma cloaking and jamming ships (I'm still not sure *all* of the power gen formula I pulled from the previous starmade website was 100% accurate, but it seemed pretty close).

At the time my math showed that any power module that wasn't part of an efficient reactor containing at least 17 modules in it would be losing you more power than it generated while cloaking and jamming simultaneously. From there, of course, you have to keep going to up the efficiency per block enough to cover other non-power generating blocks on the ship. Of course, they've changed power requirements for jam and cloak since then, but I think the power usage for doing both still adds up to the same consumption per block.

I eventually got tired of doing math - now when I want to build a cloak ship I just build crazy long reactors, plop on stealth blocks and start periodically testing while building to make sure the power gen will keep up with it as I add in non-power modules. The old exercise of trying to max out the power output on ships did get me pretty decent at making good use of space for power generation in my ships in general though

Here's one of the cooler looking ships I made... it typically got tore up in battle despite it's 4 separate missile computers (which updated into some really mean shield supply beams... now I can sneak up and supply the heck out of my enemies shields if they anger me):

 

[Snk]

Scanners disable cloak and jam.

 

[jorgekorke]

This is from an old solution of mine regarding Stealth better-looking vessels

Reducing the mass from basic hulls and making hardened/advanced hulls heavier looks fine to me. Keep them light-armored, but with better looking and without punishing decoration and smoothness so much (regarding corner-penta-tetra-wedge)

 

[toric55]

That doesn't sound that ugly. I wouldn't mind fighting that

thing is, it couldn't fight that well. it may have been able to take out a turret or 2, but it would most likely bump the ship in the process to to its unwieldy shape. also, it had very little for weapons. enough to beat most pirates, but i don't think they could even dent the shields of the capitals on our server. (they out-regenerated the weapons) of course, that could just be that I'm terrible at doing weapons, I'm better with reactors.

 

[aceface]

Scanners disable cloak and jam.

what? how does it work exactly?

 

[KiloZulu]

what? how does it work exactly?

Probably the same as with activating weapons while cloaked.
[DOUBLEPOST=1418550305,1418549462][/DOUBLEPOST]I used to have a couple decent stealth ships. The first one was based on the Minmatar Vigil from Eve Online:

The sails, or fins, on the bottom were made out of lines of power/shield blocks and produced enough power for a radar jammer to hide the ship's signature. It was armed with twin cannons and a missile launcher. I found that I was able to stand off outside of the AI's detection range, fire the missile, and re-engage the jammer before the AI enemy could respond.

This led to a second design, but the design was more inspired by ships with solar sails.

The large "solar sails" were again power and shield blocks that spread out from the ship's center. The ship was able to carry two larger homing missile launchers and a cannon, which allowed it to stand off farther and rely on the missiles instead of the cannons for firepower. More importantly, this ship could maintain both cloak and jammer indefinitely.

 

[Mr. V]

As far as stealth goes in this game - keep I'm mind that taken independently, jamming is not just easier but also more helpful as long as you're not trying to get close and personal

A cloaked ship still shows a radar signature - it's difficult to recognize a distant ship without a radar signature to draw attention.... Especially if you hull it in black.

 

[Snk]

If you get close enough and activate your scanners, radar jam is disabled. Seriously people, how do you not know that?

 

[Mr. V]

If you get close enough and activate your scanners, radar jam is disabled. Seriously people, how do you not know that?

Valid point, but how many people are going to regularly use a scanner when they don't have a reason to suspect that they need to? ... of course that might change once they fix the logic linking (or did they already.. I haven't checked that yet on the new update) :D

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Valid point, but how many people are going to regularly use a scanner when they don't have a reason to suspect that they need to? ... of course that might change once they fix the logic linking (or did they already.. I haven't checked that yet on the new update) :D

You should still get a warning when ships enter your system, jammed or not, at that point you just send out scanner pings until the threat is neutralized.

 

[Mr. V]

You should still get a warning when ships enter your system, jammed or not, at that point you just send out scanner pings until the threat is neutralized.

So you just avoid owned systems unless you have a spooled up jump drive or are looking for a fight :D My main point was that of the two stealth options, jamming seems the more useful of the two in most circumstances (at least in my opinion).

In the big scheme of things, how a player employs stealth really depends on their motives behind it's use in the first place.

 

[Blakpik]

Stealth requirements are high because of the benefit of stealth, however there has been little or no real change to stealth mechanics since their inception. I think a lot of players want changes to be made.

Right now, if you want a stealth ship you're not going to be able to give it much hull. If you want weapons/utilities, you're going to need to make big ships made of mostly power blocks, and no hull.

What benefits? with how power hungry and hard stealth is there basically are no benefits and there won't be until there is a reason for espionage.