Are fully cloaked ships possible? What is your cloaker design?

[Depriest]

The small ship on the right is perma cloak/jam. It has a two crew interior with a telepad and scanner. I made it mostly to hunt other cloak ships but haven't had the chance to really give a try yet.

 

[Byamarro]

I have fully cloaked, fully radar jammed, nearly insta jumping ship.
So - yes.

 

[Falcon_One]

Just going to point this out here:
With the newest patch adding auxiliary power, cloaking larger ships has become possible.

I am in the process of building a fully cloaked and jammed ship with full weapons, shields, power, thrust - all the goodies with a mass of around 200k. The challenge, however, is in the massive amount of calculations you will need to do. This is a high risk/high reward method. If you do not accurately calculate out the mass of all of your systems beforehand, you will miss your power mark and waste a lot of time. Additionally (hint), the ratio of auxiliary power blocks at max efficiency will balance the amount of power and shields you can store versus the volume you have available to build with. In order to obtain all the systems I wanted with 1.5 mil shields, 50k regen, and 100mil power cap, I had to calculate out the volume of blocks I would need, and scale up my hull to fit that (yet another hint).

By no means am I saying this is easy; this process is very long, very easy to mess up, and the ship you build will be seriously specialized in its combat capabilities. But the challenge is its own reward in my opinion.

The hull I've been working with :D:

Spoiler

My Two Cents:
I would ask that anyone willing to go through this process not post a final version of their ship for download. Images and tutorials are always more than welcome, but this is a lot of leg work and it would be neither right nor responsible to unleash a finished product for download in Starmade's current progress state. Perhaps in the future, after the cloaking/jamming/scanning overhaul.

Good luck,
Falcon One

 

[Dr. Whammy]

Well... I guess it's time to refit ASC Atlantis. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[MrFURB]

I got me a stealth shuttle cheap enough to buy right at the start as well as a dirt cheap stealth salvager used to scout out whatever sector I decide to settle down in and grab some materials for a proper base/combat vessel. I don't yet have a stealth combat vessel.

Anyways, here's a pic of the stealth salvager:

 

[Vengeance42]

This thread makes me want to try my hand at a stealth ship again. But they are hard to get looking good, be small, and not run out of power.

Why make it look good when no one can see it!

"Hey guys....here is my stealth ship! Yes, it looks awesome! No, I wont uncloak it....just take my word for it...."

 

[Panpiper]

I'm late to this party, sorry. I've built a perma-cloak, perma-jammed ship that also is built to recharge it's jump drive in the time it takes to jump. This makes it possible to travel galaxies in a reasonable period of time at zero risk. It has no weapons, that's not it's job. It does have 20K of shields though, just to be extra safe.

 

[EricBlank]

Just to screw around, I made a perma-stealth brick using the new auxiliary power. At a mass of 25k itself, it can haul about 100k cargo (not mass, but cargo space, haven't tried docking an object to it to gauge total mass it can handle yet) while remaining cap-stable. It's ugly as sin, and that payload is minuscule compared to its overall size, probably less than 1% of the total volume of the craft, and it only has 4.1k shields and 1:1 thrust ratio. As a proof of concept, I think it's a success, but very poorly executed :P

In essence, you can build an invisible freight hauler for operation in dangerous areas.

 

[Daeridanii]

I've got three cloaking designs.
PS-2 "Cuttlefish" Stealth Scout
PS-0 "Sepiada" Heavy Stealth Scout
SC-7 "Amapa" Advanced Stealth Cruiser

All capable of permacloaking, jamming, overdriving and charging their jumpdrive simultaneously. The Amapa (shown below) is also armed.

 

[Falcon_One]

Just to screw around, I made a perma-stealth brick using the new auxiliary power. At a mass of 25k itself, it can haul about 100k cargo (not mass, but cargo space, haven't tried docking an object to it to gauge total mass it can handle yet) while remaining cap-stable. It's ugly as sin, and that payload is minuscule compared to its overall size, probably less than 1% of the total volume of the craft, and it only has 4.1k shields and 1:1 thrust ratio. As a proof of concept, I think it's a success, but very poorly executed :p

In essence, you can build an invisible freight hauler for operation in dangerous areas.

That's essentially where I'm back to... Less than an hour after my last post, I did exactly what I said not to do lol
Upside though, I've still got all the systems I wanted - tradeoff is that it's an ugly brick until I finish a different hull to throw it all into. Bird of Prey design is out the window for now though. I'll have to return to it later

 

[StormWing0]

Almost forgot you could tempt fate and cost by using the new auxiliary power to totally make cloaking permanent no matter the size. or at least up to the point where the cost to build the thing is unreasonable. XD

 

[JinM]

For my small hanger I built into my new ship I needed an even smaller Scout. So I managed to build a 16x7x9 meter full cloaker + jam. It also has a scanner antenna and a jump drive. I think it's not that pretty, but my maximal dimensions for the hangar are 17 length, 8 height and 9 width.

I think I will try to make a prettier one one day. But designing this sort of hulls isn't that much fun for me.

 

[Az14el]

how to arm those cloakers; 50+ AI guided torpedos & the undock all button, go hunt actual titans with it.

 

[KiloZulu]

It's convenient that you've resurrected this thread. Ever since the discussion about the changes to the power system, I've been wondering how it'll impact cloaking development. Given the drop in mass that's been stated, I'm hoping that we'll get more freedom in the design of cloaked ships. Just the fact that they won't have to be long sticks of exposed power blocks will be a great start.

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

It's convenient that you've resurrected this thread. Ever since the discussion about the changes to the power system, I've been wondering how it'll impact cloaking development. Given the drop in mass that's been stated, I'm hoping that we'll get more freedom in the design of cloaked ships. Just the fact that they won't have to be long sticks of exposed power blocks will be a great start.

I'm not sure about that - a cloaker should have to rely on its cloaking for defence, and shouldn't be able to have decent armour and/or decent shields too.

Currently the balance is about right. You can have a cloaker (with cloak and jam) and there is a small amount of lee-way (you can have a small amount of armour or a small amount of shields or a small amount of weaponry), but you are forced to compromise and must make sacrifices.

If you've ever built a "stealth bomber" and used "fire missile, then cloak while missile recharges" tactics you'll know that these ships are almost invincible already (the only effective defence against them is scanners). If there were less compromises, they'd be over-powered (much larger missile damage and/or shields) and would still be "naked" (without hulls).

 

[Gasboy]

It's convenient that you've resurrected this thread. Ever since the discussion about the changes to the power system, I've been wondering how it'll impact cloaking development. Given the drop in mass that's been stated, I'm hoping that we'll get more freedom in the design of cloaked ships. Just the fact that they won't have to be long sticks of exposed power blocks will be a great start.

I would like to think that when they do the power overhaul, they would address the radar jammer and cloaking device. Both of these systems should have a computer and associated modules like most other systems in SM.

And I don't know how, but the jammer and cloak vs scanner should be a more interesting minigame.

 

[Dvaren]

Here ya go, no exposed systems, full complement of warhead torpedoes (auto consecutive launch or manual), full cloak, full jam, can/can/ovd, custom chain drive, scanner, jump inhibitor, and even a custom loading dock that will autoload 30 torps from an independent entity that was build for just that purpose =)

 

[JinM]

Full cloakers are the only ship type in Starmade where you are bound to strict design choices. Form over function, or: the only place where your creativity about ship shapes has to kneel.

And it makes no sense, that the smaller ship designs (less than 13m) have to bear all those exposed parts and are barely able to reach max speed. It should be exactly the other way around: The bigger the ship the less usefull systems should be possible to be integrated.

 

[Dvaren]

Full cloakers are the only ship type in Starmade where you are bound to strict design choices. Form over function, or: the only place where your creativity about ship shapes has to kneel.

There is a reason U.S. naval and airforce stealth ships and aircraft are radically different than their non stealth counterparts. Stealth, much like other complicated systems, directly impacts the design of the vehicle it is embedded in.

And it makes no sense, that the smaller ship designs (less than 13m) have to bear all those exposed parts and are barely able to reach max speed. It should be exactly the other way around: The bigger the ship the less usefull systems should be possible to be integrated.

Ever seen a U.S. navy railgun installed on a smaller gunboat? It would physically fit....yet the power generation systems do not. The reason our air force does not install small nuclear reactors on our largest bombers? It was tried...yet even with their (relatively) massive size, the amount of shielding required to keep the pilot safe from irradiation tossed the plans right back to the drawing board.

Size matters. Starmade does not stop you from cloaking small ships, but it does force you to make some sacrifices, and the size of a power generator is the limiting factor here. .

 

[JinM]

What has a nuklear reactor or a railgun in common with stealth? I don't get that comparison. If size matters for you, it's fine. For me it's exactly the other way around: The smaller the size the better, because I don't have time to make big ships all over the place.

Look: If a stealth ship has to have a certain size, the ship who transports this vessel in it's hangar, has to be 10 or 20 times larger than the stealth ship, because I might carry not just one fighter or stealth ship in my transporter. The size of the smallest possible ship or turret or ship element decides how big the carrier or the whole ship is.

And if my stealth ships all have a certain size, my fighters might be at least 80% the size of them, to fit the eye. All of a sudden my hangar has to be 150m long to contain five 25m long ships. So just because stealth ships have to be fucking huge (yes for me 30m or more is allready a huge length if I want to fit this fighter into a hangar), all my other ships must get bigger too. And I really don't have the time and patience to build carriers that are 500 m long, so the 150m long hangar actually doesnt make up the whole ship. And this 150m long hangar still only can contain like 5 small vessels - how phatetic compared to the ammount of volume I used up to make space for a hangar.

See you can't make a carrier or flagship like the Donnanger from the Expanse, if the flagship is 70% hangar. A ship's volume should only have 50% of it's volume dedicated to hangar (and that's allready a ridiculous part) if it is a carrier, and maybe 15% or less of it's volume if it is a normal flagship.