Change mechanics of OC Cloaker/Jammer or Power Generators

[SgtFlexxx]

So today I figured that I wanted to try and build a stealth ship. After about 10 different ships, I found it nearly impossible, even with ships make entirely out of power generators, the cloak alone would last no more than 2 seconds. I then looked up some info on how Cloakers and Power generators work, and I found this of course (http://oldsite.star-made.org/wiki/power-generator)

I began to try each different method, and I tried a flat plate, thinking it would be enough since I figured 1000 e/s is needed per mass, and 1 mass=10 blocks., so 100 e/s per block, and the plate method seemed like it would generate JUST enough power to do the trick, but it didn't do the trick, it didn't even come close. I tried the flat plate with 600 generators and no luck, only lasted around 3 seconds. Then I tried the line, which I just created 2 lines of 5 generators seperate from each other, and ofc, it ended up being infinite cloak. I found this a little dissatisfying, since I couldn't really create the stealth ship I really wanted to. The line method basically has you use the same amount of blocks, but for some reason you get 9x as much power as you would get from just grouping it up like a solid. I ended up having to make my ship entirely out of generators of diagnal lines seperated from each other, with barely enough power to get infinite cloak.

Please change the mechanics of either the power generators and make them generate more power, and change up the way it generates power so we don't have to make it in lines to make the most out of it. Right now, stealth seems like one of the most obselete and pointless things to try to go for, since it requires SO much power, and your ship has to literally be made out of power generators. Not only that, but to make stealth worth it, you kinda need radar jammers too, and even this ship, with radar jammers+cloak only lasted 1 and a half seconds before the power completely drained.

 

[Sgtwisky]

Although I agree that cloaking and jamming take too much power, I think you also have an issue with power generation. If you connect power blocks so that you have 10 block in each direction (X Y Z) and they connect its treated as though its a 10 x 10 x 10 cube of power generators. The more power generators that are connected the less efficient each of them is individuality. The non existent power blocks that are generating power do NOT take away from how efficient your ship is. Putting power in lines has never worked well for me. as it would take so much space to get over 1 mil power for my battle ship that I couldn't put shields or weapons in it.

BUT again cloaking and jamming take HUGE amounts of power and I agree that they need to be a bit more reasonable. Hell... I think it would be cool if big ships (like my 250 long ship) could cloak for a few minutes. As it is now I can just barley construct a small cloaked/jammed scout made of nothing but power/thrusters/core/cloak and jammer. I cant have any shields or other useful things on such a ship so its not really worth it.

 

[SgtFlexxx]

Although I agree that cloaking and jamming take too much power, I think you also have an issue with power generation. If you connect power blocks so that you have 10 block in each direction (X Y Z) and they connect its treated as though its a 10 x 10 x 10 cube of power generators. The more power generators that are connected the less efficient each of them is individuality. The non existent power blocks that are generating power do NOT take away from how efficient your ship is. Putting power in lines has never worked well for me. as it would take so much space to get over 1 mil power for my battle ship that I couldn't put shields or weapons in it.

BUT again cloaking and jamming take HUGE amounts of power and I agree that they need to be a bit more reasonable. Hell... I think it would be cool if big ships (like my 250 long ship) could cloak for a few minutes. As it is now I can just barley construct a small cloaked/jammed scout made of nothing but power/thrusters/core/cloak and jammer. I cant have any shields or other useful things on such a ship so its not really worth it.

Well that's what I was talking about, that's why that ship in the picture is made entirely out of diagnol lines of power generators, and each line is seperate from the other. I managed to get a few lines of shield dispersers and guns, as well as plex doors, some machines, etc, but I HAD to offset those blocks by ADDITIONAL lines of power, which is why the original ship without any thing else added except the cloaker and power gens were smaller, but once I started added blocks that weren't power generators, as well as a decent amount of thrusters, it became so much more difficult to offset the amount of power drained by thrusters and the mass added by those blocks.

 

[ImperialDonut]

Starmade's box-dimensional powersystem is well known and there are many tutorials on it.

Basically, the bigger you make a shape (x,y,z axes) with the least amount of blocks, the more efficient your generators will be, untill the magic mark of 1mil e/sec when they will start giving only a set small amount of power per block.

Cloakers and jammers do take a lot of power, the idea is simply to avoid giving every type of ship the possibility to fully cloak. And while building a full featured stealth ship is pretty hard, it definately isn't impossible if you have a thorough understanding of the power system.

BUT again cloaking and jamming take HUGE amounts of power and I agree that they need to be a bit more reasonable. Hell... I think it would be cool if big ships (like my 250 long ship) could cloak for a few minutes. As it is now I can just barley construct a small cloaked/jammed scout made of nothing but power/thrusters/core/cloak and jammer. I cant have any shields or other useful things on such a ship so its not really worth it.

You can in fact cloak larger ships for a while, by using a good number of power tanks, the bigger the total connected volume of those, the bigger the storage you get (exponentially). Takes a while to charge too ofc, but you can stay cloaked for a good while longer if used properly.

 

[Sgtwisky]

Hum... here I don't think you get what I mean so I took some pics and will explain.

This is the method It looks like you are using. I built this with a total of 40 power blocks and it provides 5891.4 e/s.

This is what I am talking about. It uses 33 power blocks and generates 7602.1 e/s.

You can also use the design above and "flip" it around to make a box. Just make sure that each set of 3 lines do not touch each other or your overall power will drop big time. I only combined 3 out of 4 in the pic. It provides 19516.1 e/s.

I have found that normaly using a square or rectangle of some kind and this method of power gen is most effective. Doing lines to get the same results would require more blocks which requires more Cloaker and Jammer power. There ARE other methods that work better for saving space but with a cloaked ship your doing good to have enough power to cloak/jam/fly. and it wont look very good. but the box design will give you the best advantage in cloaking that I know of.

But again I do agree that it takes a ridiculous amount of power to even attempt to cloak or jam.

EDIT: Removed Suggestion as it was long and I didn't manage to add anything with it

 

[Sgtwisky]

"You can in fact cloak larger ships for a while, by using a good number of power tanks, the bigger the total connected volume of those, the bigger the storage you get (exponentially). Takes a while to charge too ofc, but you can stay cloaked for a good while longer if used properly.

Derp... I didn't even think of that XD. well that steals some of the thunder I thought my above suggestion had XD.

 

[Viridis00]

Funny, I was just trying to make a stealth ship of my own design today too. It really bugs me that I can't make a small lightly armored fighter that can't perma-cloak. I can only reasonably get perma-jam. I don't want a fighter that looks so awful made of just power blocks.

I understand the need for balance, so maybe this can be fixed in a few ways.

Lower the overall energy consumption at low speeds, but as speed increases, up the consumption, like the cloaking CPU is under more stress to calculate changing environment. In addition, if overall energy drops below 50%, start to uncloak the ship, but make it a very gradual transparency effect. (I know the team could do something cool like that, our shield animation is sweet) If the energy hits zero, break cloak and impose an overheat/reload time based on how massive you ship is (larger ship, longer cool down).

I've never successfully made a cloaking vessel, so I'm not sure if this is already like this, but I think you shouldn't be able to fire under cloak either. If so, I think firing under cloak should immediately break cloak and impose the cool down. Manual de-cloak should not., but give a gradual fade-in. I think all of that would give a pretty fair edge for both parties dependent on situation and how they play their cards.

Jammers I think overall are workable right now, and their very nature isn't too OP because of line-of-sight. I had a decent looking fighter capable of jamming while in flight.

 

[Trafalgar]

I usually buy a cloak and jammer as one of the first things I do, and build a simple fighter and install them and turn them on. Any time I'm building a skeleton of a ship somewhere where pirates could attack, I install them and turn them on as soon as I have the power system built enough to do so. It's really not very complicated.

Funny, I was just trying to make a stealth ship of my own design today too. It really bugs me that I can't make a small lightly armored fighter that can't perma-cloak. I can only reasonably get perma-jam. I don't want a fighter that looks so awful made of just power blocks.

This is already possible. If it's a small ship, you just have to design the power system efficiently, and generally, not put hull on the ship (or otherwise waste mass).

Lower the overall energy consumption at low speeds, but as speed increases, up the consumption, like the cloaking CPU is under more stress to calculate changing environment. In addition, if overall energy drops below 50%, start to uncloak the ship, but make it a very gradual transparency effect. (I know the team could do something cool like that, our shield animation is sweet) If the energy hits zero, break cloak and impose an overheat/reload time based on how massive you ship is (larger ship, longer cool down).

Thrusters use energy too. If your cloak is using all your power generation, using thrusters is going to drain your battery. If you have enough power gen to accommodate both, it's not a problem.

I've never successfully made a cloaking vessel, so I'm not sure if this is already like this, but I think you shouldn't be able to fire under cloak either.

Firing immediately decloaks your ship. You can immediately re-cloak, however.

You can also use the design above and "flip" it around to make a box. Just make sure that each set of 3 lines do not touch each other or your overall power will drop big time. I only combined 3 out of 4 in the pic. It provides 19516.1 e/s.

I have found that normaly using a square or rectangle of some kind and this method of power gen is most effective. Doing lines to get the same results would require more blocks which requires more Cloaker and Jammer power. There ARE other methods that work better for saving space but with a cloaked ship your doing good to have enough power to cloak/jam/fly. and it wont look very good. but the box design will give you the best advantage in cloaking that I know of.

But again I do agree that it takes a ridiculous amount of power to even attempt to cloak or jam.

Using that hollow cube frame design for power generation (with all four placed, instead of just three), if you make one large enough to provide the power to cloak itself and some additional blocks, you can make a modular ship using it since cloaks will use docked ships' power to cloak them, if they have enough. [Edit: There, much simpler.]

For stealth fighters or shuttles you can generally just use a single 3d + and extend it along every axis until the ship cloaks and stays cloaked while thrusting. The less extraneous blocks you use the more effective it will be, e.g. omit hull, you'll never be able to cover everything anyways.

In practice the actual results will be less. Practical restrictions of a perma-cloaked ship:

• Your thrusters and such will use power as well, so unless you want your cloak to fail when you maneuver, you'll need to allocate some power to them too by not using as much mass as you theoretically could. (You'll know when it's too much mass because your power reserves will drop when you thrust while you're stealthed, and if you go way too far they'll drop while you're just sitting still, obviously)
• With anything more massive than a stealth fighter, the cloak (and/or jammer) requires more power per second than your stock batteries store, requiring you to add power tanks to the ship until the cloak stops intermittently turning itself off.
• You probably want to add shields and weapons unless it's just a cloaked scout ship or shuttle, and you can't fit nearly as much into a ship like this as you can into a regular warship of the same volume (e.g. with the same turn radius - perhaps in future turn radius may not be dependent on ship dimensions). Currently this is problematic for turn rate unless you don't use a hollow cube frame power design (multiple lines in a very long and thin ship will work because then you're largely only slowing your roll rate, IIRC, but it's less efficient at generating power).
• Since your power generation is paying for your ship's mass, it's wasteful to spend it on mass that does nothing useful, like hull blocks, especially when your ship is so spread out that it'll be impossible to coat it all in hull and still be able to cloak permanently.
• Having any of your fragile and exposed power generators sliced in half by weapons fire will render your cloak inoperative by vastly diminishing your power generation.

 

[rocketman221]

You just have to build the ship correctly and it will cloak. Making one that looks good though is very difficult.
This is a stealth frigate I built. It can cloak and jam indefinitely, the amc does 29600 dps, and the 4 missiles pack a punch too. You need 1536 e/s per mass to cloak and jam.
I wish they would make the decorative block require a lot less power to cloak so we could make decent looking stealth ships.

 

[testkil]

why should we change that ? its fine ?

 

[Viridis00]

This is already possible. If it's a small ship, you just have to design the power system efficiently, and generally, not put hull on the ship (or otherwise waste mass).

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Not putting hull on a ship, can you really call that a ship at all? I'm not asking for a luxury corvette with bells and whistles, just to be able to make a lightly armored small stealth ship with its energy components out of sight on the outside.

I don't think I can squeeze enough power into a small one-man scout-type craft and maintain both systems. Overall the systems needs to be a little less forgiving.

Thrusters use energy too. If your cloak is using all your power generation, using thrusters is going to drain your battery. If you have enough power gen to accommodate both, it's not a problem.

That wouldn't be a problem. With what I said, cloak power consumption should scale with your current speed. Maintaining a low speed would allow large ships to cloak and not lose power as long as they don't try too boost to top speeds and maneuver around a ship under cloak. The drawback comes into play in that you can't move fast if your ship isn't totally dedicated to stealth, and if your power drops too low, you become a little more visible the less total remaining power you have left, under my suggestion.

Firing immediately decloaks your ship. You can immediately re-cloak, however.

Thanks for clearing that up.

 

[Sgtwisky]

hum... maybe they could change it so that cloaking doesn't consider hull blocks in its calculations? Then you could add pretty stuff to make the ship look cool but you still would be limited in the actual system components.

 

[NeonSturm]

I think we have different weights per block type.

We sum the number of blocks. We have a listing of how often blocks are used while buying ships.
How hard can it be to sum different masses?

I think you should not be able to build a ship with top speed perma-cloak/jam, shields and AMCs at once.

• If you have any weapons or shields, you should not be allowed to have top speed while perma cloak/jam is active.
• If you have decent weapons and shields, you should suffer thruster blocks in exchange, but thruster blocks are just too efficient (1 support 29 to 99 other blocks for still 1:1 thrust - depends on array size)

I think it is the non-linear power-formula (the extreme of changes until and after the 1 mille cap) that makes this hard to balance.