Recognized Cloak, Jam, and Scan. System Revamp

[Theodore_William]

I don't know, maybe Isaac Clark can fix our magic engines. With his telekinesis.

I'm no scientist, I'm just a nerd armed with Google and sassy Siri. And antimatter cannons.

I mean, we could, on this particular thread, decide what the most logical but flexible standards are, then work off of that.

EM is by far the easiest and most logical, in my opinion. Rails, thrusters, weapons, power, shields, it all could easily give off large amounts of EM. Perhaps cloaking ships give off only trace amounts of some kind of signature, different from everything else. Perhaps it could leave a brief trail behind, so if you can pick up on those signatures, you can track a cloaked ship? It sounds silly, but you should be able to pick up on artificial gravity fields. This could betray cloaked ships' locations. Magnetic fields as well. I guess that would be more for sensing rail systems. Way in the future, I'd like to be able to scan a ship and view a 3D model in an in-game terminal and filter through different systems via different scans. Each filter requires a scan. But I digress.

I had a thought on sonar earlier. We can't use sound. What about x-rays? This could give sonar the ability to also detect mineral deposits in asteroids? Again, I have no formal knowledge, just a creative mind, if slightly insa-hey! Shiny thing...

 

[ne3zy]

I like your suggestion but I don't think a ship should be able to be permanently cloaked even if designed correctly

 

[Sgtwisky]

I like your suggestion but I don't think a ship should be able to be permanently cloaked even if designed correctly

Why do you think nothing should ever be able to perma cloak? I'm not going to say that a battle ship should, but not even small optimized scout ships designed to spy? I'm not sure I understand why a ship not designed for combat should not be able to perma cloak. Keep in mind with my suggestion, their cloaking could still be broken by other ships and if they attempted to fire weapons.

Also... didn't expect this thread to come back after being dead for a few weeks.

 

[ne3zy]

Why do you think nothing should ever be able to perma cloak? I'm not going to say that a battle ship should, but not even small optimised scout ships designed to spy?

Why not if it can only do that, otherwise every ship will have cloak

 

[Sgtwisky]

I disagree. I wouldn't use a ship that cannot stand up to a fight as my everyday ship. Tell me why you think everyone would just build small scout vessels? OR do you mean you don't want every ship to be able to cloak even for a short time? More over they would be screwed if they engaged in battle as they would have very VERY low shields. That makes sneak attacks only viable for glass cannons. The best counter would just be a much more Tankey ship. OR many small ships in a fleet. I fail to see how being capable of having cloaking work, would make every ship have it.

There are plenty of people that wouldn't want to waste the space, or deal with the massive shield hit when they cloak/uncloak. The only real advantage would be scouting, and avoiding a fight you had no chance of winning. And that is assuming the other guy couldn't drop your cloak.

 

[Theodore_William]

You can blame it on me, Sgt. :D

Anyways, dedicated ships, without effective combat abilities, should be able to cloak indefinitely if built for that purpose. Think a space submarine. It appears for certain purposes, then disappears.

There's no reason to not have infinite cloaking on a spy ship, as long as they don't give away their position.

The biggest issue right now is the power con. Required power and the necessary block count is too high.

On a side note, as for shield dropping, what if cloaking was a shield alternative? Like a camo shield? You could still have lesser shields, and you'd have to drop them to cloak/uncloak, but then your cloaking could take a certain strain before having to reboot.

 

[Sgtwisky]

Interesting concept Theodore. Also, I don't blame you for anything XD.

 

[Theodore_William]

Interesting concept Theodore. Also, I don't blame you for anything XD.

The idea of strain is inspired by "Fallout: Equestria". If too much strain is put on the stealth drive, it overloads and has the possibility to break down. You'd have to fly to a station for repair. Therefore, indefinite stealth could be an easy task. But if your drive can take huge strain, it would be even better. You'd have resistance to scanners.

Beyond that, constant systems, such as shield recharge, thrusters, and similar, that require constant drain, could instead put a strain on your power.

The idea behind this is that you have a power grid that constantly produces power. Instead of having your recharge rate and drain rate compete, you simply have a power grid that produces the same amount of power constantly. You'd a threshold. If you surpass that threshold, you ship will suffer negative effects of lesser systems shutting down. Worst case senario, you ship shits down and requires a reboot.

This way, we can balance systems. A ship could have many systems, ranging from combat, to support, to stealth. But stealth systems would not play well with active combat systems. Ships would be able to scan your ship and have indicators of your ship activating inactive systems. Jammers would prevent this scan, leaving them to guess.

I know that harps more on power, but I'm kind of pointing to how all the systems work altogether. This could resolve many issues with power and would lead to discussion of how those systems work. Activating stealth drive could drop your combat effectiveness by 20%.

 

[Madman198237]

Valid points: An impossible-to-see ship with a small missile launcher or ion weapon could really hurt. However: Cloaking is based on signature, just like detection. A cloaking system renders you invisible to naked-eye detection. Jamming and cloaking should both eliminate your in-game icon, but cloaking costs much more power, while jamming makes other ships unable to scan.

I'd propose a cloaking system based on detection of EM signature: Normal detection is affected by this, and so is stealth.

EM radiation creates a "signature" value. The more EM radiation you emit, the higher this value. The larger the ship, the larger this value, simply because a larger ship has more active systems to emit this EM radiation. The more radiation that gets past your hull, the less stealthy you are, the further away you get detected.

Now then, adding systems to your ship increases signature. A cloaking system and shielded hull (New blocks, essential part of a cloaking system when they cover signature-emitting blocks ) reduce signatures. More blocks in the ship, the larger the signature. The larger the % of cloaking blocks and non-signature-emitting blocks (Hull and similar non-function blocks with no reason to emit EM radiation) the better the signature reduction and the smaller the range your ship must be within to be detected.

Missile launchers should be changed: They can only be "smart" when linked to an active scanning system.

An active scanning system gives off an impossible-to-conceal signature. Passive scanning, none at all.

Firing a weapon lights you up on everybody's screen until you move X number of meters away from the zone of firing. You can't conceal the launch of a laser, cannon, or missile. You just can't.

Power systems give off decent emissions, thrusters huge levels of signature-creating EM emissions.

And yes, these things are basically space submarines.

If you have any questions about the wall of text, go back and read it until your eyes bleed. Then, please, ask away

 

[Theodore_William]

I like it. But just to clarify, both an active cloaking system, as well as shielded hull would be in place?

The way I'm understanding it, your ship will emit EM. Using, I'm assuming weaker, EM resistant hull will reduce your detection, but not make you stealthy. Just hard to detect from further away. The cloaking would render you completely invisible.

So having an effective stealth ship would be a matter of balancing your emissions AND cloaking. Is that what you're getting at? Cause that's awesome. Like, seriously.

 

[Madman198237]

Yes. Almost exactly.

Visually, stealth blocks make you hard to see because they're black. Darker colors reduce VISIBLE LIGHT EM emissions...but not necessarily others. Stealth blocks (The specific, high-level type of hull block that I'm suggesting) will reduce EM emissions from within the ship...but only if they cover the source. So a ship skinned with these, or with a layer inside the hull before any EM-emitting blocks, will emit little EM. Just like a stealth aircraft or submarine. But if you put 80 of these behind 100 power reactors, so the power reactors are outside the blocks, they do nothing.

That's it, my wrists hurt too much. "electromagnetic emissions/emitting" just became EME forever. Got it?

The EME-reducing hull doesn't have to be weaker, just requires higher-level resources so it's stealthy.

Active cloaking reduces EM signature somewhat, but is mostly used so that a player can't see you. AI would be ineffective because they can't do anything until the cloaked ship is within detection range.

All active cloaking does is make you invisible. Though it may reduce EM somewhat, as stated above.

Passive cloaking is the block usage and minimization of EME activities.

The trick would be to make a perfectly EME-clean ship, so that you can touch the ship's scanning array and not be seen.

In order to see ANY ships by sensor (As in, get the tag we see on all ships/planets/asteroids/stations now) you must have a scanner set up.


And yes, I'm awesome. And I think way too much about this game. Hence complex suggestions relying on knowledge of real-world physics and systems combined with a love of science fiction and this game in particular, and an interest in development.
Maybe if I suggest enough good features I'll get a free copy of the game! Maybe.....

 

[Theodore_William]

Weaker, as in less armor. To kind of balance the hulls. Advanced hull armor is best used for defense, while "lead" hull reduces emission. You're exchanging durability for stealth.

Would it be possible for a ship to leave an EME trail? Similar to contrails or heat signatures. That way, even if you don't see the ship, you could track it(if you can find the signature). That would encourage the use of lead hull in tandem with a cloaking system.

 

[Madman198237]

Well....no. Because EM travels at the speed of light. It doesn't remain put unless our drive mechanisms are ion drives, which would leave ions in their wake. Then you can scan and follow an ion trail and perhaps get an approximate estimate on position based on how good your scanner is.

No, no no no no NO lead in your hull! That stuff is heavy. No, I mean things that are science fiction and don't reemit EM radiation later. Water is actually better than lead.

But yes, I suppose for balance stealth hull would be as expensive as advanced armor while only giving standard armor's protection, or something similar. Anyway, I'm off for the night. I'll answer further questions, compliments, and sarcastic remarks tomorrow, with rhetorical questions, vague insults, and even more sarcastic remarks.

 

[Theodore_William]

Makes sense. It's not a vital mechanic.

I wouldn't build lead hull even if saved my life(which it wouldn't). I just said lead cause if naturally blocks radiation. I meant it as a term to describe it's basic purpose, rather than it's actual composition.

Water hull sounds completely reasonable, entirely practical, and undoubtedly realistic.

Hey, snarky comments work. We're just laying the ground work for actual functions.

 

[TheWurm]

EM resistant hull ain't bad, don't forget we already have a magical energy resistant field in shields. A repurposed version of that magic makes as much sense to me as adding more magic to hulls.

Either way, one potential issue with blocking outgoing radiation is storage. Houses from around the sixties are dangerous because they are too well sealed, trapping higher concentrations of radioactive isotopes, which is a word I deeply enjoy using. The issue with cloaking is that eventually it will kill you. Think a localized version of global warming.

So a module or block count based system makes a lot of sense, since you're basically just storing energy instead of emmitting it. Unless you're pulling something along the lines of "The God's Themselves", and siphoning the energy to a different dimension.... Or just folding it into space-time using the jump/warp technology... Hmmmmm...

Wait, what were we talking about?

I'm realizing more and more that we could make it do pretty much whatever makes the game more interesting and then explain it later.

 

[Theodore_William]

True, we could wait and just make the blue space magic mechanics first, then make excuses later. I guess laying the framework first is more for us nerds.

That would be interesting, actually. Having resistant hull but nothing protecting you would act as a radioactive oven. You'd have to line the inside of your ship with EM resistant hull as well as the outside. The question is how would you get rid of the buildup of EM trapped inside your hull? I'm pretty much positive that extremely high concentrations would not be good, even for the systems emitting it.

Perhaps you could use the emissions as components or fuel for other purposes. Such as powering ship yards or as fusion components in factories. Although, that would be pushing the science part of the whole deal. Using radiation for power. I don't know, just brainstorming. But I'm sure there would be a use for radioactive buildup.

That could also add to repairing ships. Entering the reactor core or repairing the insides of thrusters would require rad suits. Similar to getting close to a star, the radiation would slowly kill you. Could make for interesting gameplay.

We've kinda moved away from cloaking, jamming, and scanning a hit, haven't we? We need a list of ideas for each of those and vote on them. Sgtwisky's ideas are fantastic, which is why I posted in the first place.

Man, I do NOT shut up, do I?

 

[Madman198237]

Well you see, I'm not talking black-hole-size gamma-ray emissions capable of turning you into highly radioactive soup, I'm talking relatively small but traceable amounts of radiation or other disturbance caused by engines, power generation, operations, etc.

Yes, we are siphoning this stuff off into another dimension: It's called reality. Lead is useful as a shielding material because it reemits radiation slower than it receives it, on account of physics that I'm not going to explain unless you really want to hear it. It's interesting but lengthy. Therefore, you receive 5000 Urists of radiation in 2 seconds, but the lead barriers A. reemits it in random directions, reducing the amount that reaches you and B. takes 100 seconds to reemit the radiation. You don't receive a lethal dose, most likely.

Same idea here. The shielding reemits these EM photons slowly enough that, unless you're absolutely soaking the inside of your ship with EME, you are not going to show up as a ship until you get REALLY close to the enemy.


Before I lose anybody else, here's how this system works: You CHOOSE to build a stealthy ship, and you choose when to be stealthy. If you're doing things that emit EM signature, including utilizing weapons, scanners, and engines, you'll be detected by ships with scanners. If you aren't, they have to get close enough to detect passive emissions, which depend on your power generation capacity and active systems content of your ship. We'll need an option to enable/disable systems, as in a really stealthy ship will shut down all nonessential computers and their modules, all thrusters, most power generation, and then activate cloak, and become nearly undetectable....until you run into them.

Cloaking becomes less energy-intensive and is only a visual blocking. It gives your ship a matte black skin with represented stars, so you look like the background. It fades to completely black if you're moving. That way, you're a black patch when moving, and basically impossible to see so long as you stay still.

Ooh, an idea just occurred to me that really helps balance the stealth ship idea. No shields while trying to be stealthy. Shields would emit a signature like a bonfire, so if you're going to be stealthy, you can't have them on.

New idea to go along with that: Toggle-able shields, that will build up recharge while off, so no ten-second timer to start recharging, as that'd be completely unfair, but they do need to regenerate before your enemy fires. So, you'll want to trigger shields right before decloaking.

That or make a fancy, invisible mine system that requires minimal power generation and lots of warheads.

What not on Earth do you mean YOU don't shut up? I probably am getting close to holding a record for the most walls of text on this forum...and I've not been here for long.

 

[Theodore_William]

That makes sense.

So, let me do a walk through of what you're saying, just to make it clear to anyone reading.

1: A dedicated stealth ship with minimal armament, high speed, a powerful reactor, and other general systems, would have to be built with EME absorbing hull to minimize it's signature. This would lower the maximum range of being detected by scanners. Therefore, what the radar jammer currently does(undetectable except LoS and disabling lock-on), would be partially taken over by this new shield hull. The hull doesn't PREVENT detection, but you have to be much closer.

2: When a stealth ship cloaks(we're going to assume infinitely), it's shields are toggled off and your ship essentially copies the background. Along with this, your ship should cease movement and shut down non-vital systems. The cloaking, hull, and system "blackout" conditions would render you practically nonexistent.

3: If the ship moves, it becomes a black mass. Later on, if the programming would allow it, instead of a black mass, you could be a shimmer. This would be akin to stationary cloaking, but it could include shading and other graphical stuff(you get what I mean. It's a shimmer).

4: If any systems, i.e. weapons or scanner, are used while cloaking, your ship will light up like Vegas on the map and other scanners. It might not deactivate the cloaking, but it would leave a visible signature for certain amount of time.

That's the way I'm understanding the cloaking side of things, based on all of our discussion. Feel free to correct me on anything.

I had some other thoughts, so here's spoilers:

Spoiler: Other Stuff (Long, cause I didn't feel like splitting it up.)

I so in conjunction with the aforementioned walk through, I wanted to add a couple of my own previously mentioned ideas. I just want to see how they'd hold up.

1: A power grid. You generate X amount of power CONSTANTLY. Not each second. This is dependent on the size and efficiency of your power grid/array/whatever. Instead of power drain, you have power STRAIN. You're fine, as long as your power strain stays under your power threshold. The less systems putting a strain on the grid, the more efficient they are. Systems put a minimum and a maximum amount of strain on your grid. Similar to how the thrusters overhaul, you can balance and prioritize your power. Not only this, but you can disable systems entirely.

2: The more power dedicated to a system, the more efficient it will be. If more power is prioritized to your thrusters, the greater their performance. To prevent too much abuse of this, you can only have a system use a minimum amount of power before it just shuts down.

3: The grid systems makes it so that rather than information being processed every second, the information is calculated then stays that way until it is change by an outside force(physiiiiiics). This would include system power usage fluctuating our the player adjusting systems. This, I do believe would be more stable.

4: Some systems would have fluctuating power. Shields would require far more power when recharging than when idle(fully charged). Weapons are similar, they require little to no power when inactive, but lots of power when fired. So one would need to pay attention to those strain ranges when adjusting.

Docked Entities
Child entities would put only a small strain on the mother entity's power grid. They will not require power from the mother to run their own systems, so long as they have their own grid. However, docked entities can use the mother entity's grid to run systems. For instance, charging jump drives can be done while docked to a mother ship, rather than relaying on the ships own power. This would allow you to dedicate full power to those systems that normally would put far too much strain on the child ships own grid.

Cloaking would carry over to docked entities. EME reduction would not. That is a part of construction. I would say that weapon blocks would not generate EME unless fired. That way, an idle cannon barrel can be exposed without generating rads. Once fired, it generates more and more, gradually "heating up". Over time they cool.

 

[Madman198237]

Great summary---you should just hang around and help me create a less super-nerdy answer that regular people can understand.

You're almost 100% accurate, except for the points I've not been clear enough on.

Your ship is always SLIGHTLY stealthy. The less equipment on your ship that produces EMISSIONS (So any power-using system, as a rough measure) the closer you can get to an enemy SCANNER without being DETECTED.

Using thicker hulls or hulls made out of the proposed "stealth block" will reduce the EME that leaks into space, meaning you can have more EME blocks without a penalty to the range at which you can remain unspotted from an average scanning array.

Using fewer EME modules will make you stealthier as a natural consequence. Oh, and weapons systems will give off larger signatures than anything other than thrusters and an active scanning array.



Design choices are only the first step to making a stealthy ship. Your actions reduce or improve stealth.


Hiding behind a rock makes you impossible to see, and you don't need a cloaker. Not to mention the asteroid dampens your emissions to the point where it's effectively impossible to see you.

Hanging out in empty space makes you easier to see. Maybe later you can fly out of a star and be VERY hard to see (Stars give off a lot of EME)

If you are running the engines, you lose a LOT of stealth, because you're leaving a trail of, let's say ions, behind you.

If you activate your scanner array, fire a weapon, or use a salvage beam, you light up, as you said, like Vegas, and everybody and their brother notices that you're hanging out nearby.




A Death Star has so many systems, you basically can't hide it. It's signature is so large, it's effectively uncloakable.

A fighter is relatively stealthy, even if the engines are running.

A ship whose hull is made of stealth blocks, with recessed thrusters (So they're a distance from the end of the ship, and some emissions are captured by the stealth blocks) and minimal active equipment, will not be detected by scanners until it's basically touching the scanning array.


None of these ships is invisible.



Now the ships all get a cloaking device. They can't be seen, but you can see the tag if they're close enough to your scanner. Maybe the scanner can give a mass estimate and give a rough area based on the mass, or maybe you can just get to shoot blind and pray...or shotgun and laugh.

For those of you who just started reading and are going "What? EME? Huh? Saywhatnow?" EME is my lazy-man shorthand for "electromagnetic (EM) emissions" or "EM emitting" or just about any version of that.

 

[Theodore_William]

Eh, it helps. It's harder to program quantum mechanics and physics than basic algebra.

Ok, so any ship can reduce detection. No ship is invisible unless equipped with a cloaker. Even then, you're really just camouflaged.

I was actually about to mention thrusters. I got to thinking about the B-2 Spirit. The engines are recessed to minimize the heat signature. It would be interesting to see the stealth blocks play with the thruster mechanics. Let's say that you put more forward thrust. You'd need to put more EME resistant blocks behind your engines.

Along with that, we could have a EME block specifically designed to block large amounts of EME. Very vulnerable, but capable of absorbing huge amounts. This would reduce the block count and allow you to have stronger systems closer to the outer hull without sacrificing stealth. This, in exchange for much weaker armor.

Other than that, a the more systems you have, the more EME. That would discourage invisible juggernauts while encouraging small, swift spy ships.