Creating Completely Cloaked Ships

[1adog1]

Hey guys, I'm here today with a bit of a tutorial on how to create a ship that can have it's cloak and radar jammer active indefinitely. There's a bit of math involved but it shouldn't be too complicated. First of all, you need to make sure your ship has the power capability to support both devices at the same time. Press T, N, or I and go to Structure, the bottom left tab. Click on Power Systems and look at the number of generators and your power production. Put the numbers into the following formulas:

P/N/150=A

A-1=B

P=Total Power Produced per tick
N=Number of Generators
A= Ability to Cloak and Jam
150=The power needed per block your ship has to cloak and jam.
B=Extra blocks that can be cloaked and jammed per generator.

If the number you get (A) is greater than 1, that means you can cloak your ship without changing your current power systems. The number you get for the second formula (B) is how many other blocks you can have per power block on your ship. Experiment around with different power setups and you'll eventually find one that works for you.

Now your need to determine if your ship will cloak without losing power. There's a formula for this as well:

A*N/10=M

10= The number of blocks per 1 mass.
M= Maximum mass your ship can have to cloak and jam indefinitely.

If your mass is above what the formula gave you, try to shed some weight (WITHOUT deleting power generators), or add more generators. Do note that this formula only applies when your ship is not using any other power. When you're flying at speeds you may need a bit more power.


Here's a couple quick tips to help you out:

If you need more power, consider making your power generators in single line groups of 12 or more. This will always produce a number of greater than 1 on the first formula, and will make it a lot easier to create your ship.

Don't go for aesthetics. Without a ridiculous number of generators, your ship probably won't even be able to have an outer hull.

Adding power tanks will help if you need extra power while cloaked.


Here's a large cloaked fighter I developed a few days ago. I call it The Starstian All Purpose. It has 10 SD-BB Missile Arrays, 5 powerful Antimatter Cannons, 6 Salavage Cannons, 11,668 Shield Power, and produces 259,236.6 power per tick. All of this, in a ship of only 164 mass. It may not look pretty, but it'll do almost anything a ship it's size could ever do. Here's a Download.

 

[Cybertooth]

Nice, this is much eaiser than building a ship and testing it

 

[LordChicken]

Time to build a stealth escape pod!

 

[1adog1]

Hey guys just added some pictures and a link to a basic stealth ship I made.

 

[JimmyJamba]

Thanks for the info about cloaking. The ship actually looks pretty cool as well. I'm going to give it a shot when I get home.

 

[RedDragonflyxx]

Time to build a stealth escape pod!

More like a stealth cruiser if you want it to look good, just make the mass as low as possible, separate power blocks are the most efficient currently, but lines take less space

 

[1adog1]

More like a stealth cruiser if you want it to look good, just make the mass as low as possible, separate power blocks are the most efficient currently, but lines take less space

From what I found separate power blocks only produce about 140 power per block, but I've created line setups where they'll produce up to 260. It's really weird though how the game decides how much power each block produces, so I could be wrong. And yeah you're going to need a massive amount of power generators to be able to just put hulls around them. I might start work on a Battlecruiser class cloaked ship. That could be cool to mess around with.

 

[der_scheme]

From what I found separate power blocks only produce about 140 power per block, but I've created line setups where they'll produce up to 260. It's really weird though how the game decides how much power each block produces, so I could be wrong. And yeah you're going to need a massive amount of power generators to be able to just put hulls around them. I might start work on a Battlecruiser class cloaked ship. That could be cool to mess around with.

Generator groups will be more effective than single ones if they are at least 10 blocks large. Below that threshold single generators will be more effective. But since a single generator will output only 140 power, it won't be able to sustain itself.

 

[WolfChild]

Rather than the calculations in the op, I use: Mass*1500=Power Needed for infinite cloak+jam. Then I check it against my power on my ship.

 

[1adog1]

Generator groups will be more effective than single ones if they are at least 10 blocks large. Below that threshold single generators will be more effective. But since a single generator will output only 140 power, it won't be able to sustain itself.

It's more than that though, and that's what's confusing. For some reason, when I set up 20 generators in a 5x4 group, it produces less power than the same amount in a 1x20 group. It's the same with any number I've tested, 10, 20, 40, 50 generators the same thing happens.

 

[der_scheme]

It's more than that though, and that's what's confusing. For some reason, when I set up 20 generators in a 5x4 group, it produces less power than the same amount in a 1x20 group. It's the same with any number I've tested, 10, 20, 40, 50 generators the same thing happens.

Every power block gives you 25 energy regeneration. A group of power blocks will give you a bonus that scales with the sum of dimensions of its bounding box. Let's say you use five blocks to build a cross. That cross's bounding box will be 3x3x1 in size, thus the sum is 7. This will give you the same amount of energy as building a straight line out of five blocks, as the sum of dimensions is 7, again (5+1+1). If you use these five blocks to build the most compact shape possible (3 and 2 besides each other), the bounding box will only be of size 3x2x1 with a sum of dimensions of 6. This group will give you therefore only the bonus for the sum of 6, plus the 25 energy regeneration of the one additional power block.

These are the shapes I'm talking about:

  ██
██████
  ██

██████████

██████
████

We learn: Build large lines/crosses that do not touch each other. A power generator will only give you a bonus if the added block does increase the overall size of the generator's bounding box.

Additional info: It is more efficient to build single generators if you can't manage to build groups larger than 9 (so use at least 10), because the energy per block will be smaller than that of single blocks.
Also keep in mind that this is capped at 1 million. If you reach that, each additional power generator will give you only the 25, regardless of layout. This effectively limits stealth ships to 6666 blocks (ignoring tricks like docked generators).

 

[1adog1]

Every power block gives you 25 energy regeneration. A group of power blocks will give you a bonus that scales with the sum of dimensions of its bounding box. Let's say you use five blocks to build a cross. That cross's bounding box will be 3x3x1 in size, thus the sum is 7. This will give you the same amount of energy as building a straight line out of five blocks, as the sum of dimensions is 7, again (5+1+1). If you use these five blocks to build the most compact shape possible (3 and 2 besides each other), the bounding box will only be of size 3x2x1 with a sum of dimensions of 6. This group will give you therefore only the bonus for the sum of 6, plus the 25 energy regeneration of the one additional power block.

These are the shapes I'm talking about:

  ██
██████
  ██

██████████

██████
████

We learn: Build large lines/crosses that do not touch each other. A power generator will only give you a bonus if the added block does increase the overall size of the generator's bounding box.

Additional info: It is more efficient to build single generators if you can't manage to build groups larger than 9 (so use at least 10), because the energy per block will be smaller than that of single blocks.
Also keep in mind that this is capped at 1 million. If you reach that, each additional power generator will give you only the 25, regardless of layout. This effectively limits stealth ships to 6666 blocks (ignoring tricks like docked generators).

Thanks for that, I've been trying to figure out how these power systems work since I started playing starmade. Danke der Scheme! lol

 

[1adog1]

Hey guys I made this be an informative thread, so I'm going to bump it if no one has a problem with it.

 

[Cool3303]

My new ship:
Power-Cloak efficency=547.270,6/1124/150=3,24 (including core in 1124)
Power:547.270,6
Dimensions: 41/41/41
Whats your best result?
I made that one very quick.... and confusing
http://www.file-upload.net/download-9028746/C3Stealthbody414141.zip.html
I think this is an great example of a good looking stealth cruiser.