Holo-Emitters/Cloaks

[Edymnion]

Random thought that occurred to me last night as I was going to sleep that I managed to remember today.

How about holo-emitters/cloaks?

As in, a system that would allow one kind of ship to project an image of a different kind of ship around itself?

Give it a huge power cost, like cloaking does now, and you could project an image of a much larger ship around yourself. So that any player seeing it while the holo-cloak was up would see the full readout for shields, power, hp, etc of the shipyard design you assigned to the cloak.

That way a miner or a cargo ship could project a cloak of a warship to dissuade other players from attacking. Is it a cargo ship full of goodies, or is that a legit dreadnaught? Won't know until you shoot it and either the cloak falls or a whole lot of firepower turns your way.

Could also be used the other way around, for a decked out warship to try and pass as a cargo ship.

Limit speed and turning while cloaked to either the projection or the actual ship, whichever is worse (so that you could cloak a titan as a fighter, but the fact the fighter is taking 3 days to turn around would give it away).

 

[therimmer96]

Have you been watching star trek again? :P

 

[Jake_Lancia]

Random thought that occurred to me last night as I was going to sleep that I managed to remember today.

How about holo-emitters/cloaks?

As in, a system that would allow one kind of ship to project an image of a different kind of ship around itself?

Give it a huge power cost, like cloaking does now, and you could project an image of a much larger ship around yourself. So that any player seeing it while the holo-cloak was up would see the full readout for shields, power, hp, etc of the shipyard design you assigned to the cloak.

That way a miner or a cargo ship could project a cloak of a warship to dissuade other players from attacking. Is it a cargo ship full of goodies, or is that a legit dreadnaught? Won't know until you shoot it and either the cloak falls or a whole lot of firepower turns your way.

Could also be used the other way around, for a decked out warship to try and pass as a cargo ship.

Limit speed and turning while cloaked to either the projection or the actual ship, whichever is worse (so that you could cloak a titan as a fighter, but the fact the fighter is taking 3 days to turn around would give it away).

I actually kinda like this idea.

Though I wouldn't give it the power cost of a cloaker - maybe closer to the jammer's power cost, to encourage it to be used a bit more often that a true cloaker.

 

[nightrune]

I want this as well but I also want it for hidden doors and things along those lines. Here is how I think it should work:
1) It should have a holo computer
2) It should reuse designs from a shipyard
3) Should be logic activatable

Use:
1) Slave a rail to the holocomputer
2) Load Design
3) Turn on holo emmiter
4) Select rail docker that is supposed to be attached (This should be saved so you don't have to do it every time you turn it on, hopefully in the design file)
5) Object unloads when you turn it off

Holo-object Properties:
1) Does not interact with physics in anyway including enemy fire
2) No shader or changes to the blocks except when mother entities power drops below 75%, then you start seeing small glitches or you could scale power by block count of the holoobject
3) Interacts with rails in the normal fashion (Imagine having holo fighters roaming on the outside of your ship for mining vessels)

Good way to cloak a base in an asteroid field!

Things I might like to see
Any damage to the mothership via shields drops the holo image.
Scaling of the object if/when we see a block LoD system. This would allow using the actual design for your ship as a holo image scaled down inside.

 

[Jojomo]

Hmm, why is that cruiser mining an asteroid?

 

[aRottenKomquat]

Hmm, why is that cruiser mining an asteroid?

Or why is that little carrier holding a fleet of titan drones?

 

[Edymnion]

Or why is that little carrier holding a fleet of titan drones?

I would assume with a cloak like this you would take on the physical dimensions of the larger of the two ships, so that you don't have a shuttle generating a titan that docks in a way that looks really weird.