Hull and the cloaker

[FictionDragon]

Hi people! Do you ever wanted to build perma cloak ship but abandoned the project because it would have to be just a flying reaktor with no hull on it? I have exactly the same problem myself, so I suggest a simple solution to this matter: Lower the default power/block requirements for cloaker

Spoiler: it's

Maybe to like 80-90 e/block? That should be low enought, what do you people think?

 

[Mariux]

They could be lowered slightly, I suppose. But then there should be a delay until you can cloak again after getting hit.

 

[FictionDragon]

They could be lowered slightly, I suppose. But then there should be a delay until you can cloak again after getting hit.

I agree and maybe should be even cloaker charged before activation just like the jump drive and then mantain a reasonable amout of power drain.
Oh and some special cloaking effects would be nice.

 

[BiGEdge]

A cloakship in SM with a hull isnt recognized as a cloakship.
so the most of the ship has to be energy stuff. But you can build cool cloakers,
if you understood the system behind generating energy.

Spoiler: something like

Spoiler: or this

those are examples for perma cloakers and jammers with some weapons and shields that ive build

 

[FictionDragon]

A cloakship in SM with a hull isnt recognized as a cloakship.

That is exactly what I'm trying to change. BTW I know how to build even more efficient generators than these your 2 ships have and still it is not enought.

 

[karkinosz]

I've thought a bit on this and have considered making a suggestion to overhaul cloak. As well as making cloak not completely rely on energy regeneration, (although that means no permacloak) Making cloak charge- burst use then charge again.

What would this mean for cloak?

A normal fully operational ship could have a cloak, it'd require a similar set up to the current jumpdrive and would be balanced by charge time as well as limited cloak time. (You'd be able to get it pretty high with enough cloaking modules if we do the numbers right but config options rule here) A tactical type of cloak for in battle use (balanced for time cloaked v.s power cost with diminishing returns for time cloaked. Small mass modifier so no cloaking titans) and a long term scouting type (mass v.s power cost with exponential increase on the mass. Cloak time proportional to the amount of cloak modules. )

If there is interest in making cloaking something you could use in an RP ship or at least something with a hull and systems I can flesh this out further.

 

[Ithirahad]

A cloakship in SM with a hull isnt recognized as a cloakship.
so the most of the ship has to be energy stuff. But you can build cool cloakers,
if you understood the system behind generating energy.

Spoiler: something like

Spoiler: or this

those are examples for perma-cloakers and -jammers with some weapons and shields that I've built

Nice job, but I see no reason why a cloaking ship should have to be recognizable as such at all. The whole point of cloaking is stealth, it shouldn't require a ship to look like a big chunk of reactor blocks, which gives it away immediately.

 

[jath]

What if your cloaking blocks only cloaked the blocks within it's radius. Each cloaking block would require X amount of power which is higher for the number of blocks that cloaking device has to cloak, and lower if it shares the blocks with another cloaker. You could force deactivate the shield on any cloaked ship (or reduce it to 25% while it's cloaked). If a ship is hit, the cloaker in the area of the strike becomes damaged, and the ship will become temporarily visible. The more cloaking blocks you hit, the more power the ship will require to cloak, until the cloakers are repaired. This would still favor smaller ships, but allow for things such as hulls as well. It would also make larger cloaking ships less OP since they will more easily absorb a hit from rapid fire and area effect attacks, exposing the spot that was hit. You could simply quadruple the average power requirement for any ship with cloakers, instead of factoring it by 10.

 

[FictionDragon]

I believe this radius things have some perfomance issues but shield weakening/deactivation when cloak is on sounds reasonable. And about that need for cloak blocks in addition to its cpu: I think the way jump drive work would with cloakers and jammers as well. Like the more blocks your ship have, more time will the charching of cloaker/jammer take, unless you add more cloaker/jammer blocks to your ship. And more these blocks you have the more power will they need for charging and upkeep.