Viability and shape of dangerous stealth ships?

[Snk]

What benefits? with how power hungry and hard stealth is there basically are no benefits and there won't be until there is a reason for espionage.

Depends on the server you play on. In regular SP, there rae a lot of advantages. Evading pirate bases, mining, finding the faction module on pirate stations, etc

 

[Deleted member 433088]

Depends on the server you play on. In regular SP, there rae a lot of advantages. Evading pirate bases, mining, finding the faction module on pirate stations, etc

In my experience, if mining is what you want to do a simple radar jammer is already good enough; it seems to completely kill the pirate ship AI. It does not seem to work on stations though, so you might have to use a cloak + jam ship for that. I haven't tested the latter myself.

 

[ltmauve]

I have tested pirate stations versus jam only on accident once, and it does not work.

 

[godmars]

I have tested pirate stations versus jam only on accident once, and it does not work.

Radar decreases AI's engagement range and kills their aim. it might not be as noticeable on a larger ship. They can still fire lockon missiles though, but that's a bug

 

[Mered4]

Things about Stealth everyone should probably know but might not:

1. Perm jam+cloak is considered a perma-cloaker. They are invisible to everything - except the nav screen. No, seriously - just look at nav. You'll see any and all ships and their distance from your vessel. You can't pinpoint their location, but I'm sure if you popped a scanner you'd see them really quick :D

2. You can't cloak through a gate or a jump. The FTL auto-decloaks, but doesn't dejam for some reason.

3. Radar jammers are awesome, especially in smaller vessels. In fact, they are almost required in fighter-craft - otherwise, they wouldn't last seconds against a turret battery.

4. The jammer sometimes lies. I've been ruthlessly murdered on MFleet while my hotbar told me the jammer was on - but it wasn't. Be careful. It's usually a good idea to fly around like you've been spotted, even if you have the jam on. Just in case :D

 

[FMK]

Things about Stealth everyone should probably know but might not:

1. Perm jam+cloak is considered a perma-cloaker. They are invisible to everything - except the nav screen. No, seriously - just look at nav. You'll see any and all ships and their distance from your vessel. You can't pinpoint their location, but I'm sure if you popped a scanner you'd see them really quick :D

2. You can't cloak through a gate or a jump. The FTL auto-decloaks, but doesn't dejam for some reason.

3. Radar jammers are awesome, especially in smaller vessels. In fact, they are almost required in fighter-craft - otherwise, they wouldn't last seconds against a turret battery.

4. The jammer sometimes lies. I've been ruthlessly murdered on MFleet while my hotbar told me the jammer was on - but it wasn't. Be careful. It's usually a good idea to fly around like you've been spotted, even if you have the jam on. Just in case :D

#2 is entirely incorrect, I've used gates and jump drives numerous times while cloaked/jammed and have remained both the entire time. What you're probably experiencing is lag causing the server/client to think you ran out of power while it loaded up the new area you jumped to.

#4 probably happens for the same reason.

 

[Mered4]

#2 is entirely incorrect, I've used gates and jump drives numerous times while cloaked/jammed and have remained both the entire time. What you're probably experiencing is lag causing the server/client to think you ran out of power while it loaded up the new area you jumped to.

#4 probably happens for the same reason.

But still true, nonetheless - lag is a real and serious gameplay problem in Starmade.

 

[Dr. Whammy]

I've recently attempted to make decent size stealth ships (300 - 500 mass) and I've found that when talking about only a invisibility system, it takes too much power to possibly power anything in this range permanently at inefficient power shapes (IE not a circle or cube) and if you want to put radar-jammer, interior, hulls, decent guns, or small shielding, forget about it. I've been trying with all different kinds of power configurations, attempting to make ships appear like Stealth Bombers, but the shape just doesn't lend its self positively to volume vs surface area ratio (important for lots of power production). Sleek designs surprisingly are not good for stealth in starmade. I've also noticed that virtually all weapons have the same damage vs power usage ratio, 10 per one point of damage, making strategic stealth weapons I wanted to know if any one else has been able to get past these hurdles and any suggestions for decent power generation/ what sort of weapons are good for stealth ships.

ASC Atlantis

Advanced prototype deep space strategic reconnaissance Starship.

Mass: 664
Dimensions: Length 115m, Width 57m, Height 27m.
Thrust to mass ratio 1.3:1
Power grid: Capacity 568,499. Recharge 1,000,094 e/sec.
Shields: Capacity 28,950. Recharge 121 e/sec.

Armament:
- 4 Repeat fire cannons (4000DPS)
- Heavy ion beam weapon: 200,000+ anti-shield
- Warhead Launcher (will most likely switch out with a 25x launcher for mass reduction)
- 2 Point defense turrets

Equipment:
- Radar Jammer (stable)
- Cloaking Device (stable)
- Primary and secondary warp drives (can charge while cloaked, jamming and moving)

For power:
- I use long reactor 'stripes', staggered like a checkerboard. I fill in the space between the reactors with motherboard blocks to give the appearance of hull, as they only take up 0.01 mass as opposed to most other blocks taking between 0.025 and 0.1 mass. On this ship, the average reactor length is about 85-90 meters. Use literally every chance you get to extend your reactors height-wise and width-wise without letting them touch another group. Keep an eye out for the 1 million e/s soft cap for power. If you build over that, each reactor you add will give less power and actually begin to drain power due to their added mass. I think it's a load of B.S. but this is what we have to work with in the vanilla (unmodded) version of the game.

For weapons:
- I find that a beam weapon with with a 100% pulse slaved to it and say... 80% ion effect can be a nasty anti-shield weapon with the ability to kill system blocks. This kind of weapon is standard on all my current starship designs in a beam/beam/ion configuration, though with a pulse slave, you get a LOT more firepower per block. The down side is that you need to get close (cloak and get on their six or in a turret blind spot.) and wait 30 seconds for a reload.
- Cannons are an effective anti-armor weapon if done right. I prefer multiple fast firing (about 4ms reload) cannons, as they pierce armor at the point of convergence and shred internals like a chainsaw.
- I have tried missiles... Theoretically, they can work but I'd advise against them. They take a lot of power to fire, do pitiful damage against advanced armor regardless of launcher size, and they load far too slowly to be used for anything other than a sneak attack on 'soft' targets.
- Like a submarine, I tend to carry warheads on a torpedo chassis, although this ship was originally designed to carry and fire 20 of these. Keep in mind that warhead damage is only 2000. I tweak mine in the block behavior config to do 500,000... Not an insti-kill weapon but it will blast through advanced armor.

Hopefully, this info is helpful.

 

[Crashmaster]

Scoundrel;

It's designed around continuous fire while still cloaked as opposed to the standard de-cloak and alpha technique.



http://starmadedock.net/threads/sleek-armed-perma-cloaker.21075/