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Re: Cloaking

#16
Available ship sensors would include: thermal, relativistic, X-ray, and possibly radio waves. Sensors are used for detecting ships throughout the whole system (think long distance). Visual cloaks are useful for cloaking ships in the player's line-of-sight (think short distances). You would be able to equip more than one sensor on a ship but use a hard point for each sensor. This would keep your ship from being able to detect everything.
Love this idea.

I also think it balances ships as they must have a good spread of technology. Or they can be brutes (just weapons + lack of sensors/ other technologies), but they can't hit without a good sensor kind of idea... It encourages you to keep up with your fleet and continue diligence and exploration to get the best possible technologies.
Maybe something along the lines of a cloak that completely masks your ship, but depending on how much heat output it has, the cloak starts to glow and you see an outline of the ship. The more heat produced (weapon fire, engine use, internal reactors running) the brighter it'll glow. This would allow for ships that go into 'silent' mode to drift through enemy territory without being seen, but would prevent an assault from a capital ship because the engines would be putting enough heat out to stress the cloak.

Of course, this also adds a bit of strategy too. If you really want to take the time to try and drift a huge carrier into the middle of an enemy faction in order to do a surprise attack, and you're willing to spend a week to do it, I see no problems that way.
Agreed.

I also agree with the side that think it should drain energy, and it will likely be part of the "generator" category in the ship's hardpoints. I think it would be effective to create stronger cloaking objects versus stacking cloaking objects, however if you'd like to stack, you run out - your ship is stranded out in battle.

I'm leaning more towards this option as a strategical means of surrounding or sneaking up on an enemy, not an endgame ability. The enemy always has a means of finding out where you are, depending on how advanced their technology is ;)
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Re: Cloaking

#17
There should never be "binary" cloaking, meaning that you are either fully invisible or perfectly visible.

I had written a bit on such scaling issues and possible interactions here.
4 completely different types of sensors is not very scaling-friendly.
When you have 500 ships, you probably don't have time to tinker with the sensor buttons on all your scouts individually...
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Re: Cloaking

#18
On a pedantic note (ow! hey, no hitting!), cloaking only counts as strategic if you can cloak entire fleets and send them halfway 'round the galaxy. That's strategic in that the capability to do this kind of thing alters the national/civilizational balance of power -- you're forced either to divert precious resources from somewhere else to create equivalent-or-better defenses against that threat, or to acknowledge that you're powerless against it... which your citizens may not appreciate.

Note that this is why ballistic missile submarines are a strategic threat, not a tactical one. WWII U-boat "wolf packs," while a tactical threat individually, became a strategic menace (that had to be countered by high-level military policy) because of their numbers and mobility. Generally speaking, an individual ship sneaking up on you to deliver a surprise shot is a tactical action -- it's only strategy if you have a preference and significant capability for that particular kind of offensive action.

OK, that out of the way, I also like the idea of cloaks, especially if IFF spoofing is included. But in addition to other "interesting choices"-style limitations, I would definitely want to see this as just one half of the visibility game. The other half would have to be the sensors that others have mentioned. There needs to be an ECM/ECCM arms race or it's an "I WIN" button for somebody.

One very interesting side effect of including this in the tactical/operational level of Limit Theory gameplay is that it makes scouts/explorers much more valuable as fleet size increases. A scout ship, which presumably would optimize sensor capability (at the expense of other systems like weapons or armor), could go off and do its own thing, gathering data on new worlds and new civilizations. Or it could serve on the front lines of a conflict as the eyes and ears for a large fleet -- risky work, but vital for countering sneak attacks.

This should apply to spoofing as well as cloaking. To a vessel with average sensors, the readout on that ship floating serenely toward your prime refueling base looks like just another mid-size merchant. But to a well-equipped and alert scout, it's revealed as a cruiser using EM and IR masking to minimize its real power signature, and only pretending to be a merchant by altering its IFF transponder code. The best sensors (passive AND active) should be able to cut through virtually any masking/jamming to expose the true physical, energy, and data signals that are the unique signature of every ship.

Finally, I leave you with the thought that "cloaking" as a general gameplay feature doesn't have to be about hiding ships only. The code that allows ships to become invisible to poor or average sensors could be extended to apply to other objects and phenomena.

What if asteroids could be cloaked? What if planets could be hidden? What if alien derelicts floated through space, unseen unless someone with great sensors happened to be looking in the right place? What if technological artifacts could spoof themselves to appear useless unless studied closely? How about hidden "space monsters" or jumpgates?

You get the idea. :) If the "hidden" flag can be applied to many objects, then "finding" becomes a viable and potentially enjoyable additional mode of gameplay.

I'm not really expecting anything like this in LT 1.0. It's fun to think about, though.
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Re: Cloaking

#19
I was also fantasizing about hidden planets or galaxies only visible through means of sensors & being ambushed by aggressive hidden fleets waiting for you to cruise by.

It would no doubt be an awesome feature extended into the universe if we concept the idea correctly.
4 completely different types of sensors is not very scaling-friendly.
I agree this might be overkill. Regarding the binary cloaking, any use of cloaking should drain energy, and therefore only last as long as the ship has resources to supply this ability - possibly degrees of visibility as energy levels deplete - either in the radar, screen view, etc...?

If you touched on this in your linked write-up I apologize, I plan to read that when I get a free moment.

One thing I liked about SC was the ability to see invisible units move and bend the light around them. It was interesting from a tactile standpoint, and you knew something was there even though you could do nothing about it. This might not be practical for LT, but it's another idea to throw into the mix.
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Re: Cloaking

#20
I was thinking - I like the analogy to submarines.

What if ships could 'submerge' (I dunno, go into subspace or something) and hide out there from any ships not equipped with subspace scanner technology? You could even import interesting things from the world of submarine warfare like active subspace 'pings' or passively listening for subspace distortions. This way you have one to three easily scalable parameters (maybe how 'far' into subspace you can go, analogous to depth; how much you disturb subspace, analogous to the sound output of your ship - variable on speed; and any kind of anti-active-sensor coatings, a la anechoic tiles) posed against the enemy's sensor capabilities.

Maybe call it 'darkspace' rather than subspace. Sounds more ominous. "Engage the darkspace flux drive! Take us 150 folds in!"

I also like the idea of an ECM/ECCM war. Similar analogies could work there.
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Re: Cloaking

#21
AndyThompson wrote: I agree this might be overkill. Regarding the binary cloaking, any use of cloaking should drain energy, and therefore only last as long as the ship has resources to supply this ability - possibly degrees of visibility as energy levels deplete - either in the radar, screen view, etc...?
I don't agree that all kinds of "cloaking" should require energy, think of it more like Stealth.

In terms of stealth it's actually the other way around, you want to reduce the amount of energy that's given out since energy radiation can be detected!

When it comes to masking your heat signature or your radar cross section these are passive types of "cloaking", or can be achieved by just turning engines and other heat generating systems off.

Actually researching a more effective engine that gives you the same amount of output for less wasted energy automatically reduces your heat signature making your ship harder to detect using heat sensors (unless that energy automatically is distributed to other systems instead).

An active cloaking masking visual signature could of-course require energy which increases the heat signature and means such sensor types or heat seeking missiles can detect the ship easier.
Normally this is also balanced in Sci Fi by visual cloaking draining so much energy that weapons systems and other systems have to be brought offline or at least reduced.

Almost no Sci Fi gets the Stealth/Passive Stealth aspect right though from a science point of view.

In reality we already are using IR (visual Image Recognition), Radar and Heat sensors to find targets or guide missiles towards targets, so if you want to give LT a bit more realistic touch these 3 are a given. Radar unlike the other two is special in that it's active meaning turning the sensor on also reduces your own Stealth since your physically emitting signals towards your target. This radar lock signal is responsible for the "missile warning" red flash you see in movies involving fighter pilots.
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Re: Cloaking

#22
Bringing back the cloaking discussion. Maybe if we could have "zones" wich will hide everything insid,e up until some distance, they could be used to cloak entire systems or stations. If we could build a "cloaking" device, wich produce this kind of zone in given radius, then we could have moveable zones, bound to an object, to cloak ships. Or with modification of this technology, we could have other kinds of zones around the ship, like nanobots shield or emp. I hope Josh will consider bringing this kind of functionality into the game.
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Re: Cloaking

#23
i'd prefer to include it in the general framework around sensors and what we already know for sure about them (look here for a write up)

so that cloaks are no
Gazz wrote:I pressed invisubul button so you can't see me! Hurr durr!
feature.

so that you actually have to do something for your stealth-ness.

like reducing your emissions by turning down your reactors and stuff.


BUT i'd enjoy a "damper field" mechanic.

not a stealth per se but a device that reduces your signature to lower levels.

this could also be frequency-dependent.

so the dampener field produces an "anti-signature" reducing your signature along a signature graph.

this amounts to pulsar9's different sensor areas (IR/X-Ray etc) without making them artificial borders but natural continua

so you have to match your equipment and dampener field that nothing "sticks out" of the dampening effect.

this also introduces more reconnisance into strategic gameplay.

so you may tune your sensors to listen in the areas where your enemies dampeners are bad....
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Re: Cloaking

#24
Cornflakes_91 wrote:i'd enjoy a "damper field" mechanic. not a stealth per se but a device that reduces your signature to lower levels.

this could also be frequency-dependent. so the dampener field produces an "anti-signature" reducing your signature along a signature graph.

this amounts to pulsar9's different sensor areas (IR/X-Ray etc) without making them artificial borders but natural continua so you have to match your equipment and dampener field that nothing "sticks out" of the dampening effect.
To expand on this, what if this process -- selecting damping frequencies corresponding to the emission frequencies of your ship's various systems -- was not a fire-and-forget kind of action? What if, instead, the frequencies of all your ship's systems "drifted" over time?

This would definitely change cloaking from being an "invisubul" button to being an active gameplay process. The frequency of every ship system would stay within a certain range, but it would drift within that range periodically. The more cloaked you want to be, the more time and attention you would need to dedicate to monitoring the emission frequency of each of your ship's systems and tuning your cloaking frequencies to match the new, drifted emission frequencies.

This also has the nice side effect of making bigger ships much harder to cloak than smaller ships, without requiring any artificial rule like "big cloaking devices consume more energy." The more systems on board your ship (which you would want to do for a bigger ship), the more difficult it becomes to compensate for all their emission drifting. If you want to be super-stealthy, you'll choose the smallest ship so that you can concentrate on the smallest number of systems to monitor... at the expense of being able to defend yourself if you're discovered. :twisted:

One important caveat to making cloaking an active gameplay feature: it should not be something you can delegate to NPC crew. On every ship, there should have to be one player, human or NPC, whose job it is to match cloaking frequencies to ship system emission frequencies. Otherwise you either lose this as active gameplay (on a human-commanded ship) or NPCs have an unfair advantage (on an NPC-commanded ship).
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Re: Cloaking

#25
Flat: this would kinda confront with my preferred notion of that signatures are unique for a given ship/system layout and can be used for identification
if signatures were allowed to drift, they could "transform" a battleship to a big freighter with too high emissions but same spectrum.
(bit of an extreme case, but you get the idea)

maybe let the damper field drift and not the other systems, same effect but the identification capabilities stay untouched
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Re: Cloaking

#26
You raise an interesting possibility...
Disguise your battleship as a huge unarmed transporter by manipulating its emissions. If done well, even a visual identification shouldn't throw off some greedy pirates. :D
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Re: Cloaking

#28
I find this idea to be excellent and would like it to be implemented. :ghost:
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Re: Cloaking

#29
I only oppose mechanics that require either constant attention in order to be effective at a fleet level that most people would either ignore it or abuse the 'Pause as a Gameplay Mechanic'.

I.E.
  1. Set fleet to stealth
  2. After X amount of time, pause game
  3. Cycle through each ship to make sure <insert manual mechanic that needs attention> is still in order
  4. Unpause
  5. Repeat
If people have to do this constantly, it'll become tedious at best, and at worst, players will start ignore said 'feature'.

...Which brings up another parallel to AI vs. Player. What happens with tasks that are deemed boring/monotonous/tedious? The AI has no concept of such a thing, which means that a player can get frustrated with a tedious task while the AI doesn't, but is still forced to do it just to be on the same playing level.
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Re: Cloaking

#30
Agreed. If a constant action is required to make cloaking balanced, it just means the player is disadvantaged.

Perhaps a stealth factor would make a useful research attribute? By focussing on stealth you could become less detectable by scanners in various ways. Still, there'd be a range where sensors would still detect your ship. The more advanced your research and your stealthy equipment, the shorter this range would be.

This would make stealth gameplay tactical. You're not invisible, just harder to detect. So playing smart is still important.
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