Lets talk about firing when camoflaged...

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Space Battles
21

From my understanding of the cloak (admittedly pretty rudimentary, just enough to add a stealth field to my Antares Expanse mod), multiples of the same cloak are really not all that helpful. Here’s a few lines from the Cruiser Camouflage Shield:

max_cloak_power = 200 cloak_rechargerate = 0.01 cloak_consumptionrate = 0.02

As you can see, this cloak consumes power at twice the rate it recharges, meaning the ship will spend about one-third of the time cloaked. But the trait that applies most to the idea of multiple cloaks is the max_cloak_power, which sets how long the ship will remain cloaked. If the two cloaks have the same stats, they will complete recharging and complete consuming at the same time. If you had cloaks with different stats, so as to stagger the period of cloaking, I would imagine the ship would remain cloaked as long as one of the cloaks still had power and the ship had no reason to decloak. (I haven’t had time to run a thorough test involving modded cloaks with different stats.)

Cliff, please correct me if I am mistaken about this. Also, while testing the cloak, I had a thought. How difficult would it be to put a charge bar on the cloak module similar to the bars that appear on weapons as they are reloading? That would certainly make it easier to track just what the camouflage shield is doing.

22

I think hologram with cloak is fine. It cost a lot and will still get bypassed by the rescuer tag anyway, so it probably wouldn’t turn out overpowered.

Besides, they don’t have an armor tank hull either, so they needed something else to tank for them.

23

Alright, thanks, that’s about what I thought. I’m thinking, though, that if weapons go in that can fire while under a cloaking device, cloaking devices suddenly become a practical alternative to standard defenses, and it suddenly becomes desirable to have a ship that can remain cloaked for extended periods of time (or even all the time).

Or similar to the ones tractor beams and shield generators have. I agree with this suggestion, and would like to extend it to the Holopojector as well, to have a better sense of how long until the next time the cloaking device or holoprojector becomes active, and for how much longer it will remain active.

24

Cliff mentioned earlier that he would code so the ship would not uncloak for fighters. Having the option to choose what type of craft to uncloak for would be interesting.
I’ve ad an interesting thought - it would be very cool to arm a few frigates or cruisers with a camo modules and and multi beam tractors.
They could sneak up on the mass of fighters that always seem to congregate mid way between two approaching fleets, uncloak, and smash them with tractor beams and anti fighter weaponry.
Just a thought…

25

Ok I’ve changed it back so they can continue projecting whilst cloaked…

26

suggestion:

how about we add the decoy projector to the fleet HQ for all races, BUT the outcasts have a special one that cloaks them while the decoy is out, and this decoy has a more solid image (the AI shoot at it longer) this wold not only make the cloaking while the decoy is out maintainable it would (as opposed to random) it would be a cool tech that’s available to just the outcasts side, this would also be similar to the parasite revenge scrambler (by how it edits a tech that everyone can use)

27

Well tbh I am quite attached to the idea that the decoy projector is some amazing new WTF device that only this new race has the technology for, which will make them more interesting than if they just have variants of existing tech,