Stealth system idea

[icy bluff]

My idea for stealth system: When a ship is cloaked, its reactors are paused, so reactors stop generating energy into its internal capacitors.
This puts an interesting design constraint to stealth ships, as the player has to consider how long they want the ship to operate when cloaked, and designing a cloaked ship is vastly different from designing a normal ship.
Faster movement vs longer cloak duration? There will be interesting tradeoffs.

If stealth is designed this way, the stealth module themselves could use only a tiny amount of energy, or simply no energy at all. I suggest it should use a tiny but nonzero amount of energy, so it's not completely immune to emp, and cloaked wreckages will eventually decloak.

However, I think current capacitors may be too weak for these cloaks to run properly, we need better capacitors.
One idea is to add a chemical battery. Chemical batteries have an additional chemical energy storage. When its normal energy is not full, it recharges the storage, like a normal reactor, but it consumes energy from its chemical energy storage. When there is surplus energy, it recharges its energy storage from reactors.
This could be easy to implement, just have its energy recharge task default priority 1, and it will behave mostly fine. There is still risk of having chemical batteries recharging each other, but this can be solved by crew assignments.
Another idea is https://discord.com/channels/314103695568666625/1237789479251480636. The main problem with this is extreme coding difficulty to implement.

For mods: Some mods have replacement for reactors, like SirCampalot's hyperium powered things. There should be a modding interface, so modders can tell their components to also be affected by cloaking.

[stiff lance]

Problem with that is someone could cloak and jsut shoot cannons

[icy bluff]

I think weapons should hold fire when cloaked

[stiff lance]

What if you make it similar to the way FTL does it

[icy bluff]

Or just give away your position by firing, disabling the cloak

[stiff lance]

Have you played FTL?

[icy bluff]

Not yet, I don't really play rougelike

[stiff lance]

Ok so the way cloaking works in that is it cloaks you for 5 10 or 15 seconds and if you shoot people the amount of seconds you have go down

So you cannot shoot much but you can shoot a bit

Mabye in this case if you shoot used a chunk of power form the stealth system

[icy bluff]

Cosmoteer have strong alpha strikes

Decloak as soon as you fire is very acceptable

[stiff lance]

Also mabye stealth should be like Hyperion efficiency and you place multiple and there different sizes that makes it use less power

[icy bluff]

With cloaked 8 length railgun design, you can even recloak after firing

[tiny fox]

I would say shooting should give a long term advantage to your opponent. Perhaps a "Heat signature" that appears from a ship that has recently fired weaponry, depending on the weapon fired and the amount of times fired, the "heat signature" would stay longer.

[icy bluff]

I think it should make you less detectable when cloaked

With large fleet combat (required by faction wars) there could be dedicated sensor ships to decloak enemy cloak ships

[tiny fox]

Side note, I appreciate the detail put into this, have an upvote.

I would say having more sensors should give you a better ability to detect enemy cloaked ships.

[stiff lance]

Idea

[tiny fox]

The heat signature concept would work well there too.

[stiff lance]

We do this

Max efficiency is 75%

And if you get into the inner 25%of the enemy ships detection

Then they notice you

[icy bluff]

It could, but I suggest trying out the balance without it first, then adding things like this if things don't balance well

[eager quiver]

Chemical batteries could be instead a sort of really weak reactor that runs off of a resource like sulphur or smth
2x2 and produces 0.75? But active while cloaked

[stiff lance]

And if you have sensors then it’s a bigger

Would that work?

So you cannot move a bit too close

[icy bluff]

I think nukes and railguns can be very strong with cloak design

[eager quiver]

rails don’t need to be stronger lol

[icy bluff]

Nukes have very strong alpha, and railgun have long range

Rails can easily maneuver out and recloak for another attack

[stiff lance]

Would this kinda design work

[icy bluff]

I'm not sure, I'll leave the actual numbers to Walt

[stiff lance]

Also weapons would reload and charge a shot so when you decloack massive attak comes

[icy bluff]

The main problem (with most cloak design) is nukes and railguns can become way too strong

[eager quiver]

Idea for cloak detection:
Turn it into a detection level where certain actions increase your chance of being spotted,
Higher speed,
Distance to ship trying to detect you (has the strongest detection,
Cloak efficiency: provides a ceiling for minimum detection
Sensors increase enemy detection ability by a set amount or %

[eager quiver]

Force reload on decloak?

[stiff lance]

You also gotta account for enemies being cloak

[eager quiver]

Yes? What’s the issue with this then?

[icy bluff]

My original post already prohibits high speed, because they burn through power fast, and can easily run out of power when cloaked

[eager quiver]

Maybe weapon amount could make you easier to detect? As a separate stat to efficiency

[stiff lance]

Well how would detection levels work for us and them

[icy bluff]

Yeah I think bigger ships should be easier to detect

[eager quiver]

I’m stupid srry I don’t understand what you’re trying to say :>

[stiff lance]

So they would need extra cloaked

[icy bluff]

That leaves UL nukes in the possibility of being overpowered

[eager quiver]

That’s tied to cloak efficiency

[stiff lance]

Autocorrect

[icy bluff]

Or more distance from enemy, like having a 8 length railgun

[eager quiver]

#1213893811634180117 message
I think this was a decent idea for a stealth efficiency system, combined with this for functionality

[icy bluff]

Yeah, and this way it isn't a hyperdrive copy anymore

[icy bluff]

That's true, imagine career enemy factions sending waves of cloaked headhunter at you, and most of them are cloaked nuke ships or railguns, and trying to attack from a weakspot

You'll need to have a dedicated sensor ship to save yourself from that

[eager quiver]

Would need sensors, maybe could have a special cloak detection part?

[little verge]

the power idea i had would defintly help since the amount of power basicly is x5

[icy bluff]

Walt says he plan to make sensors stack, and range proportional to sqrt of how much you have

[eager quiver]

I don’t realise that was actually being considered, cool okie

[steel iron]

the way I see this working is through how starsector does cloak

aka phase ships

except here you can harm the phase ship in cloak so it's merely just becoming harder to spot

[icy bluff]

With the cloak modding interface, a modder can make certain (or all) ship parts to be invincible when cloaked

[steel iron]

in that case then weapons holding fire and extra or reduced mobility is necessary

plus the power drain and no energy being produced thing

[eager quiver]

Being invincible wouldn’t make sense

[steel iron]

though seeing as that's for modders

[eager quiver]

True

[steel iron]

then maybe just making all parts act like structure for duration of cloak makes the most sense

[icy bluff]

Just a crazy modding idea, and you can still move closer to decloak

Though such invincibility can break sundiver designs

[languid lion]

capacitors evil

[proud pumice]

My idea for stealth system: When a ship is cloaked, its reactors are paused, so reactors stop generating energy into its internal capacitors.
I really like this idea. It's kind of like old submarines that had to surface pretty frequently so that they (I think?) could run their gas generators to refill their batteries.

[languid lion]

oh boy can't wait for mods that add stealth reactors that are just 2x cost reactors that don't have "stealthToggle" on their IsOperational

[little verge]

the main type of sub i can think of that usualy did stuff like that probibly would be the u-boat, i think the main reason was they were faster above water then below...

also with the reactors being paused..... do you think something like this might help? https://discord.com/channels/314103695568666625/1237789479251480636

[steel iron]

I wonder if there's going to be something similar to starsector in the sense that cloaked ships have a considerably reduced chance to get hit like structure (not like being intangible in how starsector does it , just very low hit chance) to further emphasize the cloak ability being a sort of diving mode or whatever

[fading frigate]

And then you could have heat sinks that let the reactor work for a short while in stealth (reactor is only turned off to hide the heat signature)

[icy bluff]

2x is too OP, I think they need to be 5x or higher

[languid lion]

yes, but
you know what randoms on workshop do anyway

[icy bluff]

Yeah, just leave the modding possibility open and people will figure out

[rancid steppe]

Yeah seems like it could be an awesome mechanic that creates a new use-case for capacitors outside of edge cases like budget dom ships and PD that's too far from the internals of a ship. Two W's for the price of one.

[wet marsh]

not strong, VERY strong, I mean, you just fly around enemy and launch 2-3 nukes in point-blank range

actually, cloak will be very usefull for ships with 1-2 railguns, emp, NRE and scouts

because you will be able to hide your artillery, fast/small ships and many more

your idea is perfect, because it wont effect ships that dont really move, but will effect heavily ships that have a lot of thrusters (speed meta wont be very useful with cloak) or shields, balancing cloak perfectly

[wet marsh]

actually, not very, railguns eats energy, if you make railfun, your cloak will go down very fast, and single/double railguns are useles now, but will have use with cloak as snipers

actually, gas reactor will be perfect for alpha ships if it will cost less than a reactor and a bit more than a capacitor

also giving you ability to recharge ships that lost all their "fuel"

[icy bluff]

The ships should decloak as soon as they fire, so when firing, the reactor will function as normal

Recloaking in combat will be needed by many tactics, though my proposal doesn't give any details of charging up the cloak

Suppressing the speed meta is intentional, as friction scales with speed^3. So to move 2x faster, you need 4x energy for the same distance, which will be problematic with capacitors

[icy bluff]

I think some form of cloak detection will exist, I expect it to be included in sensors

So no point blank range, but it will be very difficult to dodge a nuke if it's a surprise attack

[wet marsh]

Wait, in cosmoteer doubling your speed means making it eat 4 times more? Never saw that

I never heard of such scaling

But yeah, that's true, the more speed the more energy you need, so to hide big fast ship you will need a ton of energy

[languid lion]

if its speed^3 would'nt it be 8x?

[fading frigate]

Yeah

[languid lion]

drag scales like that but has a minimum linear dampening

i thin

[wet marsh]

That's why I was confused

[icy bluff]

8x per unit of time, 4x per unit of distance

For linear friction, to go 2x faster, you need 2x energy per unit of time, so it's 1x per unit of distance, so going faster isn't inefficient (though the engine still weighs the ship down, and requires more energy to move the same distance)

I think the it switches from linear to ^3 at 75m/s, so cloaked ships shouldn't go much faster than this

Fast ships may need to delibrately throttle their thrust when cloaked, to improve endurance

[languid lion]

funky

[noble tree]

ah yes, ftl:Faster Than Light cloak