Cloaking Device addon

I like this idea, it would allow for hit-and-run tactics. Just make sure that certain sensors or scout ships can detect cloaked units.

I wouldn't expect anything like this from the TEC, but the Vasari have already been mentioned to have some stealth options. Will have to wait and see just what that entails, though.

If stealth units were to be integrated the stealth capabilities would either need to be timed, or there would be a sudden need for detector units/structures/abilities.
Although I'm not a big fan of the idea, I do think it would be an interesting twist.

I dont think stealth really makes sense in space... space is completely empty so the best form of sensor would probably be a sonaresque device coupled with a visual detector and em/radiation detectors. It would be very difficult to cancel out all of these factors and amke yourself invisible, maybe if you had a large fleet and only a few were concealed they could be written off as background radiation or sensor errors, but a few ships close together would have to emit some form of light/magnetism/radiation to alert others.

actually... as a physics student, it seems to me that if stealth were to work anywere it would work best in space. yes it would be difficult. but like eetmor said the best kind of detector in space would be an active sonare type device, coupled with a pasive e/m detector. basically the way underwater sonar works with sound, but instead with light... it would be VERY hard to hide bigger ships or even fleets of smaller ships if they were close together, but if spread out and they were frigate size. One would need to first make sure from the "ground up" the ship was designed to cancel out its own e/m feilds (wich isnt hard, just lots of design work). thus its emission is practically zero, then you line its hull with light absorbing material. (much the way the stealth bombers of today have... just much more advanced). this would mean that any active sonar signals pinged out would be obsorbed and not returned thus looking like empty space. after all this the only way to detect such a ship would be to have a very wide feild camera that would look for stars disapearing in the back ground as the ship moved infront of them. this would work well at close range but at long range would become very difficult as the "veiwing" angle needed to see the disapering stars got very small you would need extreamly fine tuned equipment. in space when talking about the distance the size of planets this angle would get small VERY quickly... and the stealth effect would be even better if the ship (or sensor pod) was not moving.

i like the idea. i think its perfect for smaller ships, and maybe even a "Supper advanced" end game type upgrade for a "next gen" capital ship (meaning this ability would only be available on ships constructed after the ability was reseached, not as an "upgrade")... anyway vote yes!

Now, I know I'm just being petty and I am all for stealth in space for added gameplay, but heat, from the engines and everything else, makes ships hot and easy to see with RADAR. Sonar works underwater with sound waves, it could never work in space. Way to go physics student!

Heat? Try thermal imaging, not radar.

Radar

Thermal Imaging

Thermal imaging sees the same stuff your eyes do, it's just a different bandwidth. All radiative energy can be manipulated via gravity, black holes for instance do not just suck in visible light, they manipulate the entire electromagnetic spectrum. This happens to include everything a ship should be emitting. Something that can manipulate gravity can in theory warp everything around it, including visible light. It's own emissions would be a neat trick, but you can at the least channel them in a specific direction, making any passive system impossible. Detection would require tracking the actual particles as they bent around the object, or detecting the gravitational field itself.

There is a question as to how one builds a ship that creates and survives gravitational forces so great as to simulate something similar to a black hole though. Since even capital ships accelerate fast enough to turn the crew into very flat puddles of goo on the walls, they have at least discovered some form of inertial dampening though, it's not a very big step from there to dampen gravational fields, both being the same basic thing.

And you can also assume that they would be able to create an image on their hulls to make it seem as if the star is really there, my point was that if you have a fleet of them, a sensor is bound to notice that something is wrong, at which point everyone would just send as loud of a pulse out as possible, the same as active pinging for sonar. It would then be simple to determine where the ships are, especially if there was more than one ship sending out the ping.

Also, we have found black holes using the same method as you described. While it is true that black holes are much bigger than a ship, the distances involved are much smaller and the viewing equipment and, more importantly, the computers interpreting the data are far more advanced, making it nearly impossible to do such a thing.



as to this, we ALREADY have ways to detect gravitational warps and we cannot yet warp gravity. To say you can just magically suck everything and hide would probably be the best way to get yourself found, even if you somehow managed to keep that immense gravitational pull limited to a very small radius outside the ship, they would probably notice that all of a sudden there is *nothing* coming from a certain direction. Already, a way has been found to detect new-age American subs, they are *quieter* than the background noise, so you just look for the 'black hole.'

How about we do it like this, the same way our Air Force does it, you reduce the area that can be effectively seen, special materials and such. So a cloaked ship would have to be a special ship and the technology would not be available for larger ships. Or, it could use antimatter as the energy source, when a ship runs out of antimatter it cannot cloak! The amount of antimatter used would be tied into the size of the ship being cloaked.

Let me just add one salient point to this people... space is big. Really big. Ships are going to be hard to detect simply because they are so small relative to it. That said, if they're emitting they are going to be much easier to detect...

yes, to quote THHGTTG, "Space is big - really big - you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

BUT, the space in which the ships are fighting, the gravity well, is comparitively very small. We can detect black holes millions of light years from here. A couple Earth radii should be no problem at all.

Also, from a gameplay perspective, stealth adds to micromanagement. If people have to spend all their time making sure there arent any invisible ships running around their systems, it makes it harder to concentrate on the larger battles.

A solution to this would be that the stealth ships can only remain invisible in unconquered/their own space.

Yes, im not dumb. I thought about the whole heat thing already. I was thinking about the Stealth Bomber when i wrote the post. the way that works is it cools the exaust as to not leave a heat trail. A star ship would do somthing very similar. i didnt put it in my original post because it was already really long and it seemed un-important. The hull itself would already be near 0 Kelvin (absolutly no black body radiation) the engins though would need some working on... but since in space you only need engines to accelerate or decelerate then you only have to worry about hiding your engin signature while manuvering. so long as your not firing your engins directly at the enemy ship, it should be very possible to sheild. anyway as already said this is petty and nit picky, though still very possible given we have figure out all the other advanced technology needed to simply build a space ship to start with.

as for the back hole comments... if we could manupulate gravity that is an intrieging idea. however one of the signatures of black holes is gravitational lensing. this is how the gravitational field bends light around it... as much as i love the idea of using a mini-gravity well to suck all the light into itself, we would have to figure out how to change the rate that the field disapates or else all that bent light would act like a gigantic magnifying glass (only with a small dark spot in the middle). either way the nit picky details of how the stealth/cloking works is really irelevant so long as they make it sound lagit. it is a game after all