Optional Cloak/Anti-Cloak Tech for Expansion

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Cloaking would only be great if it allowed the ships with more cloaking ability to have a first strike.

Sounds really intriguing... one thing i can see though, it will need a lot of play testing & code readjustments to ensure AI can use 'em well.

Yes the Cloaked ship would have to have first strike ability unless the defending ship has adequate components to detect it first. Of coarse I realise it will need extensive playtesting and coding which is why I suggested the option for the future expansion.

....Space has no noise....you need air (or something like it) for noise to travel on....duh.

But on a serious note, i'd like to see cloakable ships. You could do what Eve-Online does for it's cloakable ships, make them REALLY, REALLY, god awfully slow.

Damiun you're right space has no noise. However all engines and generators do produce noise. Even your computer produces noise from its power supply, hard drives, and rom drives. Generally the more powerful the device the more noise it produces. There are steps that can be taken to reduce the amount of noise made, however with the proper equipment you can always detect sound.

All of the tech I have described with the exceptions of shields, lightbending, and phasing are very real modern tecnologies currently employed by all banches of the US military. Submarines are underwater you couldn't possibly hear them from the surface. But with the proper listening equipment and training you find them while on board a destroyer by listening for thier engines, or looking for signs of EM.

Dang it. Yes space has no noise because it's a vaccuum. Thus all that noise from a ship would not travel outside of the ship.


Qoute: " also think this would encourage people to make sensor ships to counter this threat. Almost like real life intelligence/counter-intelligence.

The Cloak Tech Tree could be something like: Stealth (gives the ship special armor that is resistant to sensors), EM Control (gives the ship a device that eliminates electronic emissions), Reduced Engine Emissions (a device the eliminates engine signatures and noise), Light Bending (a shield that bends light making an object impossible to see), Total Cloak (a shield that combines all the previous techs into a single device), and Phase Cloak ( a cloaking device that puts the ship slightly out of sync with space time making it impossible to detect until it attacks).

Of coarse you would have to have Anti-Cloak/Stealth Tech Tree to all the Cloak Techs. For example Radar (to detect hulls, cannot find Stealth Armored ships), EM Detector (to detect electronic emissions), Emissions Detector (to find engine emissions), Tachyon Detector (to find Cloak Shielded ships), Multi-Phasic Sensors (to detect Phase Cloaked ships).

I hope Frogboy and the devs will consider this option, I think it will add flavour and challenge to the game. "

I agree with all this. It's great.


--Wade

Wade you need to read more at space.com and you will find that space is not a true vacuum.

Noise aside I also mentioned engine trails. Unless you have some super-efficeint way of producing energy all engines will leave some sort of exhaust trial, vapors, smoke or something.

Please think about this seriously: What is cloaking? It is a device that lets you attack your opponents first and remain undetectable from them deep within their territory.

Cloaking as good as exists in the game already. Just put enough engines on a ship that it can attack from outside the enemies vision radius and enough sensors so that it can always know where the enemy is and what the sensor radius probably is.

Cloaking would not add a significant new dynamic to the game. Although I would like to see a simple tech line that effectivly reduces enemys sensor radius vs your ships.

Damiun you're right space has no noise. However all engines and generators do produce noise. Even your computer produces noise from its power supply, hard drives, and rom drives. Generally the more powerful the device the more noise it produces. There are steps that can be taken to reduce the amount of noise made, however with the proper equipment you can always detect sound.

No, no you can't. Space is a near-total vacuum, and considering each square is a parsec there is no way that you would hear it. A few kilometers away perhaps, but a parsec is a long distance. Noise isn't an issue.

Besides, first strike is going to be removed. It's going to be changed to galciv1 both ships fire at the same time, and you see who's dead. Instead of cloaking, I think the dev's mentioned they were interested in the "initiative module" idea that brings up first strike (although I may be wrong).

Either way, cloaking would be annoying. It was in the original galciv, and was removed because it was awful as hell to be ganked by AI cloaked ships. So odds are since Frogboy himself chose to remove that from the game, it probably won't make a comeback.

It's often said that in space, you can't hear yourself scream. True enough, more or less, but rather misleading. Recently, several SPACE.com readers wrote to ask how a B-flat emanating from a black hole could be detected from 250 million light-years away, as we reported earlier this month.

The answer, along with related interesting facts, reveals that silence is in the ear of the beholder, and ears come in a variety of configurations.

Sound can travel through space, because space is not the total vacuum it's often made out to be. Atoms of gas give the universe a ubiquitous atmosphere of sorts, albeit a very thin one.

Sound, unlike light, travels by compressing a medium. On Earth, the atmosphere works well as a sound-carrying medium, as does water. The planet itself is very adept at transmitting an earthquake's seismic waves, a form of sound.

Space, though not as efficient, can also serve as a medium.

If a brave and clever astronaut could safely remove her helmet and shout into the cosmos, her voice would carry.

"We wouldn't be able to hear the sound because our ears aren't sensitive enough," explains Lynn Carter, a graduate student in astronomy at Cornell University. Not enough atoms -- if any -- would strike our eardrums. "Maybe if we had an amazingly large and sensitive microphone we could detect these sounds, but to our human ear it would be silent."

An amazingly sensitive microphone, in a sense, was used to discover the constant B-flat coming from the black hole [Story here]. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory observed gas, compressed by the sound, in concentric rings much like ripples on a pond.

I am not sure how big a parsec is but at 250 million lightyears a ship would have to be able to travel 13 billion times the speed of light to move farther then that detection distance in one turn/week. The article also states:

The black hole under study sits amid a cluster of galaxies, a region of space where gas is denser than the universe on average.

I am not an expert in astro physics, but it would seem reasonable to me that in certain places, possibly close to suns or planets, that with the right equipment you could detect the sound coming from a ship. Also, if a ship does leave a engine trail and you were to cross that path the noise could vibrate that engine trail to the point where it was detectable. In the end this is all science fiction and who is to say what is possible and not possible.

It's often said that in space, you can't hear yourself scream. True enough, more or less, but rather misleading. Recently, several SPACE.com readers wrote to ask how a B-flat emanating from a black hole could be detected from 250 million light-years away, as we reported earlier this month.

The answer, along with related interesting facts, reveals that silence is in the ear of the beholder, and ears come in a variety of configurations.

Sound can travel through space, because space is not the total vacuum it's often made out to be. Atoms of gas give the universe a ubiquitous atmosphere of sorts, albeit a very thin one.

Sound, unlike light, travels by compressing a medium. On Earth, the atmosphere works well as a sound-carrying medium, as does water. The planet itself is very adept at transmitting an earthquake's seismic waves, a form of sound.

Space, though not as efficient, can also serve as a medium.

If a brave and clever astronaut could safely remove her helmet and shout into the cosmos, her voice would carry.

"We wouldn't be able to hear the sound because our ears aren't sensitive enough," explains Lynn Carter, a graduate student in astronomy at Cornell University. Not enough atoms -- if any -- would strike our eardrums. "Maybe if we had an amazingly large and sensitive microphone we could detect these sounds, but to our human ear it would be silent."

An amazingly sensitive microphone, in a sense, was used to discover the constant B-flat coming from the black hole [Story here]. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory observed gas, compressed by the sound, in concentric rings much like ripples on a pond.

I am not sure how big a parsec is but at 250 million lightyears a ship would have to be able to travel 13 billion times the speed of light to move farther then that detection distance in one turn/week. The article also states:

The black hole under study sits amid a cluster of galaxies, a region of space where gas is denser than the universe on average.

I am not an expert in astro physics, but it would seem reasonable to me that in certain places, possibly close to suns or planets, that with the right equipment you could detect the sound coming from a ship. Also, if a ship does leave a engine trail and you were to cross that path the noise could vibrate that engine trail to the point where it was detectable. In the end this is all science fiction and who is to say what is possible and not possible.

I am not an expert in astro physics, but it would seem reasonable to me that in certain places, possibly close to suns or planets, that with the right equipment you could detect the sound coming from a ship. Also, if a ship does leave a engine trail and you were to cross that path the noise could vibrate that engine trail to the point where it was detectable. In the end this is all science fiction and who is to say what is possible and not possible.

But the problem is, the sound is going at the speed of sound in a near-vacuum. Very fast, but the ships are travelling FTL. There is absolutely no way that if you were heading straight for them, they could hear you. If you were moving away from them and passed them, they might hear you a good few months later, since a parsec is a very big area of space (open space anyway). Sound could never equal C, and if I remember the stargates were about 1.5 C. The black hole sent out the noise, but it isn't moving towards us faster than light (black holes have a gravity pull of over C anyway), so you would be moving much faster than sound.

Anyway, even planes can move faster than sound. You certainly wouldn't hear a concorde heading for your face from behind, why a FTL ship?

But the problem is, the sound is going at the speed of sound in a near-vacuum.

Good point i guess it would be a little late at that point, but precombat you would be much closer. So in the long range scans you would be screwed, but detecting a cruiser before it unloads a volley of missles would be nice. I guess this may not even work though because the missles probably travel faster then sound. So in the off chance someone flies into your sector cloaked that does not want to kill you, then i guess you would know they were there. Lets just say that noise detection though maybe possible would be unpractical without a time distortion device of some sort, and we all know that a time distortion device would be used for a weapon long before a detection device.

Good point i guess it would be a little late at that point, but precombat you would be much closer. So in the long range scans you would be screwed, but detecting a cruiser before it unloads a volley of missles would be nice. I guess this may not even work though because the missles probably travel faster then sound. So in the off chance someone flies into your sector cloaked that does not want to kill you, then i guess you would know they were there. Lets just say that noise detection though maybe possible would be unpractical without a time distortion device of some sort, and we all know that a time distortion device would be used for a weapon long before a detection device.

That would be the good equivalent of a psionic beam. The DIE OF OLD AGE GUN! BWAHAHAHAHA.
Either that or matrix style bullet-time modules. Watch in super slow motion as the ship- fails to dodge because it's a freaking huge piece of metal.

I just thought about this last night. When we talk about waiting for a sound signal to reach you being unrealistic is a passive sensor system. Kind of like submarines. You can wait and listen to hear another sub but this does not always work especialy if the other sub is running silent, or cloaked. This is the passive system. They can use an active system like sonar though which will find the target sub weather they are running silent or not. This reveals the originating subs position as well, but if that sub does not have a run silent mode, or cloak, then this is not a problem.

In space there could be a similiar technology, maybe involving FTL probes. If you can propel a ship to FTL speeds why not a signal, or possibly a probe. If you design the right technology you could send a signal that could reflect off sound distortions, kinda like sonar, but at FTL speeds. This would be an active sensor, instead of waiting for the sound to reach you. You already have standard sensors that detect ships from far away, when not using cloak. They must use some technology that speeds that detection signal to FTL speeds otherwise you would never know they were there until well after they had gone. It is only a matter of research to adapt the sound detection technology with the current sensor technology.