EM, Scanning, Jamming and Cloaking

[Taqwus]

After thinking about how the various sensor methods (EM Passive, EM Active, Temporal, Gravitational, Psychic) could be better differentated, several ideas came to mind regarding the EM types.

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EM Active should probably NOT be compatible with cloaking. Or, more specifically, EM passive/active cloaking. You're actively sending out detectable signals, after all. Even if you're cloaked, that signal will tip off foes with any sort of EM Passive/Active scan that an emitter is nearby.

Arguably, then, either

a) it should always be off when cloaked, or
b) it should be toggleable when cloaked, but if on, an opponent who would not otherwise break the cloaking only perceives an EM source (represented, say, by a circle w/ a question mark in it?). Obviously this latter bit would require more coding...

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Scanner jamming might, likewise, be divisible into passive (such as the scattering armor) and active (such as the scanner jammer proper). The active method should, again, probably reveal an emitter source when cloaked.

Incidentally, perhaps the tree should be extended with scanner feedback generators that overload the long-range scanners when used, if a plausible explanation can be found.

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Think wide-area jamming. We can do that with today's warships, jamming signals in such a way that it may interfere with such things as targeting, but also giving away one's location (as an EM emitter). Perhaps there should be components that interfere with EM scans over a wide radius -- e.g. a system-wide EM Active/Passive cloak. This would make other scanners, such as gravitational (available to everybody) VERY valuable once wide-area jamming came around.

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Jubala]

Good points, I agree.

[Baron Munchausen]

I made the same observation some time ago on the beta forums. There are just so many things that have to be dealt with first, mainly the AI, that there's no telling when they can get to it. Also, you'd think there would be some sort of advantage for "active" scanning vs, passive, don't you? As it is, the cheapest way to catch all cloaked ships is to research "advanced military science" to level 6 and use the hyper optics. Surely their are limits to passive scanning? I'm tempted to boost the passive cloak level of the cloaking device by 1 at each level, then you'd need active scanning to catch the device, but stealth armor would still be hosed by the passive scanning.