Combining cloaking with stealth armor

[Claymore 2002]

Does this give any additive effects?

Does a single cloaking device work for a ship no matter what size it is? Can a cloaking ship help to hide other ships in the fleet?

ad infinitum....

Claymore

[Baron Munchausen]

No, stealth armor and cloaking device do not stack so far as we know. Some have claimed that cloaking in your ship will stack with cloaking from a storm or nebula but I haven't seen any proof of this.

Defense and attack modifiers do stack, though. So the defense bonus of Stealth Armor stacks with ECM.

No, ships cannot help each other cloak. Each ship is on its own as far as cloaking, and defense modifiers. No 'wide area jammers' in the SE universe -- yet.

One cloaking device will cloak anything, yes. To make things fair I suppose that higher level cloaking ought to require larger devices but that's a 'balance' issue that MM hasn't gotten around to.

[ June 19, 2002, 20:17: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Marvin Kosh]

The stealth armour only gives you protection against lv1 active and passive EM scans. But it does bump up your damage resistance and defence bonus into the bargain. The cloak just gives you progressively higher protection against lv1, 2, 3 scans. My advice is to combine scattering armour with a cloak - same defence bonus, same damage resistance per Kt as stealth armour, but cloaking is left to the cloaking device and the scatter armour stops any long-range scans (handy for keeping your new secret weapons secret until you want to use them).

Note, you can also stack stealth armour with scattering armour and the defensive bonuses will stack up Add ECM III, mwahahaa. But 90 kt in total, pretty heavy, you can get a couple of shield generators for that much.

[EDIT] My personal fave is to put scatter armour on my star-killer ship. It's for that 'Oh Boy' when it de-cloaks right over their system star You can empty a system real quick this way and not even fire a shot.... of course nobody buys a bluff like that.

Everything works on a per-ship basis though, so if you want an attack fleet to sneak into enemy space to do a little bit of napalming of defenceless targets, gonna need a cloak for each ship.

[ June 19, 2002, 20:02: Message edited by: Marvin Kosh ]

[Taera]

I know the answer to the first one - no. Cloaking uses the highest aviable. If in any case this is destroyed it will use the second best etc.

Second answer: yes, any ship can be hidden using Cloaking, Stealth Armor or whatever you can mod.

Third question is interesting. anyone had tried? Last time i used fleet cloaking was when all the fleet had Stealth Armor so i dont know.

[Suicide Junkie]

You can have one ship cloak another ship if you use the "sector - cloak" ability.
However, this has the side effect of always being "on", and it cloaks planets and enemies as well.

[Taz-in-Space]

BTW - the sector cloak ability must work differently between Human & AI. I designed a map that had cloaked ringworlds. My intention was to provent use until players had the required scanning tech. Well, the AI's still sent ships to colonize these worlds. (Of course, the colonization failed due to the cloak) This tells me that the AI's CAN see a cloaked planet.