+1, if for no other reason than it's not an "omg I can't kill that guy afking in my ratting system" whine.

In hindsight I have come to the conclusion there is not sufficient base to warrant the lock.
In other words, I made a mistake. My sincere apologies for the inconvenience this caused.

Thread re-opened.

Well, nice story, still doesn't convince me to rattle on CCPs statement "we won-¦t change cloaks or what affects them".
Cloaks are fine and they don't need a counter like this .

"nor is it for the sole purpose of nerfing AFK cloaking" - still haven't found anything else in your post besides this. So what is beyond the sole purpose if the only purpose is to find cloaked ships ?!

I rather have more options to hide from, diffuse and distort scans ... there was a nice thread a bout mass and energy shadows around celestial and such, worth looking into. Way more interesting and offering a big meta game of hide and seek.

But no matter how elaborate or exclusive the mechanics you make out to be are, its still just a 'cloak probe/scanner' with 'warp to'-decloak.

-1

In hindsight I have come to the conclusion there is not sufficient base to warrant the lock.
In other words, I made a mistake. My sincere apologies for the inconvenience this caused.

Thread re-opened.

I realize that some people just won't believe my actual motivations seeing how often 'nerf afk cloaking' comes up and the only action I can take is to say that it isn't my primary motivation. I do, however, realize that it would be a side-effect of an added mechanic such as this.

This would ruin on-grid stealth bombers scanning for a warp-in, would this affect all cloaks or T1 only?

Maybe force the launcher to be bigger than the current line-up and eat hundreds of CPU as the signatures are extremely faint.

Motivation does not matter.
"Wanted to built a toaster - turned out to be a radio" - Still a Radio
"I totally did not want to kill that guy, just checked if the gun was loaded by pulling the trigger" - The guy is still dead.
"Was thinking of creating more interesting scan diversity - turned out to also be of use to scan down and decloak" - Still anti-cloak

And I said no matter how elaborate the mechanic, no matter how much of a side product, .... and yeah, you might not catch an active cloak .. but then we drift again in the anti-AFK-cloak discussion ...

No matter how you put it, word it, phrase it ... it is still the same old discussion we have every week.

Cloakys' hunting cloakys', to me, just feels right and fun.

I don't see this ruining ships designed around reconnaissance, recons, stealth bombers, covops. Yes, it is entirely possible to get the general location of those ships after a period of time if they remain motionless but this type of mechanic giving an exact location for those types of ships, no.

The idea is to use existing mechanics and equipment, not create an entirely new set of equipment needed to perform this because it's already quite similar to combat ship probing as it is.

@Donnachadh, Not to stick real physics in our beloved fluidic space game... But the amount of heat generated would in no way be insignificant or hard to spot. Space is awash in various radiations and is a fairly harsh environment. Our atmosphere does a lot more for us than most realise-- and EVE space is presumably worse since it disintegrates unprotected ships, cans and various other things in about 2 hours. If you had something just absorbing that radiation and not bouncing it, or radiating what it is itself generating (I assume those engines and semi sentient computers use energy and produce some waste), it would indeed get fairly hot in fairly short order.

Not that I disagree with you that cloaks should be huntable... I have myself argued they are far too safe, safer even than being docked in some stations.... But what is the primary purpose of the idea if not hunting down cloaked ships?

If that's it, then it still gets +1 from me, but I am curious what other function you feel this would serve.

Not that I disagree with you that cloaks should be huntable... I have myself argued they are far too safe, safer even than being docked in some stations.... But what is the primary purpose of the idea if not hunting down cloaked ships?

If that's it, then it still gets +1 from me, but I am curious what other function you feel this would serve.

The sad thing here is, the OP had a good idea, but that idea was killed by bad physics. Too bad.

(Look up what "infrared" is, OP. Then you'll know why a cloak capable of bending light around it handily defeats your "thermal" scans.)

This does feel right and fun, except this doesn't fit with your concept in any appreciable way.

Without going into any real depth a rough outline for what might work would be:

1. cloaked hunter ships can function against cloaked vessels as if they were not cloaked, finding the cloaked could be done by D-scan from cloaked vessels or by special cloaked vessel only probes that themselves dont show on normal scans and probes.

2. The entire cloaked concept might have to go through major functional changes.

3. Put in place some restrictions on secondary involvement in the conflict, so as to preserve the cloaky vs cloaky concept.

4. restrict the ability of cloaked hunters to participate in normal pve or pvp.

Maybe idea to let a active cloak drain cap?

Interesting thoughts, but you are wrong on one important point.
As a cloak pilot on another character I do not want others to be able to hunt me down and force a de-cloak. In it's basics the whole idea of being able to scan a cloaked ship is well crazy. I am told by many old timers(think from the beginning of the game here) that cloaked ships could be scanned at one point. CCP changed this so it is obvious that they intend cloaked ships to be hidden from view with no way to scan or locate them.

I agree that the amounts of heat generated by our ships if they were real would be significant, but the OP theory was faulty and that is what I was trying to point out. Space by any definition contains vast amounts of nothing and you cannot heat up nothing no matter how long or how much heat you apply to it.

It was posted that heat waves are essentially the same as light waves and any cloak that was capable of bending light waves to hide a ship could easily bend heat waves to achieve that same affect rendering a ship completely hidden and un-scanable. Yet as you point out this is a game where real world physics does not always apply and there is always a give and take, a balance of sorts to be had and to be fair. It is in that spirit of give and take that I offer the alternative to the OP.

Scan us cloaked ships? yes because nothing is ever perfect so a tiny heat signature would still be detectable.
Scan us to the point that you can get a general location within the system? I am OK with that as well.
Scan us to the point where you can warp to us, or get an actual location based on d-scans and I say no as that breaks CCP's obvious intent for cloaked ships.

The radiation that prevents you from normally scanning me down includes thermal radiation.

ie: if you cannot scan me down based on the visual spectrum or higher or lower wavelengths, then thermal won't work for you either. The tech is specialized enough to blend the thermal output in with the general radiation in the area.

Plus any decent cloaking pilot would need to do is ensure they have a safe near the systems star. The thermal output of the star will more than mask any leakage anyways.

But if they added some skill based on some star trek named device to allow scanning of cloaked ships then something like that should require a minimum of 3 months hard training past tech 2 scanning capabilities just to be passable in skill. Don't want this to become something trivial.

The radiation that prevents you from normally scanning me down includes thermal radiation.

ie: if you cannot scan me down based on the visual spectrum or higher or lower wavelengths, then thermal won't work for you either. The tech is specialized enough to blend the thermal output in with the general radiation in the area.

Plus any decent cloaking pilot would need to do is ensure they have a safe near the systems star. The thermal output of the star will more than mask any leakage anyways.

But if they added some skill based on some star trek named device to allow scanning of cloaked ships then something like that should require a minimum of 3 months hard training past tech 2 scanning capabilities just to be passable in skill. Don't want this to become something trivial.

Interesting thoughts, but you are wrong on one important point.
As a cloak pilot on another character I do not want others to be able to hunt me down and force a de-cloak. In it's basics the whole idea of being able to scan a cloaked ship is well crazy. I am told by many old timers(think from the beginning of the game here) that cloaked ships could be scanned at one point. CCP changed this so it is obvious that they intend cloaked ships to be hidden from view with no way to scan or locate them.

I agree that the amounts of heat generated by our ships if they were real would be significant, but the OP theory was faulty and that is what I was trying to point out. Space by any definition contains vast amounts of nothing and you cannot heat up nothing no matter how long or how much heat you apply to it.

It was posted that heat waves are essentially the same as light waves and any cloak that was capable of bending light waves to hide a ship could easily bend heat waves to achieve that same affect rendering a ship completely hidden and un-scanable. Yet as you point out this is a game where real world physics does not always apply and there is always a give and take, a balance of sorts to be had and to be fair. It is in that spirit of give and take that I offer the alternative to the OP.

Scan us cloaked ships? yes because nothing is ever perfect so a tiny heat signature would still be detectable.
Scan us to the point that you can get a general location within the system? I am OK with that as well.
Scan us to the point where you can warp to us, or get an actual location based on d-scans and I say no as that breaks CCP's obvious intent for cloaked ships.

In fact, given the sparse medium of space to disperse heat in, something that was containing the heat build up in the ship would argue more for a timer and forced downtime for cloaks than anything else.... you simply could not keep it up.

Fortunately, there is already a forced downtime for cloaks in the game. It occurs the same time each day and takes around 30 minutes.