A cloak idea I want to try out.

[DemonLordEnigma]

One thing I have been looking at is the idea of having a shield ship fire weapons while cloaked and not break the cloaking field. But, how to go about it that isn't a godmod?

Then, looking at a past thread, the idea hit me. One of the early problems with my jump drives, which was fixed with a shield alteration, was the fact photons kept building up on the ship as it travelled, attracted and trapped by the graviton field.

Now, stopping and looking at that, another thing occured to me: I can create a device that alters the graviton field coating my shields to redirect photons around the ship. While the ship is firing, the field will remain intact (or, at least, as close as it can get), thus keeping the ship cloaked.

Now, the weakness: The rather large concentration of gravitons. If a ship equipped with this activates it while having engines charged for a jump, it loses the ability to jump while the cloak is active, but should appear to people as though the ship did jump. However, they should begin to figure it out when the graviton field is not only failing to disperse, but is actually moving and the source of weapons fire.

So, my question: What do you think?

[Central Facehuggeria]

What happens if your enemy's sensors can detect stray gravitons?

[DemonLordEnigma]

Then the cloak is worthless.

[Penguenia]

I don't consider firing from a cloaked ship a godmod anyway. If the enemy isn't smart enough to calculate where shots came from, they deserve to get ownzored. But, it's just my opinion.

[Five Civilized Nations]

Heh... I use cloaking anyways only for hit and run attacks as well as scout missions...

[Zarahemla]

fire when cloaked? easy... have missiles/torpedoes with phase cloak. All you have to do is phase cloak your ship, fire when out of phase, then the weapon's own cloaking device rephases once it is outside the ship.

[Zarahemla]

Or if you want to use the traditional star trek cloaking device, then what you need to do is have the field temporarily extend out in the direction of the projectile's path, and then simply retract the field, excluding the projectile from it... sure, you'd break the field, but it'd be so far away from the ship (a kilometer at least), and so small, that even if they COULD detect it, they'd be a kilometer away from the position of the ship, which does them absolutely no good when trying to find your ship.

Also, as something to throw them off, if you have beaming technology, try beaming small remote missile launchers into various positions around your enemy and begin firing, confusing the everloving snot out of them.

Let's see, what else... You could just go with optical cloak, but that doesn't do much... I saw someone mention a cloak that bends photons around... The only problem with that, and it is a BIG problem, is something like that that could effectively cloak you would make sure that none of YOUR radiation gets out either. That means, except for subspace, all your communications and sensors will read nothing but your own radiation bouncing back. Now, if you want to go with the "2 way mirror" concept, then, well, it is possible, however weakly, for the enemy to detect you.

Hmmm... Man I love phase cloak... OH YEAH, big lesson from star trek VI... never, ever, use Ion engines with a non-phase cloaking device... they can track your exhaust... unless of course you sweep behind your tailpipe constantly... I don't know how you could do that though... maybe put a bunch of anions out there to collect the cations (and vis a versa) in order to make some sort of containable waste.

[Zarahemla]

Oh, right, the subject matter... jumping while cloaked... that's a tough one, as pretty much any time you alter space/time as we know it, or rip a whole into another dimension, people tend to notice

Escaping is easy, especially if you have something that can be executed in seconds, like a fold drive, or a hyperdrive/warp drive whatever. But entering an area of space undetected is hard. Making the jump/defold undetectable is fairly difficult, if not impossible... (if you have some idea how, tell me!).

But what you could do is mask the jump, or disguise it, or something. Popping in near high-radiation areas, like a star, would make your presence less noticible... who's going to detect a fractional change in gravity near A STAR? No one... they don't look for that crap unless they are studying the star... and even if they were, you'd have a few minutes to sublight your way out of there before they even know what happened.

Or you could disguise the event somehow. You could vent some gasses just before jumping, and when you drop in on the enemy, cause a distraction by igniting them. They spend so much time figuring out what anamoly they just saw, that you could already be out of the area before their first local active scan.

[Arizona Nova]

I just had a revelation.

You know how the sane science fiction genres (Halo, Star Wars, etc.) use shielding that covers most of the hull but not weapon hardpoints? Why not invent a cloak that does the same?

I'm willing to bet you could do it to and make it sound scientific at the same time.

[Central Facehuggeria]

Because when you retracted the cloak to shoot at your enemies, a bunch of turrets would appear from nowhere on the enemy's sensors. (Then again, that could be really fun to RP! But you'd better try it on someone reasonable. US or his contemporaries would likely say "OMG MOI UB3ER SENSURS FIND J00!@!!131666111!!)