Cloaking: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 00:03, 18 October 2026

A cloaking system hides a supported ship from ordinary scans and target selection once activation completes. It is useful for escape and ambush, but does not make the ship invulnerable. The Cloak command page covers ON, OFF, and command restrictions.

Activation and recovery

Cloak state advances on the main ship-state update, normally every six seconds:

State	Meaning
0	Off
1	First activation stage; still visible
2	Second activation stage; still visible
10	Fully concealed
3	ge-next recovery after deactivation; weapons still blocked
Negative	Damaged; repair required

Two updates are required to reach full concealment, so activation normally takes about 6–12 seconds depending on when the command is entered. States 1 and 2 already block affected weapons but do not hide the ship. A negative state repairs toward zero automatically; classic adds one point per ship-state update, while ge-next's common Damage Control, maintenance, and applicable upgrades can accelerate cloak repair.

Classic switches the cloak directly off and makes weapons available when CLOAK OFF is entered. ge-next instead enters state 3; affected systems return at the next ship-state update, when the player receives the “All weapon systems are back online!” message. Entering hyperspace or running out of cloak power also turns the field off; ge-next applies the same recovery delay. An OFF entered during activation cancels it. Classic announces nearby decloaking even if concealment was never complete; ge-next does so only after state 10 and also announces the reappearing ship to its sector.

Flux use

The configured CLENGUSE is drawn on every ship-state update while the cloak is charging or fully active. Classic 3.2e defaults to 7,500 flux per update; ge-next defaults to 5,000. Consumption continues after full concealment. Cloak and raised shields may operate together, but both draw from the same flux pile.

Classic's CLOAK ON command requires a pile greater than CLENGUSE and does not itself load a carried pod. During a later ship-state update, classic's general flux routine can reload a pod before cloak is processed, but it does so only when the pile is below its fixed 5,000-flux threshold. With stock settings, a pile of 5,000–7,499 will not trigger that reload and cannot pay the cloak's 7,500 cost; the cloak shuts down even if a pod remains aboard. ge-next checks the cloak's actual cost with its common flux routine and can load a pod when needed, both on activation and during operation. With no usable power, the cloak shuts down.

Visibility and detection

A fully cloaked ship is omitted from ordinary ship scans and cannot normally be selected as a weapon or scanner-lock target. Cybertrons and other NPC targeting logic likewise treat it as concealed and may eventually abandon pursuit. Activation states 1 and 2 do not confer this protection. Neither version erases projectiles or mines already in flight or deployed against the ship.

A directional phaser beam can still strike a cloaked ship if the attacker fires along the correct bearing. Classic's resulting messages can identify the concealed ship's commander to the attacker after either a hull hit or shield deflection; the target also learns who fired. Since ge-next 0.3, the attacker's message identifies the target only as “a cloaked ship,” including when shields deflect the shot. The cloaked target still receives the normal warning identifying the attacker. Nebula concealment can substitute direction- or sector-based messages where applicable.

Movement can reveal an approximate bearing through background ion-field displacement. This is evidence of a cloaked ship, not a normal scan-table entry:

Classic: The check runs when a fully cloaked player issues an impulse command. Higher requested impulse speed makes the speed test more likely to pass. Unjammed observers within half their class scanner range receive an approximate bearing, displaced by up to about ten degrees. Repeated impulse commands can repeat the check without waiting for movement.
ge-next: The check runs during movement rather than on command entry. A moving, fully cloaked ship has a periodic chance to produce it. Detection is limited by the observer's effective scanner range, an absolute 20,000-unit range, jamming, and nebula visibility. The reported bearing remains approximate.

Historical ge-next range bug

ge-next 0.2.2 moved the displacement check into the movement routine but initially used the global warsptr from the command-time code instead of the ptr ship currently moving. The distance test could therefore be measured from an unrelated user's ship: someone far from the cloaked ship could receive a warning, while someone near it could miss one. The bearing still pointed toward the actual cloaked ship, so a misplaced warning could disclose its direction across a great distance. This ge-next-specific bug affected 0.2.2 through 0.2.6 and early 0.3 prereleases. It was fixed in 0.3 Beta 2 by measuring from ptr; final 0.3 and later have the correction. Classic GE's impulse-command check did not have this pointer error because it was called from the command path, so warsptr was always correct in that context.

Restricted systems

While a cloak is charging or fully active, phasers, torpedoes, missiles, mines, decoys, jammers, zippers, and scanner locking are unavailable. ge-next keeps these restrictions through its brief recovery state after the cloak drops. Impulse travel and rotation remain available. Warp travel is permitted, but entering hyperspace forces the cloak off.

Maintenance cannot normally proceed while a ship is cloaked in ge-next, and cloak cannot normally be activated during maintenance; a ship orbiting its commander's own planet is the exception. Classic maintenance does not repair cloak damage, while ge-next maintenance does. Cloaking is not available in ge-arena.