Cloaking would remove you from radar and sector occupant list (u). You would have to remain stationary to cloak. If you fired missles you would become momentarily visible. As soon as you accelerate in any direction you would become visible again. Being cloaked would use energy (like 55/s). You would still be able to visually see a cloaked ship via zooming, etc. Cloak would need to use a weapon slot or lots of cargo space or something.

Hey you stole my Idea!...:p

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/3273#77964

Check out this thread for some huge comments posted by Celebrim and Eldrad about cloaks and sensors and what not. It covers just about the whole of cloaking ideas.

Actually, it'd be nice if moving makes you partially visible but not really. Partially transparent would be a quick and dirty way of implementing it, or since we seem to already have full-screen bloom effects, maybe implementing a refraction effect wouldn't be too hard (with a fallback to transparency if shaders or whatnot are off).

And maybe they wouldn't be targetable (with the X key)? Or maybe there could be a whole NEW class of ship add-ons for sensor types, each level of which can pierce through/defeat cloaks of the same level or below, allowing you to target them?

I say make both a large-weapons-slot item :) Or maybe level 1 cloaks and sensors could be a small slot and everything above a large slot.

I think this addition could actually lend a whole new area of strategy. Pirates could have cloaks and lie in wait for people totally invisible, but once they come out of cloak, they don't have full energy to fire with anyway. Or you could have anti-pirate parties going around with one ship equipped with a really good scanner to find the pirates to kill. Or maybe the spy/reconnaisance mission could be upgraded so that if the ship you're supposed to be scanning detects you (i.e. you don't have a cloak), they run and you fail the mission.

Just randomly spitting out ideas here, if you couldn't tell :)

--mcn