Geoff,

You would be forcing people to use some version of the hideen cloak rules.

By Geoff Conn (Talonz) on Saturday, March 29, 2003 - 03:40 am: Edit

Not technically. The counter would remain on the map and the facing of the unit is still known, just the exact position of the unit could be slightly off.

Anyways, I'd rather see ideas like that, improvements on the cloak, than outright abberations.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Saturday, March 29, 2003 - 02:54 pm: Edit

If you've ever played with the Hiden Cloak rules (nd I have) the first thing you notice is that it it a huge bookeeping pain, most of which will be transferred to your proposal. You would have to constantly track where the real ship is as well as its apprent position. You run into issues like the fact that a cloaked ship can still possibly set off a mine. Suppose your image sweeps wide of a mine's detonation radius but actual ship doesn't?

all you're really doing is replacing the detection mechanism for cloaked ships. In the Hidden cloak rules the ships get to know shield facings twise a turn (and usually traingulate the cloaked ship's position from that) and in your proposal's case the ship can't stray farther than 1 hex from its apparent position.

To reiterate, my problem with your proposal has to do with the bookwork that must come with leaving the cloaked ships position indeterminate.

By Geoff Conn (Talonz) on Wednesday, April 02, 2003 - 11:49 pm: Edit

There is no bookwork to track other than what direction the actual ship is in from its shown position on the board. Good grief, simply put one letter or a Zero on one line on your ea.

As to the mine issue, don't drive your 'image' counter next to a mine. Hidden mine placement is just as optional as Hidden cloaking.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Thursday, April 03, 2003 - 03:01 pm: Edit

Geoff,

Means nothing.

You still have to account for hidden cloak + hidden mines. You can't sidestep the hard stuff by saying "You can't use this cloak with midden mines because I can't figure out how they work together."

if there isn't a KISS answer to the question, question the proposal.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Thursday, April 03, 2003 - 11:01 pm: Edit

I have serious doubts about the functionality of the "You arn't where you say you are" cloak.


What possible tactical use can be be above a real cloak!?!


What are we really saying with it? If we're saying what I think we're saying then nothing.


If we are saying pick a hex number somewhere near the cloak clounter and fire and if you GUESS right then you get to fire on Double Range PLus Five and if you pick wrong then you waste your fire.
This is a massive jump in protection yeilded by the cloak but if you're not invoking shuch play, and I can't find anything that explicity say it in your post then there's no real advantage...hey I just used a Romulan Displacement Divice to jump one hex whilst I uncloaked is not much of a bonus.

By Geoff Conn (Talonz) on Friday, April 04, 2003 - 12:02 am: Edit

John,
here is your KISS answer; with hidden mines in play you must have a judge to determine mine detonation, just as you would require one for hidden cloaking vs hidden mines. Hidden cloaking itself overrides Image cloaking (for lack of a better term).

MJC,
Again I have to wonder if you have ever used the cloak? Image cloaking would, more or less, neatly eliminate the constant 'close to point blank and bomb the rom' tactic that many use even when theoretically they don't know exactly where the rom is. It is way too easy to get range 0 and line up the shield you want on a fully cloaked target and therefore avoid the double range penalty as well. This version of cloak adds a considerable amount of doubt when trying to do this and therefore is very useful without unbalancing the game (although playtesting may well prove otherwise, its just an idea right now).

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Friday, April 04, 2003 - 12:08 am: Edit

If we are looking for anything rather than something great, what about crossing the ED rules with the cloak.

You determine how long you wish to remain fully uncloaked, multiply that many impulses by 1/32 of the the total cloak cost and halve the result rounding down, with the result being the number of points of SSReo that you've developed ( or halve it again for GSReo ).
If you choose to not convert this uncloaked period back into power you are undwer no obligation but if you specify a period uncloaked to generate the SSReo then you must stay uncloak at least as long as a the specified period.


It may not have a grounding in physics, and it may not be a huge surprise but as least it's playable and different.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Friday, April 04, 2003 - 12:45 pm: Edit

Geoff,

Sounds good so far.

I play in a group that traditionally uses hidden mines.

What you're saying is that the second we toss a cloaked X2 ship into the fray, one of us has to step off the field and be a judge. To me and mine that's unacceptable.

The more common hidden mine deployment is, the more problematic your idea becomes.

Bottom line: Having a judge for an optional rule like Hidden Cloak is fine but it's questionable when it's required just run a cloaked X2 ship at all.

By Geoff Conn (Talonz) on Friday, April 04, 2003 - 06:39 pm: Edit

But John, I would just as equally respond that you are playing with an optional rule that most don't use, hidden mine placement.

But now that I think about it, this idea could be abused in ways I hadn't intended, like changing the ships position at critical terrain/uncloak points. The 'point of decision' could of course be lessened or restricted to once per turn or midturn only, but the problem could still be there.

Anyways, I'd rather see something that improves on the essential idea of the cloak (hide the ship from view and therefore a certain amount of damage) rather than the more bizarre ones that do not address that central issue.

Come to think of it, another way to address my issue with the 'bomb the rom at point blank' tactic would be to simply have the 'double range penalty' always resolve as a minimum of one.

Doesn't address the ease of picking a shield you want on a cloaked target but does address the double range except at zero bit.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Friday, April 04, 2003 - 07:33 pm: Edit

Geoff,

I agree on that score. I'd like to make the cloaking experience a little more interesting, perhaps both give the cloak a new advantage and a new weakness all in one.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Saturday, April 05, 2003 - 03:16 am: Edit

No one wants to comment on crossing ED with the cloak?


This is the problem.
Everyone wants something exciting, and when someone proposesses something exciting it's gets shot down as being too powerful ( or too difficult ).

By Tos Crawford (Tos) on Saturday, April 05, 2003 - 11:56 am: Edit

I don't want something exciting. Cummulative exciting advantages makes X2 unbalanced.

By Mike Raper (Raperm) on Saturday, April 05, 2003 - 12:08 pm: Edit

Say it again, brother. It isn't as if the current cloak is lacking, and it's hard to think of a reasonable trade off for a better one. If the roms get better phasers, plasmas and such, they hardly need a much better cloak. That's just my 2 cents, of course.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Saturday, April 05, 2003 - 01:34 pm: Edit

Mike, Tos,

Agreed.

I'd just like something interesting if I were goingt to play with the system at all.

By Mike Raper (Raperm) on Saturday, April 05, 2003 - 04:28 pm: Edit

Well...okay, here's a thought. I'm no expert on cloaking rules minutae. But, what if you made a cloak that worked substantially better the slower the cloaked unit moved? Say, when it's at speed zero it's pretty much undetectable by all but a scout. The faster it goes, the easier it is to see. It would make the idea of "stalking" or ambush more attractive to the cloaked player, and more effective.

Just wool-gathering, I guess.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Saturday, April 05, 2003 - 08:07 pm: Edit

It's that way now to some extent. Cloaked ship speed is a factor in retaining lock-on.

Are you suggesting changing th effect of the cloak according to spaad?

By Mike Raper (Raperm) on Saturday, April 05, 2003 - 09:50 pm: Edit

Perhaps. Sort of like submarines are now. At zero speed, it's almost impossible to hear one of our top of the line subs. At faster speeds, that stealth advantage is compromised. I haven't given it a huge amount of thought, of course, but the image of the near undetectable rom laying in wait for the opposition, or creeping along to get in position seems like a neat possiblity.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Sunday, April 06, 2003 - 06:24 am: Edit

Yeah it's quite odd.

You'ld think that submarines would run faster closer to the surface...on account of having to push a wall off high pressure water but...

The pressure forces on every side of the ship equally ( okay the top is going to measurably less than the bottom but Subs don't get pushed up by their props.

On the other hand, liques have incompressability ( the basis of hyprolic pistons ) so the density remains pretty static reguardm less of depth.


Then you have wave making friction, and basically the deeper you go the less wave making friction you will cause...and this reduction in resistances allows you to go further with the same amount of power.


Finally you have the real drawback, cavitation.
Basically for those who have heard of Benulli's equation but not of cavitation you'll probably follow this.
Because Benulli's says that the sum of the pressure heads in one system part of a system is equal to the sum of the pressureheads in any other part of that same system.
Consequently when you have a moving blade in contact with the water around the propellorblade a thin layers of water ( see boundry layer theory ) must also be moving with the blade.
Since that thin layer must also have the same sum of pressure heads, then some aspect of one of it's pressureheads must be reduce...say the pressure.
Furthermore, at zero atmospheres pressure ( absolute not gauge so -1 atmosphere guage ) water will turn to steam at zero degrees cetergrade...it's just an oddity of water, not some basis by which the metric system is built.
Now since most water is actually above 0 degrees centigrade, you can develop the formation of gas around the blade.
Now under caviation under it's normal understanding of the sence of the word, the blade in the top of it's swing will be in lower pressure than at the bottom of the swing and thus the boundary layer of water will exspand as it's turns to steam and contract as it's turns back to water in the bottom of the swing. This then having the drops explode and contract next to the blade creates small "divits" or cavities in the blade which will chew the blade completely off it allowed to continue ad-infinitum.
The prosses is noisey, small drops exploding to six hundred times their usual size against a metal blade will tend to make a lot of noise.

If you try to go faster ( by swinging your blades faster ) you'll get a permanent bubble around the prop and stop moving forward, mostly because the viscosity of steam is considerably lower than water.


This is why Subs travel faster underwater.
I only hear about subs suffering from cavitation a few days ago and my first thought was why your the military worry, they can afford to change the prop over next time they are in dock?
Then the Sub expert ( talking about the colins class ) said that cavitation causes alot of noise which makes the sub easy to find.


What was truely bizzar was watching HUNT FOR REWD OCTOBER recently.
You see pulling water through you ship's "tunnel" will only work in salt water so I was thinking it was quite silly that they hid the ship in a river, but then I noticed that the sub had a prop as well.
But then I though that in order to not make any noise they props would have to varriable pitch propellors with sysmterical blade cross sections and and the ability to reach an angle of attack of possitive 90 degrees.
Then I saw the model and that's exactly what it had.
The model makers were far more correct than the script writers because the script just ran along assuming that nobody knew anything about the fact that salt water can be moved with magnets.

By Carl-Magnus Carlsson (Eagle) on Sunday, April 06, 2003 - 10:58 am: Edit

Mike, how would it work in the game? We allready know were the counter is. And we can't represent the effect by allowing ships to get an attempt at lock just because the cloaked ship goes faster;
that would make the cloak less effective than it is.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Sunday, April 06, 2003 - 09:24 pm: Edit

At a guess, you'ld take the G13.331 speed table and multiply the result by negative 1 and then add 6 to the result with that result being the X2 cloak-speed-thing modifier on the G13.37 but since that would create a situatuin where any cloaked ship at speed 5 or less was invincible we'll need to slighty touch up the table.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Sunday, April 06, 2003 - 09:49 pm: Edit

...or we cap the advantage speed gives.

By michael john campbell (Michaelcampbell) on Monday, April 07, 2003 - 10:24 am: Edit

Or we could build our own table from scratch with a set of more reasonable numbers and a we wouldn't have to multiply by negative one and subtrqct from anything to develop the modifier.

By John Trauger (Vorlonagent) on Monday, April 07, 2003 - 01:37 pm: Edit

Care to take a shot at it?

By Geoff Conn (Talonz) on Monday, April 07, 2003 - 06:23 pm: Edit

Or use the table as is and adjust the retain/reaquire lockon penalties of -6/-10 to something else, say -8/-12.

MJC, I gave some thought to your ed/cloak power return idea and I think the gain versus loss in playbility just didn't do it for me.