Making cloaks ammo-based rather than cargo-based was considered (and even tried) early in the 4.87 development, but since a few technical issues were preventing it at the time, it was decided to postpone the change to a later stage of the beta. Since there were more pressing issues present during the development of each update since, this was marked as a low priority task, but now that the team has started working on the final release and all of the major bugs are already fixed, the concept of ammo-based cloaks was revisited and finally implemented.
Please note the following numbers are the initial draft, and are subject to multiple adjustments:
Cloaking Device Batteries (the new "ammo" for cloaks) will be limited to 1,000 per ship.
Light cloaks will take up 10 cargo space, available to ships with up to 250 cargo. Having a charge time of 20 seconds, and a consumption rate of 3 batteries per second will give any ship with light cloaks ~5 minutes of effective cloak.
Medium cloaks will take up 200 cargo space, available to ships with up to 1100 cargo. Having a charge time of 40 seconds, and a consumption rate of 2 batteries per second will give any ship with medium cloaks ~8 minutes of effective cloak.
Heavy cloaks will take up 450 cargo space, available to ships with 1100 cargo or higher. Having a charge time of 60 seconds, and a consumption rate of 1 battery per second will give any ship with large cloaks ~15 minutes of active cloak.
As these numbers are still concepts, and are planned to be adjusted based on results of the future test runs, feel free to discuss this change and share your opinions, suggestions or concerns regarding it in this thread.
Discuss.
Remember to include a short justification in your post if you decide to propose an alternative set of numbers.