' Wrote:An addendum: Maybe it doesn't drop you completely off, just makes it so that you can't be seen on the radar unless you're within 1K from the ship. That'd make it fair and still good to use for smugglers trying to run, or any other ship that would use it.
~Leo
Instead of that 1k limit it could drop you off completely BUT reveal you the instant you try to use ingame communication. So you'd have to take a chance and keep quiet if you wanted to get away.
Why no limit? Because let's face it, if a pirate is chasing a mining ship from a distance of 10k for example, and the miner just disappears it will be obvious that it powered down so the pirate would know approximately where to look. Oh, and by chasing I mean it knows the general direction of the miner because otherwise it's not even relevant to this discussion.
I haven't read the entire thread so if any of this has already been mentioned... oh well.:P
It could also have a time limit, powering down also means that you turn off life support system, which for example on battleship could last hour or two without, fighter with it's small cockpit needs oxygen pumps to work without a long pauses. So after some amount of time (3, 5 minutes?) the ship would power up again.
Well Idea is good of cource. It need some fixes and time limit as Pilgrim said. But making that thing will make MUCH MORE SENSE with RP and simple logic of nebulas, especially reducing radar rate ones
' Wrote:Third, radar isn't based on your emissions, it's based on mapping your hull with radio waves, so the science part of this doesn't even work.
But it's the IFF beacon that gives the ship a name, and that would be powered off. Maybe the ship could be given the same radar signature as a shipwreck, and go into the list of solar objects instead of the list of ships.
I don't know if I support it yet, just thinking about that particular question. There is a similar issue with cloaking
Oh, turning off the IFF would leave less electronic signature for the hostiles passive sensors to pick up, no doubt about it. But like you said, that leaves the ships hull unmasked.
Camoflauging as a shipwreck sounds good, but it leaves out things like heat signatures, biosigns, and the fact that none of the wrecks have any real debilitating damage like missing flight decks and cargo holds with massive holes in them.
Freelancer isn't reality, but we have to take reality into account or we might as well just wave a fairy wand around and say, "You can't see me cuz I haz magic fairy cloak!"