Cloaks are cool toey but a little... weird, at the moment.
What is strange about them is that they work on some ships brilliantly, making them very powerful, while working not at all on other ships of the same class.
Primary example: The Pirate Transport. A very strong transport with awesome dodging ability, tiny frame, great firepower and CD... that can cloak forever now. It works so great because the Ptrans is more a "pvp tool" than a transport, so the cargo-fuel trade-off does not work for it really, while it would seriously hurt the "real trader".
This one is odd because top military high tech gear should not work best on pirate equipment, imo.
Cloaky Bombers: They are odd because...
a) some bombers can cloak, many cannot due to cargo restriction. I ask myself, why there are exactly 2 heavy 3-slot bombers (Thor, Eclipse) that can cloak, and both are pirate equipment. Again, top military gear works best on pirate equipment, which kind of makes no sense to me.
b) bomber/fighter cloak times are short. My Roc can cloak for ~50 seconds with a UAU5, making me a paper toy in a fight. If CDed properly, you reappear fast, which is likely what it is meant to be like. While the "got caught after cloaking" probability was rather low at the beginning (people did not know), it feels as if it was very easy now to get the cloakers. Perhaps a little bit too easy in fact.
Jinx asked for how long people feel ships should be able to cloak:
LF: long. 4-5 minutes? So they can be proper cool scouts. Fast, and invisible. Would be cool if they could engage cloak more often (less initial drain for activating) so that they could just fade out, fade in, fade out.
Fighters/bombers: short. Max 1min 30 sec. Lower than 1 minute makes it rather easy to CD often enough to force them to appear again. Adding some little extra time would keep a probability to get away or catch them to both parties. But: every bomber should be able to get some adequate cloak time. Below 30 seconds is simply useless.
Transports: Max should be really long (10-12 minutes), but no one would put a lot of fuel on a transport anyway (exception: pewy transports). So if you use a realistic scenario (1/3 of cargo hole is fuel), you should be able to cloak for 3-4 minutes, imo. That could be enough to get away, to run a blockade, to finish the last illegal leg of your smuggling run, etc.... and give your opponent a realistic chance to counter you.
GBs: no idea. I was told they are broken when it comes to cloaking. But I have no clue.
Caps: not much experience here, so I have to pass.
My main criticism about cloaks is that there is that unlawful bias in them. They work best on the unlawful side and that's weird.
