Warfare & Tactics

What size MWD?

My blockade runners all work as expected in this situation … one effective cycle of MWD or AB while the covops cloak comes into play. When this has appeared to not be happening there has usually been one of two things going on:
- I had a smaller MWD / AB fitted than I thought. My mental model had been expecting (e.g.) 10MN boost from a ship that I’d actually fitted a 1MN prop mod to.
- The velocity increase was r.e.t.a.r.d.e.d because the ship was still aligning and, in turn, the aligning process is slower than usual because the prop module is running.

When flying the blockade runner the main reason I use that process is to get some distance under my belt when I jump through a gate into a bubble, and there’s some fast-little-bastard burning towards me intent upon uncloaking me and doing evil lascivious things to my body. In these situations the priorities are a little different, I try to align towards a nearby edge of the bubble, preferably at close to 90-degrees to the path of the incoming wannabe decloaker …. To maximize the distance between our ships when their paths intersect. Whenever you’re doing this you are balancing your speed and direction, where your speed potentially interferes with your ability to change direction and vice versa.
I do the same when I jump into a system with some hostiles who might just be dictor-camping my ingate. I want to align-MWD-cloak first, to get myself moving out of the possible bubble and away from the path of wannabe decloakers, before I commit to a warp. If I start to warp and they hit me with a delayed bubble, I am much more vulnerable and likely to die.
Otherwise I simply select my destination (object or bookmark) and warp to it, activating my cloak as soon as the warp shows in my HUD.

I’m not sure, from your OP, whether you are suggesting that you use the cloak and the MWD to get into a quick warp in your ittie V … but I am not convinced that that works so well.
Certainly a single MWD pulse can help a lumbering-slow ship get into warp more quickly than would otherwise be the case. The classic example here is the orca where a 10s MWD pulse, as you align, gets you to warp speed much faster than would be the case without using the prop mod.
However, when you start using this method and a non-covops cloak, the intended dynamic gets messed up by the velocity bonus (e.g. -95% or -75% etc) of the cloaking device. If you align-cloak-MWD, or align-MWD-cloak, the ship’s maximal velocity is a fraction of what it would be without the cloak. So the single MWD cycle will accelerate you to that (r.e.t.a.r.d.e.d) maximal velocity.
The problem with this is that when you drop your cloak your ship reverts to its usual maximal velocity, and your current velocity is far short of 75% of that velocity. So, upon dropping cloak, you need more time to accelerate to warp speed.

Yes, I fit my travel and WH-collapsing orcas with both MWDs and cloaks, but I do not use them together if my main intention is to get that behemoth into warp more quickly. The cloak is to try keep me alive when evil people try to hurt me, or just to be invisible while I wait out the timer before I can head thru the WH again. The MWD is to give me a surge of speed (if that’s ever the right word for an orca) when I am about to cloak, to accelerate me to warp speed so I can enter warp more quickly, and to bulk up my ship to provide greater mass for WH closure efforts.

I am not ingame, to test all this, but that is my understanding of the basic underlying game dynamics, and my practices.

my faction cloak works fine . I assume t2 improved cloak work aswell. prototype cloak prob got too much penalty to work properly.
(I use 10mn mwd)



Im assuming you got cargo expanders fitted.

Fit improved cloak II and 10MN MWD.

It works fine on my occator even with 6 cargo expanders and 2 cargo rigs.

Note - it is still possible for an insta-lock t3 camp to point you.
Edit: Could be you are doing something wrong or could also be your skills.

Your occator has almost twice as much mass as your Iteron V from what I can tell.

This impacts your velocity from MWD IMMENSELY, because prop mods scale inversely with mass (this is why oversizing a prop mod is so fun). Because the MWD is much less effective you don't end up with a working MWD trick. I'm sure someone's figured out how to make it work (maybe fitting nanos will do it), do some googling. But seriously why didn't you just use a viator?

just check the velocity difference yourself.

Iteron - 1134 m/s from 172 m/s, 6.6 times faster

occator - 679 m/s from 141 m/s, 4.8 times faster

On second thought, might get much more out of the inertial stabilizers since they'll make the ship more agile and accelerate faster without increasing your required velocity to get into warp.

I've always been able to cloak + MWD trick with deep space transports, the timing is just a lot harder.


Anyway, since istabs and nanos don't actually reduce your mass I don't think they would help. One thing you can try is overheating your MWD. That should give you the required oomph without having to change the fitting around.