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Homing Probe
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Deckel
Island Paradise
#1 - 2017-01-12 00:45:46 UTC  |  Edited by: Deckel
I just had an idea for a type of homing probe that could be quite useful.

This would be a new probe that can be loaded into standard or expanded probe launchers, and would likely be bulky, so you could only load one in at a time.

What this probe will do when launched is light up brightly in space and travel to a destination on grid to a target that it finds. At any point while it travels, it's current location can be bookmarked, or if it reaches a warp-able distance away from you, it can be warped to (at least by owner and allies).

The main target for this probe would be cloaked ships that are on the current grid. If there are one or many on grid, the probe will find the closest one and head towards it at a speed somewhere between 2000-5000m/s. It will then stop on top of them and stay there until the probe expires. The probe itself will not decloak the ship. Should the ship leave grid or decloak, the probe will ether sit there or fly towards another cloaked ship, should one exist. Should no cloaked ships exist on grid when fired off, the probe will proceed directly forward until it expires, which will be within 1-5 minutes (or until the owner get it to deactivate/self-destruct).


This system can be used for several things, Alert fleets of cloaked ships on grid, the ability to find and decloak them by flying or warping to the probe, ensuring cloaked ships stay alert, and providing bookmark and warp locations of bystanders that sit 100km off gate, watching a fleet, by aligning to them and firing off a probe.

Any comments about such a thing?
Omnathious Deninard
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#2 - 2017-01-12 00:48:22 UTC  |  Edited by: Omnathious Deninard
What the point? Why do you want to kill off bombers in such a lazy way?

If you don't follow the rules, neither will I.
Deckel
Island Paradise
#3 - 2017-01-12 01:07:30 UTC
Omnathious Deninard wrote:
What the point? Why do you want to kill off bombers in such a lazy way?


It is just that the mechanics of being completely undetectable seems overpowered to me. There should be at least one viable way to find and decloak a ship, so I figured I'd suggest a method. If you have a better idea then lets hear it.
Scipio Artelius
Weaponised Vegemite
Flying Dangerous
#4 - 2017-01-12 01:41:53 UTC  |  Edited by: Scipio Artelius
Deckel wrote:
Omnathious Deninard wrote:
What the point? Why do you want to kill off bombers in such a lazy way?


It is just that the mechanics of being completely undetectable seems overpowered to me. There should be at least one viable way to find and decloak a ship, so I figured I'd suggest a method. If you have a better idea then lets hear it.

There is a viable way to decloak a ship. Get within 2km of it while you are unclolaed.

-1 from me on this.

Seems too easy to use as a way to save other players perches and safes even if they warp off to avoid being probed down. You can just let this keep going and then save the spot when this prove reaches the point where they were. In my view, if you can't combat prove them in time, that's bad luck. Fly out to the point instead.

Also makes it to one easy to make perfectly aligned bombing run bookmarks.
Omnathious Deninard
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#5 - 2017-01-12 02:04:00 UTC
Deckel wrote:
Omnathious Deninard wrote:
What the point? Why do you want to kill off bombers in such a lazy way?


It is just that the mechanics of being completely undetectable seems overpowered to me. There should be at least one viable way to find and decloak a ship, so I figured I'd suggest a method. If you have a better idea then lets hear it.

My idea would be to not do anything to cloaked ships, they can't hurt you, mine resources, loot wrecks, shoot rats, hack containers, or much of anything short of sitting in space.

If you don't follow the rules, neither will I.
Ralph King-Griffin
New Eden Tech Support
#6 - 2017-01-12 02:40:47 UTC
Paikis wrote:
This thread comes up on almost a weekly basis. In fact, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a nerf cloaking thread in the first 2 pages on this forum section. Almost every single one of them goes like this:

1. OP posts a post with a new (lol) idea that always boils down to some variation of the following:
- "There's a big meanie who is sitting in my system and not doing anything, but I don't know where he is and I can't ever just go next door. I can't find said meanie and even though I know that he's probably at work and poses no threat at all, I wont do anything in my system that I absolutely can't leave ever because he might not be at work and I might lose a ship. CCP please stop the meanie from being able to do nothing to me because he's probably at work"

2. Thread gets trolled because its been done literally to death. This horse has been beaten so hard and so often that it's little more than a memory of a memory of a red smear on the grass, and yet it STILL WONT DIE! In fact it's been done so many times that this particular horse is now undead; even if it does die, it will still be remembered and parodied.

3. Someone comes along and suggests that AFK cloakers can't hurt you, because they are, by their very definition, AFK. No one ever lost a ship to someone who ISN'T PLAYING THE GAME.

4. Someone else comes along and points out that while the cloaker might be AFK, he might not be, and so we have Schrodinger's Hot Dropper. The cyno pilot who might be AFK... but he might not be as well, and you will only know for sure when he decloaks, points and lights his candle. (Yes, I know this isn't how the cat works)

5. Someone else comes along and suggests that you use bait and setup a TARP. Or have a defence fleet on standby. Heaven forbid you have to actually fight to defend your space.

6. A further person comes along and suggests that the problem isn't cloaking AFK in your system that you can't possibly leave ever, but that you KNOW that the person is AFK in your system... and perhaps local should be removed because free 100% accurate intel is probably not the best thing in the game and if you didn't know that the big meanie was in your system, you wouldn't be worried about leaving the undock/POS.

7. Then another person pokes their head in and complains that local is 100% NEEDED because D-Scan and probing are such bad mechanics, and IF YOU TAKE MY LOCAL AWAY IM QUITTING FOREVER AND NO YOU CAN'T HAVE MY STUFF!

8. Someone asks if they can have 7's stuff.

We end up with another thread which goes on for pages and pages between complains about local, defence fleets, inability to just go next door, people who aren't playing the game but are playing the meta, lots of bickering and in the end nothing gets solved. CCP wont remove cloaking because it would mess with waaay too many things and it creates content (which is a good thing) by removing content (which is a bad thing) but they can't really think of any way to do it without a complete overhaul of the local and scanning systems.

Now that I've had this entire thread's conversation, can we just let it die? Please?

Murderers of Negotiable Motivations

=]|[=
Deckel
Island Paradise
#7 - 2017-01-12 04:39:00 UTC
Ralph King-Griffin wrote:


Now that I've had this entire thread's conversation, can we just let it die? Please?


No, of course not. We must kick this horse until the bones are powder.Twisted

That said, I have no intention of suggesting anything that touches afk cloakers, just as long as they find a safe spot to idle their time away in. But if they can watch and observe me from 200km off a gate, I want there to be a way to find them, and/or know if they are there. Even if this is in the form of a mobile structure that costs 500mil, it would be an improvement over the current state of things. I'm not saying it should be easy to find them, but there should be a strategic way of finding them, especially if you know they are there.
Donnachadh
United Allegiance of Undesirables
#8 - 2017-01-12 14:57:24 UTC
-1 to your idea.
Deckel wrote:
It is just that the mechanics of being completely undetectable seems overpowered to me. There should be at least one viable way to find and decloak a ship, so I figured I'd suggest a method. If you have a better idea then lets hear it.

The better idea is exactly what we have now, cloaked ships cannot be detected in space. That is the way they are intended to be and that is the way they should be.

Personally I do not think cloaked ships are OP, even if they are we need to look at other factors to reduce or eliminate that OP status, things that do not affect the ships abilities to hide from any and all forms of scanning.
Danika Princip
GoonWaffe
Goonswarm Federation
#9 - 2017-01-12 18:13:35 UTC
Deckel wrote:
If you have a better idea then lets hear it.


Grow a backbone? Don't ask for cloaks to be nerfed into irrelevance because you're afraid of an empty chair?
Corraidhin Farsaidh
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#10 - 2017-01-13 11:51:48 UTC
Danika Princip wrote:
Deckel wrote:
If you have a better idea then lets hear it.


Grow a backbone? Don't ask for cloaks to be nerfed into irrelevance because you're afraid of an empty chair?


Basically this. If a ship is cloaked and sat dtill doing nothing you should never be able to gind it without literally bumping into it.

Maybe (and this is a suggestion just to balance the negative above) if a cloaked ship is active in some way (actually under powered flight, scanning) then the minimal emmissions could be scanned down, but this should be a sig strength similar to the Superior Sleeper Cache sites (probably a bit harder if anything). The ship fit for this ought to require several scanning modules and expensive implants, i.e be incredibly gimped fit and expensive too. Of corse if the cloaky stops still or stops scanning you lose the sig.
Lugh Crow-Slave
#11 - 2017-01-13 12:01:19 UTC
this sounds so broken O.o

BLOPS Hauler
The 16.8km Bubble