Warfare & Tactics

1) yes
2) no
3) no
4) no

so for survivability im best looking at keeping a burner fitted and finding one of those target breaker thinggies.

If you're talking about the covops cloak you can use the cloak + mwd trick to keep safe at bubbled gates. You can't run a prop mod while cloaked, but you can activate one just after hitting your cloak so you get one cycle of speed out of it. Just double click in space in a direction that seems clear/close to bubble edge and then immediately cloak and hit your mwd and you should be golden.

Stealth bombers are wonderful little ships, and a great way to dip your toes into the waters of covert ops PvP play … and hot-drops if you get the opportunity.

A bomber can warp cloaked iff it is fitted with a covert operations cloak. If it is fitted with a ‘normal’ cloak, T1/T2/faction, then it will only be able to warp once uncloaked … like all other ship types fitted with that cloak.


You cannot jump through anything (stargate, wormhole, cyno bridge, jump bridge) while you are cloaked … you need to uncloak to make any jumps. When you land at the other end of the jump you may be cloaked again for a period of time. Once you start to move, or its timer expires, you lose that cloak and will become visible to ppl ongrid. When this happens you need to activate your cloaking module to become cloaked again.

When I jump thru to a nastily bubble-camped hostile gate in a (non-T3) covops ship, this is by basic procedure:
- Wait for grid to load, and this sometimes seems to take forever.
- Look around and try work out the safest / shortest direction to exit the bubbles and keep away from ships and other items.
- Don’t rush, the gate cloak actually lasts for quite a long time.
- Double-click in space to start aligning in the direction I want to move.
- Immediately activate my cloak.
- Immediately then activate my MWD or AB. Your prop mod will activate if you do so within the first cycle of your cloak, and the prop mod will run for one cycle and then switch itself off.
- Adjust direction as needed, and keep a close eye on fast ships heading towards me.
- Upon exiting the bubble go about doing whatever it was that I was planning to do.

Unless you come within 2km of something this is a very safe approach. I’ve sat on both sides of this approach, in the covops sneaking thru the camp and amongst the campers trying to fast-lock and kill the covops, and can confirm that in the vast majority of cases the covops gets thru. Even tho they may be visible, on your main screen and overview, for a few seconds it’s very difficult to lock them once they’ve activated their cloak. A good interceptor pilot, or just plain dumb luck, are your best chances … getting something within 2km and uncloaking them before they’re able to warp.


No, you need to start dropping the gate cloak before you can activate any module-based cloak.

As mentioned above, if you start to align (dropping your gate cloak) and activate your cloaking module immediately, it is virtually impossible for someone to get a target lock unless you get uncloaked shortly afterwards by something within 2km. Superfast locking ships, such as this shameful-killmail-hoar that our bomber gang killed over the weekend, may have faster locking times but a covops is often cloaking even before the pilot can click on you in overview and start their targeting attempt.


Sometimes, but you cannot rely on it. When you undock from a station you have a period of invulnerability. Like a post-gate-jump cloak this stays in force until you activate a module or start to align or warp. In some stations that period of invulnerability allows you to move far enough from the station to instantly recloak once you start moving, in many / most stations this is not the case.

This is where station-undock, or exit, bookmarks are particularly helpful. If you have a bookmark >160km away and directly inline with the direction of the station undock then as soon as your speed reaches 75% of max you can instawarp away from the station … cloaking very shortly after you initiate the warp.


You cannot activate any cloaking device while you are target locked by an NPC or another character, or when there is any object within 2km of you. Non-targeted weapons, such as bombs and smart-bombs, do not uncloak you but do deliver damage to you while you are cloaked … and if you die, of course, your capsule is not cloaked. FoF missiles do not ‘see’ you while you are cloaked. Gas clouds uncloak you iff you are within 2km of the overview icon, not visually within the cloud as shown on the main graphics screen. Corpses around a busily camped gate can be a real nuisance for cloakies, partly because not many ppl have their overview set to ‘see’ corpses.

p.s. If you’re getting into covops play and want to learn more stealth bomber stuff … by doing it … then I suggest joining the ‘Bombers Bar’ ingame chat channel and trying to join some of their regular (almost daily starting at 01:00 eve-time) bomber fleets.

These two referrals are to the same bunch. The Bombers Bar (the name of the chat group) is the love child of a member of [VENGA], and that home-page link is VENGA’s page. The Bombers Bar gang is a covops-loving get together where your corp or alliance doesn’t matter … you will be in fleet with all sorts of ppl you may not normally be working with. It’s a lot of fun, you get to kill lots of goonies, NCers, and others, and you get to learn heaps about bombing and covops antics in general.

Kudos to Tempelman N who set it up and is still running it.

Came expecting a thread about refrigerators.

Disagree? Hek no, I agree completely, **you** fit stabs to your bomber.

Whether or not that's a good idea is a different story altogether. I don't fit stabs to my bombers except when I am relocating them long distance thru null / w-space ... and then the fit is purely for transit with no intention of locking anyone.