This is just a funny thought exercise, not a serious suggestion. So I didn’t put this under “mining” since this topic isn’t how mining actually works or “suggestions” since I’m not saying the game should be like this.
Suppose the Endurance could continue to run it’s mining lasers while cloaked. So in actual game cloaking disables a lot of modules and all target locks. However in this case, it allows target locks to remain on anything that it is already mining and allows the laser to continue. To mine another asteroid/ ice/ gas (although without a mining boost a gas cloud would decloak anything close enough to huff gas anyways), the Endurance would need to decloak to get a lock on another one. The laser is fully visible the entire time even if the expedition frigate is not.
What would be the point of being cloaked if the mining laser is still active? All someone needs to do is move to within 2500m of the point that the laser originates from and there is the Endurance.
Wouldn’t be any good unless the laser was cloaked as well.
Personally I think cloak should be a 2000m AOE bubble around the ship, thus anything inside that bubble would also be cloaked, like Attack Drones in close orbit to the ship…
So, a lot of people like to play the game zoomed out. Assuming mining laser doesn’t show up on d-scan/overview (which it currently doesn’t), the Endurance would technically be “invisible” to most hunters.
Of course, this trick wouldn’t work on me, I play zoomed in so I can admire the cool ship skins that I overpaid for…
All the people saying this would be useless if the laser wasn’t cloaked haven’t really thought about this.
1 cloaked ships aren’t on d scan so you are already less visible.
2 endurance gets a cloak speed bonus meaning it can warp out immediately after dropping cloak. So sure, whoever shows up can see you and move to decloak you. But they can’t actually lock out tackle you giving you time to warp out.
“wait, how come someone scooped up my drones into their cargo?”
His corpmate:
“You’re lucky the had the moronic idea to release a ship that can mine while cloaked and the guy who took your drones wasn’t paying attention to the animation”
Or better yet, guy runs into his own D/Ced drones and uncloaks himself by accident.
This would just encourage hunters to use cloaked ships themselves more often, because the only way to catch something like this would be to approach it while cloaked and then uncloak on top of it, assuming the lasers are still visible. If the lasers would also be invisible, then you basically have an invincible mining ship, so the idea gets thrown out.
This would have no impact on your ability to survive against players, and would only be good for cheesing the NPCs, which would be a bit imbalanced in the player’s favor.
Somehow I feel that everyone is missing the point. Attacker need to find you first and be on same grid to see laser. With cloak, you are only left with local and possibly third party sites like zkill to figure out if player can be a sneaky miner. After that you actually need to warp around belts, moons, anomalies etc. locate him and then start shenanigan’s with cloaky bumping etc.
That being said. You need to be asleep or afk to get caught by a roamer. There is no point of making something that is already hard, even harder. EVE needs more destruction, not less.
Want to ninja mine in hostile space? Use cheap venture. Those 15 ice blocks aren’t worth the insane effort that it takes to mine them and escape to hisec. You won’t even get cost of ship back.
I mean, it sounds like a lot of dev work to add a mechanic that will inevitably be broken and/or break a bunch of stuff on release, all to save people a single button press.
I agree that it sounds like a cool mechanic, and maybe in a game with a codebase that doesn’t completely break when module values are tweaked it might be a fun addition. But it doesn’t seem like a good use of dev time compared to all the other things they could be wasting their time on.