Hello all,
I was huffing gas in Jspace when a helios came into system and cloaked. Sadly, I had to move my toons out of it and back to my home system. I wanted to hunt him but realized I don’t know how.
How do I hunt a cloaked ship? Core Combat Scanner + Probes? And then get within 2km to force an uncloak… but how would I even do that?
Any insight is appreciated.
Thanks all!
Helios will appear when it is hacking a can or it will appear because it’s a bait.
The only way to catch them is if they decloak or if you bump into them and decloak them. They will decloak when using a wormhole or if they try to hack something. Since Helios’s (Heliai?) have no combat capabilities, the only sites they typically run are the ones with no rats like the pirate faction ones, so that kind of narrows it down.
The way most explorer hunters do it is they scan down all the sites in the system (beforehand), and make “perches” 200-1000km outside a cosmic signature site by dropping a bookmark while warping in. When the target decloaks at one of these sites to start hacking the cans, you can figure out where they are with D scan and then warp to the perch, wait until they start hacking, then warp to the can and surprise.
Occasionally, you can catch one on a wormhole but it’s really hard. You either need to bump/decloak them and hope you can catch them before they warp off, or they can sometimes become befuddled by wormhole polarity mechanics, or if you have a Maulus navy/remote sensor boosting buddy you can try to lock them before they recloak when coming out of the wormhole but it’s hit-or-miss. You could also employ the use of a bubble to make it easier to ram decloak them.
Cloaked ships can be de-cloaked only if they come within 2 km of an object. Other cloaked ships will not de-cloak a cloaked ship even if they are next to each other. This makes finding a ship cloaked on a safe spot basically impossible.
it’s very hard to decloak a ship if you don’t know it’s location.
If it’s a dumb pilot or newb, they may warp directly to a celestial body like a sun or moon and cloak up at the landing point. You can try warping to each celestial body in the slight hope that you’ll land near them and decloak them. Try to use a drone ship and launch drones as they’ll also decloak anything while they orbit your ship. I’ve had it happen to me a few times when I was a n00b.
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