I guess it’s probably not in your best interest to help me out, but I hope you will anyway, cause I don’t know where else to post this. I’m having trouble using the MWD cloak trick on my DST.
I have experience using it on smaller industrial ships, (sigil/badger) so I know what to do. Align, cloak, mwd, unmwd, uncloak, warp, when the MWD cycle is 95% complete, right? I’m using a guristas cloak, which is better than improved 2, and a 50 MN MWD. My acceleration control and evasive maneuvering skills are both at 4, and I’m obviously jumping from gate to gate. My allign is pretty atrocious at 22 seconds, but I tried it with an inertial stab too, and it didn’t help at all. Is there anything I’m missing?
Only DSTs stupidly aggressively fitted for agility are BARELY capable of doing the MWD Cloak trick. I used to use an Occator that could do this using only T2 mods. It served me well prior to carrier gate camps becoming popular. In the half-a-second after you break gate cloak but before you activate your cloak, they will MWD launch attack fighters at you, and those fighters will approach your last known location even after you cloak, at which point they will bump you into decloaking yourself and then kill you. At least with a proper Blockade Runner you have a substantially shorter time to warp out (ie. less than 10 seconds) while being cloaked the entire time. And yes, the cargo capacity difference between BRs and DSTs is massive, so if you want safety without carrier gate camps being an issue, proper use of jump freighters and/or courier services (PushX/Red Frog) are your friends.
On the off chance you’re hauling PI goods, Epithal can be used to haul vast quantities of low-value goods using the MWD Cloak trick instead of a DST. (Don’t use the MWD Cloak trick to go between POCO and station - a different fit is used for that.)
You don’t need your align under 10 seconds, that’s just how long your MWD cycle lasts. You need to reach 75% of your speed when entering warp, which I did. Anyways, I figured out what I was doing wrong. All this time, I’ve been looking at the warp light, because it didn’t matter how long you waited in a sigil or a badger. I realized I should’ve been looking at the MWD cycle, so I can actually tell when it’s 95% complete.
As @Hink_Yaken says this is dependent on getting both on the same server tick. It’s much safer and more reliable to hit the MWD first. Especially if you’ve got valuable cargo you don’t wanna lose because of poor server timing.
I personally have cloak and MWD assigned to the F1 and F2 keys and just hit both at the same time, but if you want to be picky, the right way to do it is align, then cloak, then MWD, i.e. hit MWD after cloaking, not before.
I see the OP has already figured it, but I suggest anyone having trouble with this to try doing it fitting 2 inertial stabs at first. A DST fitted that way should be able to comfortably, not barely, use the Cloak+MWD trick. Without the inertial stabs, the point at which you have to decloak for it to work correctly becomes more tricky.
What is the best way to time it? Is there any way to send the warp and cloak commands at the exact time you wish?
I find that sometimes you can do all three in a split second, and sometimes the correct time is longer. I assume when you’re unlucky the command reaches the server just after the tick and the only way to correctly cloak is to wait an exact second so your next one reaches it after align has begun.
It seems like a cruel joke, but you are going to be exposed for an exact second in either case right? So it’s fine to wait a split second as long as your wait time + ping time doesn’t go over a full second?