Firing weapons while in silent running

[saab]

Say you are in silent running mode tracking another player and you are invisible on their sensors, or are only visible as an unresolved (jumping around) blip.

What happens when you shoot at them? Do you appear clearly on their radars? Or do you stay invisible/unresolved as long as your heat profile+distance allow it?

 

[Retu81]

You'll stay unresolved, but you will cook yourself rather quickly, unless you have some way to get rid of the heat. Heat sinks for example, but those will be detected when you launch them.

 

[Yodafone]

Whlist rigged for Silent Running your heat signature remains the same (why the heat signature waveform above your fuel gauge is replaced by the Silent Running warning). How effective your Silent Running is depends on how effective your hostile's (or surrounding ships') sensors are. Rated A sensors have a range of between 2-300 metres (anything less makes no difference), up to around/approx 1.5km where you can be resolved and subsequently targeted by gimbals. Lessor rated sensor modules you can reduce these values down. So whilst rigged for Silent Running, you only need to concentrate on your internal heat so as to not suffer damage.

Edit, about you firing weapons, thermal hardpoints are the worst for Silent Running as they generate internal heat very quickly, to get the most out of Silent Running fit or use kinetic weapons (and/or manage your unneeded modules by turning them off).

A Silent running thread with a dev response for your attention.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=68069

 

[Ceekay]

The coolest ship (literally!) is the Diamondback Scout, with a normal mid range combat build it'll run at 22% but with some changes it can drop to 17% or lower this means you can use silent running for longer without dropping heat sinks and with chaff the ship will be very difficult to target out of silent running, of course without a shield you'll have to armor up a bit but certainly NPC's find a build like this hard to hit or detect.

http://coriolis.io/outfit/diamondba...24.AwRjNcukg===.Aw1kCyaFA===?bn=DB-S smuggler

PS the ships operating temperature is a case of build it and see I'm afraid and it'll vary in response to different load-outs quite a bit.

 

[saab]

Got it, thanks all.

Yodafone, interesting to see Sandro's response, thanks for pinning it.

Ceekay, yes, I'm flying a DBS with an A-class power plant and it keeps very cool. My build is something like this:
http://coriolis.io/outfit/diamondba...29296e.AwRj4yKA.AwiMpSu0g===?bn=DB-S smuggler

I find it effective at lurking in stations and taking out wanted players as they leave, or dropping into their wakes in supercruise, or tracking them in asteroid fields.

The rail guns are very hot but I can get a few volleys off before having to use a heat sink, and that's often enough to drop their shields and make them panic.

I find I can also keep the heat down by using a voiceattack hotkey to disable modules not in use - especially the rail guns and thrusters.

 

[jacozilla]

Whlist rigged for Silent Running your heat signature remains the same (why the heat signature waveform above your fuel gauge is replaced by the Silent Running warning). How effective your Silent Running is depends on how effective your hostile's (or surrounding ships') sensors are. Rated A sensors have a range of between 2-300 metres (anything less makes no difference), up to around/approx 1.5km where you can be resolved and subsequently targeted by gimbals. Lessor rated sensor modules you can reduce these values down. So whilst rigged for Silent Running, you only need to concentrate on your internal heat so as to not suffer damage.

Edit, about you firing weapons, thermal hardpoints are the worst for Silent Running as they generate internal heat very quickly, to get the most out of Silent Running fit or use kinetic weapons (and/or manage your unneeded modules by turning them off).

A Silent running thread with a dev response for your attention.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=68069

That may be the theory, and that may be the dev response, but in practice I've not found that to be true while smuggling.

Even with silent running turned on, your heat emissions matter. The more internal heat you emit, even semi-trapped with SR enabled, the more likely to be detected.

Otherwise, SR on with 80% heat would be same stealth as SR on with 0% heat (via heat sink pop). After smuggling ~100M the last few weeks, all practical experience for me shows that SR + minimal internal heat (via heat sink or powering off modules) is far less likely to be detected than SR enabled but not caring about internal heat build up.

So I acknowledge that SR enabled in theory should mean that heat signature remains the same, but personally my experience points exactly the opposite. Call it a bug or not intended design, but for smuggling scans at least, heat signature is not the same while rigged for silent running - it depends what internal heat you still produce.

 

[Yodafone]

That may be the theory, and that may be the dev response, but in practice I've not found that to be true while smuggling.

Even with silent running turned on, your heat emissions matter. The more internal heat you emit, even semi-trapped with SR enabled, the more likely to be detected.

Otherwise, SR on with 80% heat would be same stealth as SR on with 0% heat (via heat sink pop). After smuggling ~100M the last few weeks, all practical experience for me shows that SR + minimal internal heat (via heat sink or powering off modules) is far less likely to be detected than SR enabled but not caring about internal heat build up.

So I acknowledge that SR enabled in theory should mean that heat signature remains the same, but personally my experience points exactly the opposite. Call it a bug or not intended design, but for smuggling scans at least, heat signature is not the same while rigged for silent running - it depends what internal heat you still produce.

Well I did wonder about mentioning this. Quite frankly I too also think ones' internal heat does indeed seem to make a difference even whilst rigged for Silent Running, almost as if some heat still escapes around the edges of the radiator vent louvres even when they are shut, but it's so hard to ever get a real feel for this as every situation is always different. This wasn't mentioned by dev Sandro on the thread I started above, but ideally one needs to test this properly with two cmdrs. I've wanted to do this with someone as the results would be very interesting, if you ever fancy getting together to create an 'updated' brumster100 guide (he did a useful guide back in early beta but a lot has changed since then), I'd be happy to do that with anyone. Send me a PM if you ever get time to mess about doing a boring but fascinating test.