Night vision makes stealth builds obsolete?

Greetings Commanders.

Just wanted to ask a question. Prefferably to the more stealth oriented of You.
I have just recently been flying around planetside doing missions when i noticed that night vision makes very distant ships(the ones that appear as the scrambled blip on the compass) shine bright making it a very easy target for fixed hardpoints. I went on talking to my friend who was engaged in stealth gameplay and said that night vision makes that aspect of the game quite obsolete.

No matter the heat reading of the ship it still is highlighted in a way that it's very hard to miss on the black background of space.
I searched forums for similar questions being asked in a thread but haven't found any so i'm opening my own.

What are Your thoughts?
 
There was a silent nerf to night vision sometime fairly recently. It used to have a range of 20+ km for ships, but this has been bought back to be more inline with sensor distances. You'll still show up clearly before you are withing resolve distance if you are silent or extremely cold, but it's not the all seeing eye it originally was.

Yes, if they know your general area (and that unresolved contact or your exhaust trails, if you aren't careful, can give this away from beyond weapons range) they will still be able to visually spot you well before they can target you, but this was usually the case anyway.

It does nullify the advantages of dark colored paints, but as those were supposed to be cosmetic anyway, I'm not complaining too much (despite having Black Friday paint for most ships and tactical graphite for the others).
 
In all fairness it appears to be an in-game enabled "wall-hack" type of thing.
The distance at which ships "render" should at least scale with opponent's sensors and stealth ship's heat. Same way that they used to appear on scanner.
 
It only allows for accurate shooting with fixed hitscan weapons, but it grants immunity to turreted weapons, prevents missiles from locking on, removes all target leading assistance and removes gimballing and the microgimbal effect on fixed weapons.
 
Truly stealthy flying, in dark painted ship, running ice cold, so no dirty drives for added agility/speed, shieldless-hull-tanked, so no shield signature, and flight assist off to prevent the emission of contrails, should be rewarded with a serious tactical advantage to compensate their pilots for the additional skill and effort they are putting in. Stealth builds essentially lost their efficacy when engineers dropped, as it became nonviable to run shieldless against stacked monster shield boosters and SCB's. Indeed, 2.1 also nerfed heatsink launchers from 4 ammo count to 3, although one of the most useful things Ram Tah had done at that time was have a blue print that returned the ammo count to 4.

While it is very easy to moan about the loss of a gameplay style, it is more productive to suggest ways to bring it back, I'm thinking that with a new variable into the game say call it "signature emmissions" that corelated to the range and accuracy a ship can be detected with:
  • an engineering special effect to bulkheads could be introduced, "Radar Absorbent Material" that would obfuscate a ships night vision signature, this special effect could also be applied to Reinforcement Packages for both hull and modules - this would reduce the signature emissions
  • a power plant and distributor mod could be created EM shielded that simply adds weight to the module and reduces its EM signature - this would reduce the signature emissions
  • a thrusters special effect or recipe could be created "shielded magnets" that, you guessed it adds weight and would reduce the signature emissions - this would be representing enclosing the magnetic section of our hall effect thrusters in an non magnetic material to prevent the electromagnetic emissions being detectable by other ships
  • a new module could be created, or better yet, a utility slot, a "cryo-cooler" sprays liquid hydrogen fuel onto the heat vanes to cool them. The liquid hydrogen would absorb heat from the vanes to expand into its natural gaseous state, cooling the ship, but consuming fuel to do so. Again this would reduce signature emissions.
  • low temperature mods or special effects for weapons could be created again reducing signature emmissions.
  • New module type - ammo racks - essentially a cargo rack for ammunition, it is one of the bug bares of running stealth builds that suitably low thermal weapons all have limited ammo counts, where as visible ships can have shields that outstrip your ammo count's hit points, ammo racks would enable stealth ships to carry more munitions to a fight to hunt bigger/better shielded or better armoured conventional ships
  • new utility module, target jammer, like shield boosters they stack in efficacy, their purpose would be to further lower "signature emmissions" by scrambling the emissions and projecting radar decoy signals, the more jammers a ship carries the stronger a signal the decoy presents to the adversary. To balance these they would be power hungry, rapidly draining a weps capacitor.
All of these engineering tweaks to reduce a ships signature emissions would make it virtually impossible to detect with current technologies, including the slightly overpowered night vision. To counter these things, and make sure stealth doesn't become an overpowered unstoppable meta, ships could be equipped or engineered to have:
  • "High Resolution Sensors" - either an engineering blueprint/special effect, or an entirely new module that trades off range for sensitivity. The higher sensitivity the sensors have, the less effective an opponent with a lowered signature emissions score would be at evading detection
  • "Emissive munitions" could get a real buff, lore/roleplay it as emissive munitions contain tiny transponders / highly reflective materials that render the target move visible to sensors. Think like paintballing them with reflective paint.
  • new Ship Launched Fighter loadouts with anti-stealth modules/weaponry
    • Networked sensor data allowing greater sensitivity - like radio telescope networks
    • target designator beacons as a new cannon munition that is a beacon that upon impact with an enemy ship transmits its location to the mothership's sensor net
    • SLF weapon system that "hacks" a target ship causing it to generate more heat, by any of the following - messing with power priorities / locking out heatsinks / turning on lots of modules - overcharging the powerplant / overclocking the thrusters? To do this the SLF needs to keep a beed on the stealth target, and "fire" its hacking module, the longer it keeps a bead on the ship the more heat/emissions it causes the target to create
  • New optional module, sensors preamplifier - amplifies all signals coming into the ships sensor network thus increasing sensitivity, but at the cost of power and weight and loss of an internal slot of similar size to a ships sensors, furthermore it would create large amounts of detectable electromagnetism thus increasing the host ships "signature emissions". Your stealth enemies now glow brighter on your scanner when you use one of these modules, but sadly you also glow brighter on their scanner due to it.
  • New limpet controller - radar limpet, programmed to hold formation with your ship, easily targetable by your adversaries, their presence in the battle increases your ships sensors sensitivity - this would make it possible for a support ship to act as an AWACS by carrying long range sensors augmented with sensitivity increasing limpets, but those are still just limpets so could easily be taken out by the enemy.
The above introduces only two new variables into sensor resolution calculations, a bucket load of modules, creating a bit of a cat and mouse game with regards to load outs, these modules, with their modifications to the two new parameters of sensor resolution calculations, will enable new tactics to be created by players, and offer a new clever way for squadrons to cooperate, sharing sensor data in a battle.
 
Nowadays, whenever I go into combat, I always have night vision turned on. Not only because it makes stealth ships easier to see, it makes ALL ships easier to see and makes fixed weapons just that much easier to use at a distance.
 
Truly stealthy flying, in dark painted ship, running ice cold, so no dirty drives for added agility/speed, shieldless-hull-tanked, so no shield signature, and flight assist off to prevent the emission of contrails, should be rewarded with a serious tactical advantage to compensate their pilots for the additional skill and effort they are putting in. Stealth builds essentially lost their efficacy when engineers dropped, as it became nonviable to run shieldless against stacked monster shield boosters and SCB's. Indeed, 2.1 also nerfed heatsink launchers from 4 ammo count to 3, although one of the most useful things Ram Tah had done at that time was have a blue print that returned the ammo count to 4.

While it is very easy to moan about the loss of a gameplay style, it is more productive to suggest ways to bring it back, I'm thinking that with a new variable into the game say call it "signature emmissions" that corelated to the range and accuracy a ship can be detected with:
  • an engineering special effect to bulkheads could be introduced, "Radar Absorbent Material" that would obfuscate a ships night vision signature, this special effect could also be applied to Reinforcement Packages for both hull and modules - this would reduce the signature emissions
  • a power plant and distributor mod could be created EM shielded that simply adds weight to the module and reduces its EM signature - this would reduce the signature emissions
  • a thrusters special effect or recipe could be created "shielded magnets" that, you guessed it adds weight and would reduce the signature emissions - this would be representing enclosing the magnetic section of our hall effect thrusters in an non magnetic material to prevent the electromagnetic emissions being detectable by other ships
  • a new module could be created, or better yet, a utility slot, a "cryo-cooler" sprays liquid hydrogen fuel onto the heat vanes to cool them. The liquid hydrogen would absorb heat from the vanes to expand into its natural gaseous state, cooling the ship, but consuming fuel to do so. Again this would reduce signature emissions.
  • low temperature mods or special effects for weapons could be created again reducing signature emmissions.
  • New module type - ammo racks - essentially a cargo rack for ammunition, it is one of the bug bares of running stealth builds that suitably low thermal weapons all have limited ammo counts, where as visible ships can have shields that outstrip your ammo count's hit points, ammo racks would enable stealth ships to carry more munitions to a fight to hunt bigger/better shielded or better armoured conventional ships
  • new utility module, target jammer, like shield boosters they stack in efficacy, their purpose would be to further lower "signature emmissions" by scrambling the emissions and projecting radar decoy signals, the more jammers a ship carries the stronger a signal the decoy presents to the adversary. To balance these they would be power hungry, rapidly draining a weps capacitor.
All of these engineering tweaks to reduce a ships signature emissions would make it virtually impossible to detect with current technologies, including the slightly overpowered night vision. To counter these things, and make sure stealth doesn't become an overpowered unstoppable meta, ships could be equipped or engineered to have:
  • "High Resolution Sensors" - either an engineering blueprint/special effect, or an entirely new module that trades off range for sensitivity. The higher sensitivity the sensors have, the less effective an opponent with a lowered signature emissions score would be at evading detection
  • "Emissive munitions" could get a real buff, lore/roleplay it as emissive munitions contain tiny transponders / highly reflective materials that render the target move visible to sensors. Think like paintballing them with reflective paint.
  • new Ship Launched Fighter loadouts with anti-stealth modules/weaponry
    • Networked sensor data allowing greater sensitivity - like radio telescope networks
    • target designator beacons as a new cannon munition that is a beacon that upon impact with an enemy ship transmits its location to the mothership's sensor net
    • SLF weapon system that "hacks" a target ship causing it to generate more heat, by any of the following - messing with power priorities / locking out heatsinks / turning on lots of modules - overcharging the powerplant / overclocking the thrusters? To do this the SLF needs to keep a beed on the stealth target, and "fire" its hacking module, the longer it keeps a bead on the ship the more heat/emissions it causes the target to create
  • New optional module, sensors preamplifier - amplifies all signals coming into the ships sensor network thus increasing sensitivity, but at the cost of power and weight and loss of an internal slot of similar size to a ships sensors, furthermore it would create large amounts of detectable electromagnetism thus increasing the host ships "signature emissions". Your stealth enemies now glow brighter on your scanner when you use one of these modules, but sadly you also glow brighter on their scanner due to it.
  • New limpet controller - radar limpet, programmed to hold formation with your ship, easily targetable by your adversaries, their presence in the battle increases your ships sensors sensitivity - this would make it possible for a support ship to act as an AWACS by carrying long range sensors augmented with sensitivity increasing limpets, but those are still just limpets so could easily be taken out by the enemy.
The above introduces only two new variables into sensor resolution calculations, a bucket load of modules, creating a bit of a cat and mouse game with regards to load outs, these modules, with their modifications to the two new parameters of sensor resolution calculations, will enable new tactics to be created by players, and offer a new clever way for squadrons to cooperate, sharing sensor data in a battle.
That is well thought out and I hope you are copy pasting from your suggestions thread as it will sink without trace on page 3 of a stealth thread.

As someone running a Shieldless hull tank frag Krait with clean drives and everything engineered for cool - 9/10 would buy your ideas.

(My Krait runs so cold, I got my tongue stuck to the heat vanes.
My Krait runs so cool it used to jam with Kurt Cobain.
etc)
 
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Don't care much about Stealth builds but i think night vision is a wonderful feature. Driving around Kumay and towards the south pole is permanently night time. If night vision wasn't a thing i wouldn't be able to see anything.
 
I think they really need to change how silent running works.

- Remove it COMPLETELY from sensors (visual confirmation only)

There is literally no stealth at all with the current system since you can either see a target with the naked eye or you simply LOOK in the area where the unresolved contact is until you find it.
 
I think NV should only be available when on planets (game should easily detect this). NV in space is stupid and especially the advantage it gives you.

Not just for stealth builds, general fighting, etc... People using it for advantage in normal CZ or AX CZ or whatever because you can see everything.

I mean, do what you want...
 
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