So, this is my first post in the forun, it's more like a suggestion to frontier
We all know that the silent running feature is quite complicated, no matter if it's a good time to use it or if it's not, it is still a very discussed subject.
When you rig for silent running, you close off your ship's radiators. Your ship still generates heat and cooks, but to other vessels it appears cold. As part of silent running you also turn off shields as the context is that these effectively radiate heat directly, even with the ship's radiators off seems that we will STILL show some heat signature, so we cannot prevent all heat from escaping.
Starting Conclusions :
When Silent Running is disengaged the heat bar at the bottom left will be the heat signature we are emitting and also our vessel's heat, when silent running engages it will mean how heated up is the vessel interior and will not show how much heat signature is being emitted;
WithSilent Running mode ON the vessel will show a SMALLER heat signature BUT it will still show it ;
So, for exemple :
Silent running is OFF and our heat signature is at 15%. It means we are emiting 15% of a heat signature to other vessels sensors. Now we decide to turn ON silent running so in theory we would emit a smaller heat signature, right now with silent running ON we are at 15% Heat but we DON'T know how much heat is being emitted to other vessels as we would know if the function was off. Imagine if for exemple, at 15% Heat we would emit a 5% Heat signature, but since we started to heat up, when we reach 32% Heat our signature will be at for exemple 24% to other vessels, well at that point the signature is a bit higher than it would be before we first started the silent running funtion, but if we disable it NOW it will burst into 30% so it's kinda hard to know the moments to turn it on and off.
If we have a table of how much heat all the sensors can indentify it would help a lot. A class C sensor can target a ship with only 30% + Heat signature from 1 KM distance otherwise the sensor would only capt a vague presence signal. Now that same sensor gets only 500 meters away from the ship, so if the ship's heat signature is at 20% + for exemple the sensor will capt that ship since it is at closer range. So to avoid being targeted by that sensor we would keep our heat signature at 29% -
Now, let's imagine a fictional situation to put together all the stuff I've written up there.
So imagine we are carrying ilegal cargo or stolen cargo, our heat is at 29% and we are at 4 KM distance away from a vessel equiped with that class C sensor, imagine we are a vague presence in his sensor and this vessel wants to scan us, we surely don't want to be scanned, so we could try to engage supercruise and than jump to some other sector as quickly as we could, since he's not that close, but let's imagine for the sake of this example we want to lower our heat signature do delay as long as we can his lock on us. Since the heat is at 29% he cannot lock on us, but we know he is coming for us, so we must get that heat signature down as quickly as possible to delay his lock on us, to be within the margin of a 29% Heat we surely have some modules already turned off, but not all of them, so what we will do is acelerate to maximum speed, turn our flight assist off and than turn all our modules off, with the flight assist off we will continue to drift at our maximum speed through space even if we have disabled our thrusters, with all modules turned off let's imagine our lowest heat would be 9% but since he will come towards us we just cannot afford to wait for our heat to go down cause it will take some time, but for now let's just leave it like this... The ship is at 1 KM away, and our heat only dropped to 22% we wont be detected yet but as soon as he gets closer we will, in within 3 Seconds he will be at a 750 Meters away, so let's imagine he will detect us when he reaches that distance, what we will do is, as a last resourse to get a few more seconds, is turn our silent running on, this would cause our heat to drop from 22% from for example 13% to his sensors, well this would require him getting more or less to a dintance of 300 meters before locking on us since his sensors would be getting closer therefore stronger and our heat wouldn't just stay at 13% because of silent running, from there it's up to you to run away.
Well, my point with this is to examplify that with so little information about the silent running mode we cannot use it properly I guess... Should I turn it on? or just drift away with my modules off?
I love to sneak aroud undetected but even though searching around the web for more info about this function I couldn't find much to understand the logic behind it, this examples are based on the little I found so I hope I did manage to make my examples close to how it really works and hope the silent running function isn't something totally different from what I've written
Please Frontier give us a few more info about this mode, make some tables so people like me can be super accurate about the ranges of detection and stuff like it. ^^
We all know that the silent running feature is quite complicated, no matter if it's a good time to use it or if it's not, it is still a very discussed subject.
When you rig for silent running, you close off your ship's radiators. Your ship still generates heat and cooks, but to other vessels it appears cold. As part of silent running you also turn off shields as the context is that these effectively radiate heat directly, even with the ship's radiators off seems that we will STILL show some heat signature, so we cannot prevent all heat from escaping.
Starting Conclusions :
When Silent Running is disengaged the heat bar at the bottom left will be the heat signature we are emitting and also our vessel's heat, when silent running engages it will mean how heated up is the vessel interior and will not show how much heat signature is being emitted;
WithSilent Running mode ON the vessel will show a SMALLER heat signature BUT it will still show it ;
So, for exemple :
Silent running is OFF and our heat signature is at 15%. It means we are emiting 15% of a heat signature to other vessels sensors. Now we decide to turn ON silent running so in theory we would emit a smaller heat signature, right now with silent running ON we are at 15% Heat but we DON'T know how much heat is being emitted to other vessels as we would know if the function was off. Imagine if for exemple, at 15% Heat we would emit a 5% Heat signature, but since we started to heat up, when we reach 32% Heat our signature will be at for exemple 24% to other vessels, well at that point the signature is a bit higher than it would be before we first started the silent running funtion, but if we disable it NOW it will burst into 30% so it's kinda hard to know the moments to turn it on and off.
If we have a table of how much heat all the sensors can indentify it would help a lot. A class C sensor can target a ship with only 30% + Heat signature from 1 KM distance otherwise the sensor would only capt a vague presence signal. Now that same sensor gets only 500 meters away from the ship, so if the ship's heat signature is at 20% + for exemple the sensor will capt that ship since it is at closer range. So to avoid being targeted by that sensor we would keep our heat signature at 29% -
Now, let's imagine a fictional situation to put together all the stuff I've written up there.
So imagine we are carrying ilegal cargo or stolen cargo, our heat is at 29% and we are at 4 KM distance away from a vessel equiped with that class C sensor, imagine we are a vague presence in his sensor and this vessel wants to scan us, we surely don't want to be scanned, so we could try to engage supercruise and than jump to some other sector as quickly as we could, since he's not that close, but let's imagine for the sake of this example we want to lower our heat signature do delay as long as we can his lock on us. Since the heat is at 29% he cannot lock on us, but we know he is coming for us, so we must get that heat signature down as quickly as possible to delay his lock on us, to be within the margin of a 29% Heat we surely have some modules already turned off, but not all of them, so what we will do is acelerate to maximum speed, turn our flight assist off and than turn all our modules off, with the flight assist off we will continue to drift at our maximum speed through space even if we have disabled our thrusters, with all modules turned off let's imagine our lowest heat would be 9% but since he will come towards us we just cannot afford to wait for our heat to go down cause it will take some time, but for now let's just leave it like this... The ship is at 1 KM away, and our heat only dropped to 22% we wont be detected yet but as soon as he gets closer we will, in within 3 Seconds he will be at a 750 Meters away, so let's imagine he will detect us when he reaches that distance, what we will do is, as a last resourse to get a few more seconds, is turn our silent running on, this would cause our heat to drop from 22% from for example 13% to his sensors, well this would require him getting more or less to a dintance of 300 meters before locking on us since his sensors would be getting closer therefore stronger and our heat wouldn't just stay at 13% because of silent running, from there it's up to you to run away.
Well, my point with this is to examplify that with so little information about the silent running mode we cannot use it properly I guess... Should I turn it on? or just drift away with my modules off?
I love to sneak aroud undetected but even though searching around the web for more info about this function I couldn't find much to understand the logic behind it, this examples are based on the little I found so I hope I did manage to make my examples close to how it really works and hope the silent running function isn't something totally different from what I've written
Please Frontier give us a few more info about this mode, make some tables so people like me can be super accurate about the ranges of detection and stuff like it. ^^