Can you probe down a cloaked ship

Five seconds is usually short enough such that only frigates will be able to target you before you can re-cloak again. Stealth bombers have a longer delay of 15 seconds. This makes them slightly more vulnerable, as everything smaller than a battleship will be able to target you easily. Compact and Improved cloaks have the longest reactivation delay of 30 seconds. Although you might get away from some capital ships, everything else will be able to target you in that time. The sensor recalibration delay is a delay after decloaking in which you cannot target-lock anything.

The time varies with ships and types of cloak, and is affected by your skill level in Cloaking. This penalty is what is reduced by faction and officer versions of cloaking devices.

The table on page 10 shows all sensor recalibration delays, again I forgot to include Blockade Runners - they have the same delay as Force Recon ships.

This penalty is probably one of the biggest things to know about being cloaked - you cannot decloak and immediately point someone, unless you fly the right ship. There will always be a delay while your sensors are recalibrating until you can start to target-lock your target. As an example, remember you need your Cloaking skill at level four to fit a CovOps cloak. So in your covert ops frigate, force recon or cloaky Tech 3, you will have a sensor recalibration delay time of 6 seconds. You can decrease that by one second, to a 5 second delay if you train Cloaking to level five.

That one second can make a difference between catching your target, and missing it. Because stealth bombers have no sensor recalibration delay, they are the ship most often used as cloaky gankers. Stealth bombers are also your archetypal glass cannon ship - a lot of speed and firepower, but no tank whatsoever. Although Black Ops battleships also have no sensor recalibration delay, they are rarely used for this sort of thing because they cannot warp whilst cloaked.

They are also battleships, and are thus fairly slow and ponderous. Another way of avoiding this delay is to use either an interdictor or heavy interdictor.

These are capable of launching warp disruption bubbles in nullsec and wormhole space, preventing anyone inside warping out and dragging anyone landing on grid into it. Activating these bubbles to trap people does not require that you target them first - and so they are usable the instant you decloak, without having to wait for any sensor recalibration delay.

Firstly, the only thing that indicates that you are currently invisible is the green flashing cloak icon on your overview - - it's easy to not notice that this has stopped flashing green if you're concentrating on other things probe scanning, alts, etc. Secondly, you need to remember that everything is out to decloak you. Stuff you can't see on your overview decloaks you, like corpses and wrecks if you neglected to add these to your "Everything" overview. Deadspace signatures are the things that your probes lock onto when you scan down wormholes, cosmic signatures, or what have you.

They do not appear on your overview, and the ones next to wormholes will decloak you. You can jump through a wormhole, be out of decloak range of the wormhole but still unable to cloak because you are within m of the deadspace signature associated with that wormhole. This can also sometimes happen on gates, where jumping through can place you right next to an object already in space. This is however very rare. Pretty much the only thing that doesn't decloak you is other cloaked ships.

And if they decloak themselves, they will promptly decloak you if you are close enough. Jumping through wormholes or gates is the one time you need to be uncloaked when travelling, and thus is the most dangerous. Once you can use cloaking devices, it is a very good idea to use the relative safety of hisec to practice re-cloaking yourself after jumping. The technique is to activate your cloaking device about half a second after you start to move.

The act of aligning, or initiating a warp-to command, or double-clicking in space to start moving, breaks your cloak and you need to activate your cloak as soon as possible after this happens. If you activate your cloak too early you will receive an error message because you are already cloaked. If that happens you can immediately try the cloaking device again to cloak up - but do not mindlessly spam the cloak button without checking whether it activates.

If you do this, the moment you are able to cloak you will, but the next time you press the button you will decloak yourself again - and now you have the cloak reactivation timer that I already talked about to stop you cloaking again. The other time you need to be uncloaked is when docking or undocking. Both of these are highly dangerous moments for invisible ships. If you warp to the station itself you can sometimes land on grid too far out to dock instantly, and you will need to slowboat into the station whilst uncloaked to dock.

One way around this is to create insta-dock bookmarks, which are bookmarks inside the docking radius of a station that you can warp to, to make sure you are in docking range immediately.

Also worth noting is that when you are flying any ship with a covert ops cloak, giving a dock command won't necessarily result in you actually docking up. What usually happens is that you warp to the station, and your ship attempts to dock. Your ship is still cloaked, so that fails you get an error message which stops the dock command.

The station itself then decloaks you. Undocking is probably slighty more dangerous, because most stations will undock you well within the zero radius, making you unable to cloak. The time taken for you to align out, warp out and only then be able to cloak is quite enough time for someone to catch you.

The best way around this is to simply not dock in the first place. The second best way to avoid this problem is to make insta-undock bookmarks. These are bookmarks in line with the undock vector - because when you undock you are moving at full speed in a certain direction, warping in that direction should be instantaneous.

Finally look out for smartbombing battleships on gates anyone been through Rancer recently? While the cloak is active the ship suffers massive speed penalty. While the cloak is active the ship is unable to warp.

While the cloak is active the ship cannot target anything. After a ship uncloaks it is unable to target anything while the sensors are being calibrated up to 27 seconds on most basic cloak and skill.

Covert ops cloaking device can only be used by certain T2 and faction ships. The covert ops cloaking device has drastically less severe penalties compared to the normal cloak: No scan resolution penalty. No speed penalty while active. Ship is able to warp while cloaked.

After a ship uncloaks it is unable to target anything while the sensors are being calibrated up to 6 seconds. Of course if you were sitting at a warpable object planet, moon, etc , it could have been luck that a gang warped to that location as well for whatever reason. Baneken View Profile View Posts. Hawk View Profile View Posts. That and having a ship capable of fitting a covert ops cloak stealth bombers, covert ops ships like the buzzard for caldari, or the tech II industrial ships that way you can stay perma cloaky even while warping.

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User Info: F00tballguy User Info: Barrowhite. If you have a cloaking device active you do not show up on probe or directional scanners. If you were to log off with a cloaking device active in a condition where you would not normally disappear in space e. You still have a GCC. Then your cloaking device will remain operational untill you disappear. User Info: Gibberling