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[Flying Dice]

Mm, they're not good for direct combat ships now, but I still find myself using them. As I said, a pair of max-size passive sensors strapped to a cloak and TH-reduction drive with a decade worth of engineering spaces can do wonders. I drop them into inhabited systems to monitor ship movements, and in combat to spot for long-range carrier strikes.

Basically, offset one of those stealth ships near enemy fleet groups but out of any place they're likely to go, then launch strike groups from 1-2b km out with integrated active sensor fighters. Once they're in missile range pop on the actives and fire. It pretty heavily cuts down on danger 'cause you don't actually need an active sensor to track things, just to fire at them, which in turn means they don't have a beacon to home in on.

[Shooer]

My favorite use for stealth modules is to create extreme range planet killer ships.  Usually no bigger than 8k tons, 4 missiles each with the sub munitions having active sensors.

I use them as opening strikes to start a war or to just crack a well PDCed planet.

[Cthulhu]

Stealth in space is silly anyway, I probably won't use it on principle, especially if it's been nerfed. 

All you need to do is scan for heat signatures, there's no practical way to eliminate heat signatures on a human-crewed ship.  You can shut down everything but that includes life support, or you can block off heat emissions and cook the crew.

[MarcAFK]

Or convert the heat into some other kind of energy and store that, we're talking about trans-Newtonian physics here.   
Maybe carry a black hole with you, dump your heat into something, drop that into a black hole, and store the black holes until you don't need to worry about stealth anymore, then release the black holes to evaporate all the delicious hard gamma rays everywhere.

[Cthulhu]

Then you've gotta deal with the black hole emissions and they can be detected.  Again, either you vent it into space and people use sensors on it or you keep it in the ship and everyone dies.  In real life you solve that by making it an AI ship. That solves a ton of problems actually.

Thermodynamics puts a damper on a lot of space stuff.  There's just no way around waste energy.

[Culise]

Then you've gotta deal with the black hole emissions and they can be detected.  Again, either you vent it into space and people use sensors on it or you keep it in the ship and everyone dies.  In real life you solve that by making it an AI ship. That solves a ton of problems actually.

Thermodynamics puts a damper on a lot of space stuff.  There's just no way around waste energy.

Automation would be better than humans for driving down thermal emissions, certainly, but for the problem of detection, it still assumes that you can design your AI ship to run at temperatures equivalent to background interstellar radiation levels.  Even computers built around purpose-geared superconductive materials will generate significant amounts of heat when compared to a backdrop in the vicinity of 3K, I should think.  Then you have the engines, power generation, weapons...you'll probably get away without shields, but depending on the tech, standby emissions or spooling these up to active posture will give warning signs as well. 

Then again, futuretech, I suppose.

[forsaken1111]

Isn't the idea simply to make sure the emissions emit themselves in a direction away from your opponent? Its not like you're heating up an atmosphere which could be detected. If you emit IR radiation away from a detector it won't detect it until it bounces off of something else.

[Culise]

There are a couple problems.  Basically, the first is that whatever is generating the power needed to move that heat off-ship is itself a huge heat source, and if there are any inefficiencies at all in the power generation or thermal transfer systems, there will be additional waste heat that needs to be moved and dumped.  If you thought hiding a room-temperature human crew was bad, the thought of hiding a fusion reactor should probably make you wince.  Most radiators have efficiency issues when radiating into a limited cone; some form of laser or other forced directional emissive cooling system to dump the heat also has the issue of generating heat which also needs to be dumped.  Basically, you quickly start chasing your own tail; dumping heat requires generating heat, which needs to be dumped as well, which generates even more heat...

The second is that you need to know where the enemy is in order to send the thermal energy where it is not; it becomes rather trivial to detect thermal radiation methods of heat exchange by using fairly minor probes, but this does necessarily presuppose a competent enemy (that is, if you can solve the other problems, you might be able to sneak up on someone who isn't looking for you). 

There are other issues, but not all of them are related to Aurora.  For instance, Aurora's propulsion system means you don't need to use detectable burns to maneuver.  Instead, you just turn off the TN drive you're using and you instantly stop, based on inference from what happens when you take engine damage.  That, unfortunately, also does mean that the power problem above gets even worse, because you need to keep the TN drive continuously active (with all the power demands and thermal issues that entails) just to keep moving.  Moving on conventional reaction thrusters would fall into the "detectable burn" problem, where any maneuvering you do will stand out like a floodlamp at midnight.  That said, you can drive TN drive emissions down ridiculously low as mentioned above in Aurora, so we can probably just assume that was solved at some point. 

Basically, stealth in space, to me, is not in the art of making yourself unseen; that falls prey to thermodynamics.  It's in deception and misdirection; making the enemy believe that what they've detected is something other than what it actually is.  If they think you're a freighter, or another NPR, or even an asteroid or other natural astronomical body (even though asteroids don't have non-circular orbits in Aurora - or, I suppose, even orbits if you turn off that option), that may alter their reactions.  That, obviously, isn't modeled in-game, however, though it'd be fun if it were someday.  Can you imagine stealing someone's IFF and using to launch an alpha-strike on another power?  ^_^

[Cthulhu]

Then you've gotta deal with the black hole emissions and they can be detected.  Again, either you vent it into space and people use sensors on it or you keep it in the ship and everyone dies.  In real life you solve that by making it an AI ship. That solves a ton of problems actually.

Thermodynamics puts a damper on a lot of space stuff.  There's just no way around waste energy.

Automation would be better than humans for driving down thermal emissions, certainly, but for the problem of detection, it still assumes that you can design your AI ship to run at temperatures equivalent to background interstellar radiation levels.  Even computers built around purpose-geared superconductive materials will generate significant amounts of heat when compared to a backdrop in the vicinity of 3K, I should think.  Then you have the engines, power generation, weapons...you'll probably get away without shields, but depending on the tech, standby emissions or spooling these up to active posture will give warning signs as well. 

Then again, futuretech, I suppose.

The idea there was that you could safely power down the ship to only what basic routines are necessary to turn back on eventually, letting it wake up on a signal from a sensor in the area.

[Flying Dice]

Isn't the idea simply to make sure the emissions emit themselves in a direction away from your opponent? Its not like you're heating up an atmosphere which could be detected. If you emit IR radiation away from a detector it won't detect it until it bounces off of something else.

This is pretty much what I figured. And that's if you absolutely refuse to believe that the sci-fi setting with FTL drives and mass-produced antimatter can have really good heatsinks or a way to convert thermal energy into something useful for the ship.

Actually for that matter it's now my headcanon that Aurora ships convert waste heat into electricity, seeing as how the only reactors they ever seem to need are the ones to power E/KWs. That neatly explains why their IR signatures are just their drive torch and nothing else when the same sensors pick up all the heat sources from planetary populations.

[iceball3]

Mm, they're not good for direct combat ships now, but I still find myself using them. As I said, a pair of max-size passive sensors strapped to a cloak and TH-reduction drive with a decade worth of engineering spaces can do wonders. I drop them into inhabited systems to monitor ship movements, and in combat to spot for long-range carrier strikes.

Basically, offset one of those stealth ships near enemy fleet groups but out of any place they're likely to go, then launch strike groups from 1-2b km out with integrated active sensor fighters. Once they're in missile range pop on the actives and fire. It pretty heavily cuts down on danger 'cause you don't actually need an active sensor to track things, just to fire at them, which in turn means they don't have a beacon to home in on.

For both maintenance, research, and cost efficiency, would it be easier to design those ships with cargo modules instead of gigantic sensors? Not sure how efficient DSTSs are for their cargo size, but they are rather effective if you send the ship to do back and forth trecks with full cargo of the stuff, stick them on some nondescript insignificant system body.
Their main effective benefit tends to be that they have rather weak signatures themselves and can be placed as permanent installations away from the main concern locations due to how strong their sensors are, but the cons are that they have no protection against nuking and you might to need several trips to make them really effective for their placement, as you can't exactly move them on demand like you would a sensor ship.
But yeah, typically, my main maneuver when entering a new system is to deposit tracking stations near all the jump points (on asteroids, mainly, not sure if it counts as an exploit with non-orbiting asteroids), and firing sensor buoys onto any points which I lack appropriate sensor coverage of due to lack of bodies. Very good for keeping track of hostile activities even while they are very far from your home system.

[Flying Dice]

It would work, but it'd (if I'm remembering my tonnage numbers correctly) mean that the ships would have to be larger (and thus both more costly to build and harder to hide), and you'd lose out on flexibility for systems with few/no uninhabited bodies. They're meant more as infiltrators and fleet assistance tools, not permanent installations -- that's what DSTS are for, after all. But yes, that'd be something you could do if you wanted to put a permanent eye on an NPR that you didn't want to kill off.

[Sheb]

I hate NPRs using AMM as shipkillers. Next time I get in Wolf454 I swear I'll destroy every contact from stand off range and use the lifepods for PD practice.

[RedKing]

In my experience, AMMs are the only credible enemy threat to my fleets. And *every* NPR uses them. I wish there was a little more variety to NPR designs and AI tactics. I hate wiping out a fleet in deep space handily, only to be sandblasted to death by a couple of PDCs with 20000+ AMMs.

[forsaken1111]

Maybe there should be some kind of soft damage threshold for higher rated armor, so little piddly warheads were unlikely to do damage.