Cloaking Device

Cloaking Device in Full Thrust

Unlike More Thrust cloaks, Star Trek cloaks allow a ship to use passive sensors while cloaked. To cloak a ship, the player writes in his orders that he will cloak that turn, but does not have to specify how many turns he will remain cloaked. All ships are then moved normally. The cloaking ship may not use any weapons or shields for that turn.

Cost Mass

3 per 2 ship mass 1 per 18 ship mass

When the cloaking player activates that ship during the fire resolution phase, the ship’s miniature is removed from the table and replaced by a marker. The next ship activated by the opposing player may shoot at the cloaking ship (assuming it is in range/arc, etc) but no other ships activated after that may. This gives the opposing player one shot as the ship is cloaking.

While cloaked, a player writes his moves normally, but must estimate his ship’s position on the table. The cloaked ship may not use any weapons, shields or other systems except for sensors. (There are examples of cloaked ships using transporters, but to allow this in the game would be unbalancing IMHO.) It may not be targeted by phasers/ disrupters, but is subject to damage from area effect weapons like photon torpedo spreads. Cloaked ships may use passive sensors normally.

They may also use active sensors, but doing so reveals the ship’s position; the player moves his cloaking point marker to the cloaked ship’s current position in accordance with the orders he has written. This position fix is not exact enough for the cloaked ship to be targeted with phasers/disrupters, although the opposing player now knows where to launch his photon spreads! Ships may attempt to detect cloaked ships (see the sensor rules below).

If you are playing a game with a lot of cloaked ships and do not have a referee, it may be helpful to have a simple grid pattern laid out on the gaming area. Players can then plot their cloaked ships on a sheet of graph paper (not shown to his enemy), which can be used to determine the effects of photon torpedoes and sensor sweeps.

To decloak, the player writes in the ship’s orders that it is decloaking. All uncloaked ships are then moved normally. During the fire resolution phase, when the player chooses to activate the decloaking ship, he announces that the ship is decloaking and plots the ship’s moves from the point where it cloaked (or from its last known position, if it had been revealed in some way). The ship’s miniature is then placed at its current location. The ship may then fire any offensive weaponry, but may not use any shields that turn. Any opposing ships that have not yet fired may then fire on the uncloaked (& unshielded!) ship during their turns.

Cloak Displacement (optional)

If you are using graph paper to plot cloaked movement (as described above), or if you are playing a PBM/PBeM game, cloaked players will be able to compute their positions exactly. If you wish to introduce further positional uncertainty (say, due to the slight distortion the cloak causes), then when a ship decloaks, roll 1d6 for every turn of cloaked movement and score the dice like beam attacks, i.e. — 1-3: 0, 4-5: 1, 6: 2.

Dice roll Displacement distance

6 2″

4-5 1″

1-3 0″

The decloaking ship is then displaced that many inches in a random direction.