Cloaking Devices for Capital Ships

[Tom Cruise 1,278]

I was thinking the other day; considering the "no ship that small has a cloaking device" line from Empire, why don't we see any capital ship scale cloaking attachments in this system? Or have I just missed something between all the books? 

How do you think you'd approach giving stats to one if you did make it available?

[Yaccarus 1,214]

1 hour ago, Tom Cruise said:

I was thinking the other day; considering the "no ship that small has a cloaking device" line from Empire, why don't we see any capital ship scale cloaking attachments in this system? Or have I just missed something between all the books? 

How do you think you'd approach giving stats to one if you did make it available?

Cloaking devices seem to be very rare in general. I would also suspect that there might be a sweet spot between too big and too little.

[Ghostofman 8,319]

We don't see them much for game balance reasons. A fully functional cloak would just make a ship undetectable, with little to no way to detect them. Considering how badly people interperate stealth as it is, a device like this would be plain broken outside of a GM narrative component.

 

More fluff wise we have seen a cloak in Clone Wars, in a corvette/light frigate sized ship that is dedicated to the cloak. So that should be an indicator of what kind of ship is expected to be able to cloak. 

[AceSolo5 389]

There was also Tarkin's Corvette from the novel (Tarkin) that was cloaked... Think it was called the Carrion Spike, but I may be wrong on that bit. 

[Tom Cruise 1,278]

13 hours ago, Ghostofman said:

We don't see them much for game balance reasons. A fully functional cloak would just make a ship undetectable, with little to no way to detect them. Considering how badly people interperate stealth as it is, a device like this would be plain broken outside of a GM narrative component.

Ehhh, I feel like when you're getting into the territory of PCs commanding a capital ship you're already drifting outside of the realms of reasonable balance. 

[Ghostofman 8,319]

1 hour ago, Tom Cruise said:

Ehhh, I feel like when you're getting into the territory of PCs commanding a capital ship you're already drifting outside of the realms of reasonable balance. 

If the GM is willing to handle it deliberately they can both work. Capital ships work differently, but can be run if the gm accounts for it in the campaign design, factoring in the additional options, limitations, and resources a ship that represents.

A cloak is also technically manageable, if the gm accounts for it and recognizes that invisibility is not equal to invulnerability.

The issue is in both cases the gm may not do those things, and so it becomes unbalanced and it's lifespan short.