Home » Primary Racial Traits » SS » How to Hide my PRT
| Re: How to Hide my PRT |
Sun, 19 June 2016 21:33   |
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 magic9mushroom |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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Okay, I'll admit I was being a little terse there. Let me elaborate a bit more.
The three situations which prove someone to be SS are:
1) You see a ship that could not have gotten to where you saw it without spending a year in deep space within your scanner range, but you didn't see it that year.
2) You get a penscan on a world and things that should be there (e.g. HW starbase, freighters on a world whose pop is increasing) aren't.
3) You see an SS hull, or learn a design (combat/WM) with an SS toy on it.
1) and 2) detect the SS's inherent cloaking, although when doing 2) you should remember that ISB also gives 20% cloaking. 3) is the basic giveaway which is common to all PRTs with toys.
The difficulty of avoiding 1) is basically dependent on universe density. If the universe is dense enough that you can planet-hop every year, this is no real hazard (penscanner races will probably be able to tell when they get Elec 10, but that's quite late). In a sparser uni, though, you really have to work to avoid it. Fortunately, sparsity works both ways, and if you have NAS not only your HW planetary scanner but all your scouts have 300 ly scanners of their own - this means you'll be able to spot nearby homeworlds (apart from other SS, of course) very early. And to be able to reason out your PRT, they have to detect you first - either by chance encounter at a planet, or by you going within 25% of their scan range and being seen through the cloak. So, you just need to avoid those. To be completely safe, you'd want to avoid scouting inside 300 ly of confirmed homeworlds until you've got Chameleon Scanners, but if you're confident you've spotted all their scouts you can just manually avoid running into them. And obviously, stay outside 75 ly from homeworlds and 25 ly from the scouts (Scoper 150 and Rhino Scanner with NAS).
The only races with early penscans are JoaT and SS itself, so 2) isn't going to apply to everyone. If they're also SS, you can pretty much forget hiding your PRT; you won't know they're there to hide from until it's almost too late. But the same applies to them, so you get the consolation prize of knowing they're also SS.  JoaT... well, again, it depends on density. To stop them scanning your worlds, you'll have to intercept and destroy their scouts, which is easy enough since JoaT penscanner scouts tend to stay in deep space rather than planet-hopping. The problem is that the scouts themselves have 120 or 160 ly worth of normal scanning (assuming NAS, which is ordinarily a very safe assumption), and by encountering them you run straight back into situation 1). If the universe is dense enough to be able to ambush them without having to travel through space where they "should" have seen you, then it'll work, but if it's sparse enough that you have to run through deep space to do it, you're stuck in Catch-22 because the very fact of intercepting them without them seeing you coming implies you're SS.
Avoiding #3 isn't very hard; most of the SS toys add cloaking and are therefore very hard to see in the first place, most of the time for somebody to deliberately intercept you they have to know you're there, and many of the SS toys don't show up until the cat's well out of the bag anyway. WM spotting Transport Cloaking freighters at your planets is honestly the most likely case for this to matter; if someone's intercepting your freighters, you're already at war with them, and avoiding suspicion due to PRT has become moot. Interception or not using Transport Cloaking are probably the best ways to deal with this.
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