Cloaking

Hi

This is a question on the subject of cloaking.	Whilst FT defines it
clearly, the rules are rather vague.  It doesn't help that the rules
start with "The suggested way ...".  Is there a clearer definition of
the rules, or has anyone come up with some.

For example the rules suggest that a ship cannot use cloaking during
FTL.  However, an SDB has no FTL drive.  An example of one of my cloaked
SDB ship designs follows:-

SBD Hari Kiri  (Captial Ship gut ripper)

			Mass	Points	Comment
			--------	---------	--------------
Mass 32 		32	Most effective size for a capital sized
(Mass 96) FTL tug
Thrust 12			384	We allow Super drives
Armoured Hull 1 	2	8	Armoured Hull 1 takes up a 20th
of the mass of the ship
19 Scatter Packs	19	76	These are a cross between
submunition packs and scatter guns
Cloaking Field		3	64

For explanation in our campaign rules the scatterpack is a single shot
weapon.  Range 6" does 1 dice damage per scatterpack.  1 mass, cost 4
points.

The ship's designed usage is to sneak up to capital ships, unload its
scatterpacks into it (average 66 points damage), if it isn't dead then
it rams it, or runs away.

But the issue is.  When a fleet comes out of FTL and cloaked ships are
already in the system, can they be cloaked before the battle commences
or masked in some way from the initial Long Range Sensor Scan?

If people reckon that they should be visible then, I try shall come up
with some other ways of masking the cloaked ship.

hmm thinking about it 

what about a SDB with area ECM and weasel boats with the signature of an
uncloaked SDB Hari Kiri and the real SDB Hari Kiri is at the same point
in space as the weasel boat signature.

Next, what about putting a weasel boat generator on a SDB Hari Kiri
which when it cloaks it leaves behind a copy of its self.

Simon Tolfree
-----
"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you
hit the target."    ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT