I was watching the Beta Gameplay videos again and one thing struck me that isn't very clear by the videos.
On what principals to the cloaking device operate?
The reason I ask is because, from the videos, it looks as if cloaking actually takes the ship out of phase because of how it behaves. If it were just a visual cloak it would behave much differently.
If an enemy ship fires a missile at you and you cloak; it makes sense that it would miss, as a missile tracking the target will have nothing left to track and miss as a result.
But if the enemy ship fires a projectile at your ship; cloaking shouldn't prevent that shot from hitting because those shots have already been fired at your destination trajectory and you can't just pull extra maneuverability out of nowhere.
If you watch this video you see that cloaking after a shot has been fired misses you for some reason and also asteroids that would normally hit you miss aswell.
Suggestion:
You should still be untargetable if you cloak
Missiles should miss if they were fired before you cloak (hence you being untargetable)
Make it so that projectiles fired before you cloak still hit you
Allow asteriods to still hit you if you are cloaked
Increase the base cloak time to offset this change
I just took it to mean that the actual movement of the two ships in combat had been abstracted. So while it looks like your slugging it out back and forth with the other ship, you are actually maneuvering around. So when you turn on the cloak, you are also moving and the shot misses because the shots were fired at where you were before you cloaked(or where the other ships tracking computer had predicted your ship to be, but you cloaked and broke hard to the port).
When we were making the cloak the gameplay experience was most important to us. We wanted something that would meaningfully change combat strategies and be fun. From a 'lore' perspective... Perhaps we can consider it phasing more than simply being visibly hidden? Weapons are unable to target and therefore cannot prepare to fire on phased targets? Just a random idea.
If you're having hull problems, I feel bad for you son. I've got 99 problems but a breach ain't one.
. Gameplay experience first, THEN explain it. Much better then function follwoing after fiction.