Why can't I charge my guns against cloaked ships?

[Maury Markowitz]

The subject says it all. Is there some logic I'm missing here?

[R4V3-0N]

I assume you need an enemy target locked to charge your weapons on your weapons and weapon guidance systems.
This may be most likely to be a safety mechanism to prevent weapons going lose on civilian ships or accidental fire.

This may be another reason why you normally do not have your weapons charged after an FTL jump and also how the enemy needs to charge there weapons to.

Only a theory. it can also be a gameplay mechanism for you to perform an alpha strike after you finish your cloak or vice versa, people use cloak to hide from damage and stuff, the least you want to happen is the enemy to alpha strike you when your still venerable and can in some cases be worse then not cloaking at all.

[HeadHunter]

Because a cloak does two things: It increases dodge chance and prevents weapons locks.

If your target is invisible, you have no way to keep a weapons lock. And that's part of what charging entails - keeping your guns locked on to a target long enough to discharge them.

And for game purposes, a cloak wouldn't do much good if it didn't buy you time. For what it's worth, the enemy's guns don't charge while you are cloaked, either.

[UltraMantis]

As posted earlier, it's very much to control gameplay. The AI would unleash all it's weapons as soon as the player uncloaked, and while that may be "realistic" FTL doesn't feature targeting time so all the weapons would fire simultaneously, overwhelming defenses and making the situation worse that before cloaking.

It's slightly unintuitive and confusing, but it's done that way for gameplay purposes.