Subset Games Forum

The one aspect of the game that doesn't make sense to me is the fact that when a ship cloaks, the weapons systems on the opposing ship stop charging.

I'm trying to come up with a rational for why that would be? I thought about the idea that what I thought was a power build-up period is actually time taken to compute a "firing solution" (as they would say on Battlestar Galactica). But that doesn't make much sense since even today we have laser systems that can auto-aim in fractions of a second.

I searched around on the forum, because I can't be the first person to ask this, but in the world of FTL, what is it about an enemy ship cloaking that stops my weapons from charging up to fire?

In a related question, when I first saw the augment for cloaked weapons, I thought it would allow my weapons to keep charging, even when the enemy was cloaked, but after reading the description a few more times, it appears it keeps my own weapons from interfering with the cloak (something I have never seen happen anyway). What exactly does that augment do?

Normally when you fire, your cloak stops working. Stealth weapons lets you fire while staying cloaked.

In my mind the weapons in FTL (except for beam weapons) aren't lasers because they have travel time. And in my mind the ships are flying evasively in three dimensions, which is why the blasts can come in from different directions. So it's the time that it takes the computer to calculate the best firing solution it can come up with - which is why you can augment your ship with things like the Re-Loader which makes every weapon fire faster and why having somebody at the console can help the targeting. The augment is making the computer fire faster and the human is able to help the computer fire faster.

These were teleporting, ion weapons and cloaking. Today it may not make sense, but when cloaking was introduced it was designed to prevent weapons targeting and it made the system more usefull if weapons "froze" and stopped recharging as well.