[Dark Hunter]

This has been a thorn in my side for a while now. Basically, I want to know how to make a ship completely invisible to sensors. "Invisible to Sensors" (ironically enough) does not seem to work. When I use it, I get the fuzzy blip thing on my radar.

Ship-stealthy gets the same effect. Ship-invisible seems to do nothing at all. Furthermore, when I try to deactivate the stealth function on a ship (via ship-unstealthy) it doesn't seem to function.

Is there something I'm just not getting here, or is there something wrong with my copy of FRED?

PS I'm using 3.6.9 FRED.

[CP5670]

Stealthy works fine for me. In fact, it's supposed to do exactly what you want. Is your ship hostile?

Make sure you aren't making it both stealthy and invisible. I'm actually not sure if that causes any problems, but it might.

[Mefustae]

I was having trouble making ships completely invisible to sensors, too. Ultimately, the only way I found was the make the ship(s) 'stealthy' using the appropriate SEXP:

ship-stealthy
   Causes the ships listed in this sexpression to become stealth ships (i.e. invisible to radar).

...and then use the friendly-stealth-invisible SEXP:

friendly-stealth-invisible
   Causes the friendly ships listed in this sexpression to be invisible to radar, just like hostile stealth ships.It doesn't matter if the ship is friendly at the time this sexp executes: as long as it is a stealth ship, it willbe invisible to radar both as hostile and as friendly.

Which I found to be the only way to make a ship untargetable and completely invisible to radar, meaning no flashy crap in your HUD.

If there's a simpler solution, i'd sure as hell like to hear it. Having to SEXP a state onto over 30 different ships twice was a real bore that I hope never to repeat anytime soon.

[Dark Hunter]

Unless there's an enemy-stealth-invisible, that won't work. The ship in question is hostile.

Maybe I could fake it using a create-ship SEXP right at the moment it is supposed to decloak... but that would look weird if the player happened to be facing that way at exactly that moment.

[Mefustae]

Unless there's an enemy-stealth-invisible, that won't work. The ship in question is hostile.

Maybe I could fake it using a create-ship SEXP right at the moment it is supposed to decloak... but that would look weird if the player happened to be facing that way at exactly that moment.

Have you even tried my method with a hostile ship? Or are you dismissing it out of hand?

[Dark Hunter]

Well, it is called friendly-stealth-invisible, so I kinda assumed it would only worked on friendly craft. If you insist, I'll give it a try.

*Reads description of SEXP more closely*

Actually that does sound like it would work... mental note: carefully read through something before deciding anything about it.


EDIT: Yipee! That worked! Mefustae's solution did the trick, except for one tiny flaw: the ship was visible on radar for a fraction of a second before vanishing. However, I found a wa around that too: simply make the ship "Hidden from sensors". Doing this and then Mefustae's idea makes it completely invisible from the start. I don't know if you can unstealthy it afterwards, but fortunately, I don't have to worry about that, since my mission doesn't require it to go unstealthy.

[Mefustae]

I hope you've learned your lesson about dismissing help completely out of hand.

[Dark Hunter]

Sure. Sorry, Mefustae.

[CP5670]

I'm not sure why you're having to go through all that trouble. I have been using ship-stealthy quite a bit in one mission recently and have never had any problems getting it to work on its own. You're using 3.6.9, right?

[Mefustae]

I'm using the latest version of FRED [albeit with Freespace Port], and the ship-stealthy sexp merely makes the ship somewhat invisible, in that you can still see that flickering dot on the HUD. When you use it alone, does it render the vessel completely invisible save for visual identification?