Incudem

I think the anomalies or random space species from stellaris would be good inspiration for an alien system. Ancient facilities or leftover debris from space battles would add some interesting exploration. Or things equivalent to space animal like crystalline entities or ancient mining drones could add some nice pve elements without having an interactive alien race. I can imagine player made missions requesting ancient defenses in a system to be disabled so mining/research could be done.

. From what iv seen of this community that seems like the usual for most posts

ECM should work fairly well for landing a small ship on a planet as most of the detection avoidance would come down to radar. I fully agree with you that large ships shouldn't be able utilize a visual cloaking system, but from a stand point that something that big would be far too inefficient for the system to do. The cloak style system would ideally factor ship size into energy cost exponentially as it got bigger but there would be a cut off on how small it could be due to the size of the actual cloak component itself. The bigger the ship gets with armor the more power you need to run/cloak it and then even more thrusters to move it. Ships that used something like this would have to be pretty efficient if they want to stay cloaked and have enough energy to run/shoot if they had to. I think we are just having a miscommunication on the assumed scales of ships. To me a fighter is 1-2 man crew, small ship 3-4, medium would be 5-9, and large ships would start getting to 10-20+ crews. I'm thinking the most efficient size for a stealth ship should sit at the lowest end of medium and that moving in either direction on the scale would start adding too many negatives to a ship that should already be pretty specialized. With all this in mind nothing is stopping you from building a super small ship except for the tradeoffs of shrinking the ships scale from its optimal size.

Probably going to load up my gaming buddies on a ship as soon as we can lift off and just keep going. Stop here and there to make additions to the ship or make a small outpost. End goal we agreed on was to go to some far off system and produce ships to sell and to do recon work for others.

. What I meant by bring them is bring them through FTL as a means of transport, the ship that is being cloaked would require its own systems to do so. A large ship providing ECM like an EC-130 is an idea though. Smaller ships could very well be able to field ECM style stealth as well, but visual cloaking should require a lot of weight/energy to keeping it off of a fighter.

My thoughts were along the lines of thee elements required for FTL and stealth to be fairly large and expensive. If they work similarly it terms of lore mechanics both systems would be similar in size and power draw. You could build one with both, but you would need a reactor big enough to run them (not to mention a weapon system big enough to make good use of the stealth). That said though the ship size would keep getting scaled up, making the cloaking less and less effective energy wise. This would force you to design it for a role though, fleet assassin with no FTL but a big gun, paranoid explorer or advanced scout that pops in system to system looking for something interesting but is almost defenseless. And same here Shadow, anything stealth is life. Let me build custom space traps like cloaked mines and I'll give these guys all my money forever.

I believe the Circular /Adaptive research approach would be more player friendly on a game like this. You never know what might happen day to day in a survival game and this could help it be more forgiving. No one wants to be stuck out in space with a broken engine after your engineer rage quits and you have to re learn 20 skills in a tree to fix it.

As a side note, only large ships tend use FTL successfully in Orion Fleet. Medium to small ships, including stealth ones, would have to tag along in FTL in order to travel out of a system. If there is a stealth ship in system then there is also a larger ship there that brought it too.

For anyone who has read orion fleet, maybe something along the lines of that universe's stealth system. The ship itself uses a system that puts it partly out of regular space. The stealth system has high energy drain, meaning no shields while in use. Stealth in that universe also works both ways. While it is engaged a ship is more or less blind to the outside world except for detecting gravity disturbances (large artificial sources, asteroids, planets, anything big really). You would be unable to track small ships, tell if another ship has shields/weapons armed, or even aimed at you. Stealth units and FTL (which both use wormhole like physics to function) both require mass and energy to be used efficiently in Orion Fleet as well, so small ships can't really fit the system but huge ships cannot either since the power drain is like being in constant FTL (so no super big cloaked ships). This means stealth ships would be in a middle ground, not fast but not heavily armored and generally with a few heavy hitting weapons only. (Sorry this is a little messy, short on time)