Tordan

Curves are just polygons. Example from my Landmark Workshop.

Stealth technology and detection technology, even in a futuristic sy-fi game, would have to take its queues from our current understanding of these technologies, and known possibilities, if said game intends to be balanced and fair.  Although imagination is the cornerstone of DU, combat technologies are not.  I see a civilization trying to rebuild not self-destruct.  Conflict is bound to happen when groups decide not to work together, but the intent is not to force such a scenario; it is not only unrealistic in an economically and politically driven world, but detrimental to the core mission of the more evolved survivor of Armageddon: they did not spend 400 years researching how to destroy each other, but how to rebuild.
That said, all war technology should be limited and used sparingly and at great cost not only financially but also politically.  Defense should hold a higher priority in any case and be given much stronger mechanics.
Finally, if I may say, I think it would be great if, when building such systems, much thought and research was put into them, so that they have some scientific basis (though fictional), balanced, and consistent with the technologies related to a society attempting to rebuild light-years from home.
 

This is why true stealth should be based on 'real' physics. Do  your burn from a long way away, in a small, dark ship, kill all power and lights, and drift silently by among other debris. If you do this you are almost invisible. If you do anything at all to generate heat or light or alter your trajectory you're going to be noticed.

I'm all in for stealth.....but not in the way eve does it (cause that's just bad)
 
DU could do WAY better in this regard by simply adding a little more stuff (will rewrite the stuff I talked with beloved twerkmotor about)
- do different type of radar/sensor: gravimetric (mass), lidar (light), magnetometric (magnetic fields), radar (cross section), thermal (heat, obviously)
 
each sensor goes for a different attribute of the ship. We've already seen in videos that DU uses a crosssection in the build widget.
 
Smaller crosssection -> radar can't detect you that easily.
Small and light ship -> gravimetric sensors don't catch you well
Dark/light absorbing voxels -> lidar can't detect you well
few elements used (turrets, engines, certain voxels...) -> magnetometric doesn't pick you up
Coat ship in thermal-resistant voxels -> thermal sensors won't be good
 
all of that can be balanced by simply putting different attributes on voxels and elements: you can build an extremely dark ship to evade lidar, but that increases your mass. Use anti-magnetometric voxels ....but increase the heat.
Balance it so, that you can't build a ship which is undetectable - but may be very, very hard to detect. That has to be an extremely small and expensive ship for maybe 1-5 ppl - to allow black ops kind of tactics.
imho this can be added easily as it only adds some more numbers which then can be calculated just like the rest of the pvp system (chances).
 
Such a system would be way more engaging and emergent as the builder would have to pay attention to what he wants to build - and ppl have to think about different ways of defending their base.
You may be able to build a battleship which can't be detected by lidar - but it's cross section is a moon. Works pretty well against an outpost which only has a thermal sensor.....
But radar would be the most basic sensor - because it detects a simple crosssection - and therefor be the cheapest....
 
You see, this system would be easily balanceable and it would add way more emergent gameplay for everyone (shipbuilders, basebuilders, pilots, tacticians, miners, producers,...) than just having a full invisibility cloak element like in eve - which is basically an I win button. Plus it can be implemented very well with the existing idea of pvp-mechanics