Field Circular № 8 · Cloaked Observation in Two Movements · Rev. MCMLXXVII
A record of observed practice in cloaked wormhole work: how a system is read before it is disturbed, how its residents and their commitments are established, and what the twenty seconds after a decloak consist of. The Ministry describes. It does not recommend, and it has never flown.
The practice divides cleanly in two, and the Ministry files it accordingly.
Cloaked work in Anoikis runs on two clocks of very different length. The first may occupy an hour or an afternoon and consists almost entirely of not being noticed. The second lasts about twenty seconds and begins at the decloak.
The record is unambiguous about which decides the outcome. This circular files the long clock under PEEK and the short one under BOO. Both terms are the Ministry's own. The practice has never named its halves, and the available alternatives were longer. The Ministry has flown neither clock and relies entirely on the accounts of those who have.
Arriving, reading, and waiting. Where the outcome is decided.
Observed arrival procedure, in the order the record shows it performed.
Practitioners entering an unfamiliar connection do not launch probes. The published statement of the rule is unusually direct:
The return connection is recorded first, before any other action. Wormholes close, and a recorded position is the difference between a route home and an afternoon spent scanning for one. The Ministry regards an unrecorded return as a filing error with unusually direct consequences.
The system is then read on the directional scanner at full angle and maximum range. Ships are the least informative entry on the list. The rest carries dates:
Ships appearing on the scanner may be inside a control tower's shields and not in space in any useful sense. Practitioners discard these before treating a sighting as activity.
The scanner reaches 14.3 AU, which is smaller than a good many systems. Where the system exceeds it, the reading is repeated from a second celestial. A system is not recorded as quiet on one reading.
Probes are introduced only after the system has failed to disclose anything. The delay is not caution for its own sake: probes appear on any suitably configured scanner within range of them, and a launch exchanges an unknown presence for a visible one. Where a launch is necessary from a cloaked position, the observed sequence is to decloak, activate propulsion, launch, and re-cloak as one movement, subject to the hull's reactivation interval, which is never nothing.
The directional scanner is not a proximity alarm. Used properly it returns a position.
The technique is bisection, performed twice in different dimensions.
By angle. A contact is found at 360 degrees, then the angle is reduced a step at a time, the camera re-centred on the bearing that keeps the contact, until it survives only in a narrow cone. The instruction as Penny Ibramovic published it at Tiger Ears in April 2012 is to "reduce d-scan's angle by one step and find the target again", repeated to five degrees, at which point the contact is confined to a direction rather than a hemisphere.
By range. The same bisection is applied to distance. The range is halved until the contact disappears and restored until it returns, which brackets it between two figures.
A bearing and a bracket together are frequently enough to warp to a celestial in line with the contact, or to place probes on a first attempt rather than a third. The scanner is also used in the negative: anomalies and celestials that lie outside the surviving cone are eliminated as the contact's location without being visited.
Two limits are worth recording. The instrument cannot see a Combat Recon Ship. The Curse, Rook, Lachesis and Huginn have been exempt from directional scanning since January 2015; the exemption was not extended to their Force Recon counterparts, so a Falcon or an Arazu appears on any reading the moment it is uncloaked. And the instrument is symmetrical, which is the whole difficulty: the residents are reading it as often as the visitor, and the published advice on the resident's side is to do so continuously. The Ministry considers the arrangement equitable and has not petitioned to have it changed.
Tiger Ears has published wormhole practice since 2011, and a good deal of what this circular files was described there first. The Ministry recommends the archive without reservation.
Who keeps the system, when they are awake, and what the connections have been carrying.
A structure is, for the Ministry's purposes, a corporation that has written its name somewhere it cannot easily take back. From the name a public killboard follows. The questions the record answers are how many they are, what they fly, which hours they keep, and whether they pursue visitors or only repel them. A system that is quiet at four in the morning and busy at nine is two different propositions filed under one name.
Structure states are read as intentions. Reinforced means another party has attacked it and has a timer to return for. Low power means no service module is online. Abandoned means no service module has drawn fuel for at least seven days, and carries the consequence that the structure has no reinforcement phases left and can be removed in a single visit. Neither state establishes that the owners have gone; both establish that their attention has become intermittent, and a single service module brought online restores the structure to full power.
Connections carry their own history. A wormhole reduced to between ten and fifty per cent of its mass has had traffic through it, and the size of the traffic can be inferred. Below ten per cent, the passage has been substantial; whether it was a rolling operation, a fleet or a single heavy hull the window declines to say. End-of-life connections are jumped rather than avoided by practitioners, on the reasoning that a connection nobody trusts is a connection nobody is watching. Neither condition explains itself, and the window's figures are approximate by design.
Where a system's record justifies patience beyond one visit, the observed practice is to leave a character in it. This is recorded in the field as seeding. The craft of it is unremarkable and entirely about not being noticed: logging in and out at deep safes, flying the hull the locals themselves fly, and scanning the chain outside their active hours rather than during them.
The Ministry maintains files on pilots, corporations, and systems at PANTOSCOPE, which exists for precisely this stage of the afternoon.
What accumulates is not a list of targets. It is a schedule.
Other ships are read as indications before they are read as opportunities.
Probes on the scanner mean another party is working the chain. Their type is informative. Core probes indicate signature work. Combat probes indicate a pilot able to resolve ships. Intent remains unfiled; they resolve everything else as well, and some scanners carry nothing but. Faction probes indicate investment, though the record does not support treating investment as competence.
Probes persist a little over an hour, which is occasionally longer than their owners. A formation that has not moved in a long interval belongs either to a pilot occupied elsewhere or to one who died mid-scan, and the public record distinguishes the two in a few seconds.
Identification is performed at wormholes, on the reasoning that a cloaked ship must become visible to jump and a connection is the one location where this is guaranteed. Observed practice is to watch an exit connection rather than the visitor's own way in, and to wait at least three minutes for a return. If the ship returns, it is followed to its next connection. If it does not, the system beyond is more likely its home than a further stop. Probes still working on the far side suggest the chain is being extended; their absence makes a home more plausible without proving one, since a pilot may equally have docked, recalled them, or simply stopped.
Combat probes also reveal filament traces. A ship of a class rarely seen in wormhole space, warping to no celestial in particular, is commonly running abyssal sites; the trace is its only exit, it must return through it, and the interval is bounded at twenty minutes.
The general principle the record supports is that a visible ship matters less for what it is than for what it implies. An exploration frigate implies a nearby high-security connection. A hauler implies a customs office. A battleship moving to and from one wormhole implies an obligation to return through it.
A ship in the middle of something is a ship that cannot leave at once. That is the whole of the opportunity.
Ships in space are ordinarily mid-procedure, and procedures have next steps. The next step is where the meeting happens, because it is the one position the pilot has to occupy and cannot abandon at speed.
Where the meeting requires a fleet, the observed difficulty is not the decision but the warp-in. The recorded order of preference is to bookmark the tractor unit if the subject is beside it; failing that, a wreck or other object near the subject; failing that, an estimate from the site's own beacon; and failing all three, the scanning ship itself becomes the warp-in, which is the least comfortable of the four.
Under time pressure the record shows the bookmark dispensed with. The scanning pilot takes command of a squad, the tackling pilots join it, the scanner warps to the entry connection at range, and the squad is warped to the subject from there, the scanner exempting itself from the fleet warp.
Declined, on cost. The record is close to unanimous that the smallest subjects cost more than they return. Twenty minutes spent on an exploration frigate is twenty minutes not spent on whatever else the system produced, and the practitioners who publish on this point observe that the frigates in question are the population from which future residents are drawn.
Declined, on suspicion. Some of these arrangements were made for the visitor's benefit rather than by accident. A ship that is alone, stationary, unhurried and apparently unaware is the standard presentation of bait, and the tells are behavioural before they are technical: a connection rolled implausibly slowly, a hull sitting on a wormhole with no reason to be there, an industrial repeating a circuit with nothing to carry. Where doubt exists the pilot is examined before the hull. Bait characters are maintained deliberately, with thin killboards, plausible ages and unremarkable corporations. A hull can be fitted in a minute. A history takes months.
Where a system offers nothing committed to anything, the record shows practitioners supplying the commitment themselves.
The material of this work is not the ship. It is the impression a ship leaves in the records other people consult, and those records can be prepared in advance.
The character. Bait pilots are maintained deliberately. They are trained only as far as the intended hull requires, given an unimpressive record of occasional losses and few kills, moved between corporations at intervals that suggest a casual pilot with other commitments, and kept off the reports of the fleet they serve. A pilot who appears once alongside the response is a pilot who has been read, and the observed practice is to retire the character rather than repair it.
The performance. The recorded failure of bait is competence. A transport that aligns crisply, warps without hesitation and jumps the instant it lands is a transport with friends, and is treated as such. Practitioners are therefore slow on purpose: late to align, unhurried through a connection, visibly unremarkable. Where the arrangement is at a wormhole, the bait pulls range as tackle arrives rather than sitting at zero, on the reasoning that a fight at zero is a fight the other party can leave.
The furniture. Wrecks can be manufactured, and are: drones launched and abandoned produce debris that no probe can find and that many pilots never scan for. A tractor unit left in view performs the same office. So does a ship sitting quietly in a safe near unresolved signatures, in the expectation that a visitor will resolve it, mistake it for a container, and arrive at zero. Placement is the whole of the design, and the recorded error is placing the arrangement on a connection, which supplies the guest with an exit.
The second arrangement. Where the other party is careful enough to suspect bait and form against it, the record describes a further layer: the obvious bait is offered and engaged, reinforcements are then committed that are visibly insufficient, and the confident response follows them away from its own connection. The fleet that was the point of the exercise arrives afterwards. A variation shows deliberately weak support to an observer known to be watching, on the understanding that the observer will report exactly what it sees.
The Ministry observes that every component of this is a document: a history, a habit, a piece of debris left where it will be read. It expresses no view on the ethics and a certain professional regard for the filing.
Probing a ship that is being watched, in the smallest number of visible seconds.
Where the scanner has narrowed a subject to a bearing and a bracket, combat probes convert that into a position. The whole technique is arranged around the probes' visibility.
The formation is launched and held outside the subject's scanner range, or beyond sixteen astronomical units from any celestial the subject is likely to be near, so that the launch itself is not the announcement. It is then moved onto the estimated position and cycled once.
A second cycle is a second announcement, and the record treats a failed scan as a reason to correct the estimate rather than to repeat it. The subject may have moved, warped, or never occupied the position assigned to it.
At the end of the scan the probes are destroyed rather than recalled. The practice is attributed at Tiger Ears to another practitioner, and the reasoning is arithmetic: destruction removes them from the sky at once, recall does not. The Ministry approves of any procedure that shortens a record.
Approach, hold, and departure. Twenty seconds, most of them already decided.
Two kilometres from anything ends a cloak, and the sensor delay can be spent in advance.
Most physical objects within 2,000 metres remove a cloak. Wrecks and containers are the anticipated hazards; the recorded causes of failure are jettisoned cans, corpses, drones and gas clouds. Missiles in flight will do it. Other cloaked ships and scanner probes will not.
Approaches are therefore flown manually. The automatic approach command holds no opinion about what lies on the line it has chosen.
The cloak in use decides whether an approach is available at all. A covert device imposes no speed penalty. Every other cloak removes three quarters of the ship's speed or more, which in practice means the position must be taken before there is anything to take it against.
The delay after decloaking is the constraint that shapes the whole moment. A covert cloak imposes ten seconds of sensor recalibration before a lock may be attempted, and ordinary cloaks twenty or thirty; each figure is a base reduced by a tenth for every level of Cloaking, so five seconds is the covert device's floor. Stealth bombers are filed as exempt and wait for nothing. The lock itself begins only after the recalibration, a distinction to which the Ministry attributes several unexpectedly mobile explorers.
The technique recorded against this is to spend the delay in warp: the cloak is dropped while the ship is still travelling, the recalibration runs during the approach, and the ship arrives on grid able to lock immediately. It was described at Tiger Ears in February 2012 and has not needed revision since.
Position is taken against the subject's departure rather than its present location. A ship that becomes aware will align to something; the recorded preference is to sit across that line rather than behind it.
Denial of escape precedes damage. The arithmetic is settled before the decloak, because it cannot be settled after.
Observed module order is disruption, then range control, then damage. Practitioners commonly pre-activate tackle so that it applies at the instant the lock resolves.
Strength is fixed at the point of fitting. A warp disruptor applies one point beyond twenty kilometres. A warp scrambler applies two inside ten and additionally shuts down a microwarpdrive for as long as it holds. Faction scramblers apply three.
Against these, warp core stabilisers have been active modules since May 2021. One may be fitted; it returns two points of strength for ten seconds and is then unavailable for a hundred and fifty. A stabilised ship is not continuously stabilised, and the interval is long enough to be waited out. Mining frigates carry two points innately, which is the calculation that decides whether a single disruptor was ever sufficient.
The collision. Where a subject is agile enough to enter warp before a lock completes, the record shows practitioners arranging to strike it. A course is set through the subject, propulsion is engaged, the cloak drops on the approach, locking begins, and the impact arrives before the lock does. The subject's velocity and alignment are disturbed and a fresh warp vector has to be established, which is the several seconds the manoeuvre exists to purchase.
The recorded failure of the technique is excess. A subject struck too firmly is displaced beyond tackle range, which the Ministry files as a successful collision and an unsuccessful interception, in separate columns.
A wormhole is the only terrain in this circular that can be used against whoever is standing on it.
A connection refuses the same pilot twice in the same direction inside five minutes. Crossing and returning at once is permitted; it is the second crossing the same way that is declined, each direction keeping its own count. The condition is called polarisation, and the record shows it manufactured rather than suffered.
Polarisation by invitation. A bait crosses a connection and returns, and crosses and returns. A cloaked pursuer that follows each time spends its two permitted crossings without being obliged to think about it, and is refused on the third. When the crossings stop, the pursuer is on the wrong side of a door it cannot use for as long as five minutes, and the practitioners waiting there decloak and establish locks on everything present, a ship that is locked being unable to cloak. The technique is recorded chiefly against cloaked cruisers, which would otherwise leave any engagement they disliked by jumping and disappearing.
The hot jump. Where a connection is being rolled, the rolling ships are obliged to return through it. Practitioners wait at zero with ships of their own and jump immediately behind the subject, converting a routine crossing into a fight on the far side, where the subject's friends are not.
The forced nullifier. Fake rolling is recorded as a means of pressing a visiting scout into spending its nullification, with an interdictor stationed on the far side for the moment it decides to leave.
Displacement. The collision described in the previous section has its clearest application here. A subject beside a connection to known space will simply use it; a cloaked cruiser carrying an oversized propulsion module, with a bubble already deployed, moves it far enough from the aperture that using it is no longer the quick option.
Withdrawal by mass. A fleet losing an engagement at a connection can leave through it and then close it behind them, the heavy ships crossing last. Pursuit into a connection near collapse is recorded as an occasional source of unexpected kills, on both sides.
A wormhole is the only object in this circular that keeps its own records and destroys them on a schedule of its own choosing. The Ministry finds the arrangement irregular and has learned to work within it.
The system replies. The conditions for departure are set before it is provoked.
A hold in wormhole space is a public event. Combat ships appear on the scanner, residents undock, probes are launched, and pilots who were docked a minute earlier are now unaccounted for. A resident who has disappeared from a structure has either docked or entered warp, and the record shows the comfortable interpretation preferred rather more often than it is correct.
Departure conditions are recorded in advance and expressed as observations rather than feelings: unexpected combat hulls, failure to break the subject within an allowed interval, loss of range control, a bubble, a second decloak on grid, or simply the passing of a chosen number of seconds.
Two mechanics bear on the exit. A jump confers sixty seconds of invulnerability, ending the moment the ship moves. A cloak that has just been deactivated cannot be re-engaged until its reactivation interval has run: thirty seconds by the module's own filing, fifteen aboard an Astero or a stealth bomber, five aboard a Covert Ops or Force Recon hull. The figure should be read off the fitting rather than remembered optimistically, and the interval between being visible and being able to disappear again is the most commonly fatal one in the record.
The losses in this practice are concentrated after the engagement rather than during it, and most of them occurred while looting. The Ministry has recorded this several hundred times and offers no further comment on it.
Most of this circular records doing very little for a long time. The proportion is not an error.