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Cloaking technology is a defensive/guerrilla support system that gives its wearer partial invisibility by bending visible light emissions around a weak microwave field.
Constructed from various metamaterials, stealth boys and stealth suits are capable of manipulating microwave emissions into fields that dissipate and refract visible light so that whatever is contained within the field appears almost invisible to enemy opposition.
Availability[]
Stealth boys are particularly common despite its overall usefulness. This is due to the fact stealth boy technology is actually pretty well understood even by post-war standards and can be easily replicated in home-made versions. Pre-war models are much harder to come by but stand the benefit of lasting longer and capable of being recharged for further uses.
Stealth suits on the other hand, are regarded as myths due to their rarity. Stealth suits often show up in places of high interest to China before the Great War. Due to the nature of their interest, the stealth suits were often only deployed in the rare instance Chinese operatives were intended to physically infiltrate and sabotage something, giving them good reason for their mythological status.
In Motown, a high frequency of stealth suits are scattered across the town from the aftershocks of the defeat of the Jiang Shi before the formation of the Motown Enterprise and the first Road Raiders.
These suits are often found broken or missing pieces due to decades of service but complete suits can be completed from these parts should someone collect various pieces.
History and Development[]
Before the war, the United States of America's Department of Defense was looking for a way to shield wearers from the new energy weapons they were developing.
Though it would be a few years before these energy weapons would enter standard issue, the project gleaned information in the form of simple stealth technology. The Department of Defense sold many patent holder rights to recover lost assets after the cancellation of their project; RobCo Industries bought these rights. After several years, RobCo produced their line of Stealth boys alongside their Pip-boy models as a sort of commercially available high-end toy.
Work began on a Mk II model that would serve as a viable military device, but it never saw completion.
Before the US Army could requisition them for military use, RobCo declared it would remain a commercial good that soldiers would have to buy with their own money if they sought to use them. With a finite budget on their hands, the US Army was quick to recede any disputes they had about RobCo's declaration.
China on the other hand, was not so quiet. China got their hands on dozens of shipments through corporate espionage tactics with the explicit interest of continuing the purpose of using the technology to create energy shields. Even though they failed where the US had failed, China still managed to deploy stealth technology to units on the field in order to gain a much needed advantage over the US forces.
Poseidon Energy had gotten their hands on the Stealth boy specs sometime before the Great War. Using them they finally managed to succeed at the initial cause of creating energy shields. This success gleaned the Enclave's eponymous Tesla power armor.
Cloaking devices[]
The invisibility offered by most cloaking devices were almost completely transparent and lasted for variable time. They offer a minor resistance against energy weapons but very little compared to Tesla fields.
Stealth Boy[]
Generating a powerful cloaking effect for around a minute, the stealth boy can offer anyone the stealthy moves of a professional spy by powering them with simple energy cells.
Most models are either pre-war or home-made models that are break after one use and cannot be turned off without frying. Refurbished models have a condition that must be maintained and have to be recharged between uses.
Stealth fields can be tweaked to be weaker but last longer in both models; refurbished models can be turned off to save energy but doing so slightly damages the device.
Stealth suit[]
Crimson Dragoon suit
The Hei Gui stealth armor was standard issue for Chinese agents in the field. Though not all suits sported cloaking device systems those that did were unique and unparalleled.
Operating in a similar manner to Tesla armor, the Crimson Dragoon stealth suit itself was designed to operate as a cloaking device when energized. Though it would drain faster on more translucent fields, it still lasts longer than any stealth boy model not tempered with MaSMA. Like stealth boy models, its condition degrades with use but, unlike them, at a slower rate.
As such, the Crimson Dragoon stealth suit is an appropriate recipient to advanced capacitor systems and MaSMA integration. When integrated with MaSMA the stealth field can last much longer without damaging the suit as much.
Hybrid field[]
Due to the duality nature of Tesla and cloaking fields, both can be interchanged and hybridized if the wearer is capable of programming and constructed necessary equipment for it. Hybrid fields are partial cloaking fields and partial Tesla fields, giving the wearer more energy resistance than is conferred from a stealth field alone, while at the same time making them that much harder to see.
Though a hybrid field can never truly be both at the same time due to emission instability, an avid strategist may find use with variable fields, finding use for each type of field used one at a time or in incomplete dominance.
Notes[]
- Passive, the unique version of the stealth suit in Motown.
- Refurbished Stealth boys require small amounts of MaSMA to gain their resistance to constant usage. As such, pre-war and home-made models do not contain any MaSMA.
- Despite their rarity, stealth suits do not contain any MaSMA. This is due to being an invention of the Chinese who did not have ready access or familiarity with MaSMA.