Is it possible to force a no-radar condition on player ships?

If you mean force a ship to not see you then yes, you may equip your ship with a jamming beam. If you mean force an enemy to see nothing at all then I don't believe so.

The jamming beam should suffice for the limited uses that I envision. Thanks!

hmm...just tried equipping enemy AI-controlled ships with the jamming beam and it didn't seem to have the desired effect...what is it intended to do?

You must equip the player craft with jamming beam and then use it.

Sorry I misunderstood you. The only way you can force AI ships not to be seen on radar is to give them a 'nontargetable' parameter in the shipset, which means editing the .exe with something like Binhexedit. Oddly enough you can still target the AI ship, but the radar readings will be false. Equipping AI ships with jamming beams only works if the AI chooses to use it, and usually AI ships will not.

So to put it simply, unless you want to edit the executable with a hexeditor there is no way to do this to my knowledge.

There are cloaked ships out there.

<small>That didn't sound right. Let me try that again.</small>

There are (user-made) opts available that turn invisible beyond a certain range (the V-38 TIE Phantom, for one). I think one of the editing tools over at Darksaber's will do it.

There're still a few bugs; the ships still show on sensors, and your targeting system can still lock on. The engine glows are also still visible. It's only the opt itself that blinks out of existence.

It's not radar, BTW; radar uses sound; sound doesn't travel in hard vacuum; despite what you hear in movies & TV. Space craft would probably use "lidar" (as on Above & Beyond), or subspace sensors (as in Star Trek).

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"Don't f_ck with the Jedi Master, son." --Mark Hamill

SONAR uses sound, either active (sending pulses and listening for the echo like a Bat) or passive (just listening).

RADAR uses Radio waves which are emmited and reflected back by the target, hence stealth designs which don't bounce much energy back (either energy absorbent paint or panels designed to reflect the radio waves off at an angle rather than back towards the radar)

(And Lidar would probably use such high frequency "radio" waves that they'd actually be regarded as light, just as Microwave Radar uses radio-waves of a high enough frequency to be microwaves)

Thanks for all the replies. I'm actually only concerned with not being able to see player-controlled ships. So let me get this: equip a player ship with a jamming beam weapon and they will be invisible on what amounts to your radar, but only if they activate it?

Hang on a minute, jamming beam? Sounds more like you want to use the decoy beam...

Tractor Beam - holds enemy fighter in place ahead of you for killing, tractor lock can be broken by chaff. Good for use in the Missile Boat as it means the enemy cannot evade the missiles.

Jamming Beam - Jams the enemies systems so they cannot fire, you do need to be hitting the enemy with the beam though. Good for dirupting enemy warhead runs.

Decoy Beam - Jams enemy sensors so you are untargetable and this is a general effect against all enemy fighters rather than you having to hit a ship with the beam. I remember someone saying that there was a bug with this though (or at least it wasn't entirely effective).

...hopefully I have this right, been a very long time since I tried flying a ship with a beam.

ok, thanks a lot JM...I'll give that a try(and hope it's not too buggy). I really wish xwa had better documentation...on a totally unrelated note, how do I activate SLAM?

[This message has been edited by Hannibal (edited September 16, 2001).]

Unfortunately they took SLAMs out of the game engine between "TIE Fighter" and "X-Wing vs TIE Fighter" (I think) so you can't activate them in XWA as the ability no longer exists.

No SLAM? Ok, well thanks anyway.