I remember in old SOS you used to be able to keep the cloaking device up if your ship was too weak for combat by making sure you had enough heat vents to run it continuously.

Now it looks like it continually decreases your max cooling until it's impossible to maintain.

Right now I am stuck in a combat I can't win without cranking all the settings down to nothing because I'm in the stock default ship you get when you launch from the ship crash site. The one with the six pods that have cryptosleep caskets in them.

I say I'm stuck in it because in the save before this fight starts I have the CLOAKING DEVICE ENABLED. I have no notoriety. The fight still starts. Is it because I'm salvaging a wreck? I don't know, there's nothing that tells you.

Online, other players talk as if this ship has basic combat ability. But the ships it's generating for me to fight have MASSIVE main weapons, like this one has a super laser cannon that's like a main forward gun built into the frame of the ship. It kills me outright and demolishes the ship down to the middle, I mean it cores the starter ship like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ APPLE, in ONE SHOT.

How the ♥♥♥♥ is the cloaking device supposed to work if you can't keep it up continuously and it doesn't do anything if you try to enable it before a combat? I have a scummed save right before this combat and whether or not I turn it on the combat still starts, every time, without fail.

So why doesn't the cloaking device work? How do I make it work?

And why does every enemy kill the stock ship in one hit at default settings?