Hey all.  I played a second game of Starmada: Admiralty Edition this weekend, and combined with reading a VBAM (Victory By Any Means) campaign sourcebook, started thinking about hiding ship information.  I assume the normal way to play Starmada is that all information on a ship card is visible to all players at all times.  However, this VBAM sourcebook had some nice fiction stories about races meeting for  the first time and the surprise at the weaponry/tactics, and even how they changed weapons and tactics to cause more surprises during the war.

Additionally, in  the game I played, I had some specialty ships which obviously should be targeted preferentially over other ships as they could take out a much larger vessel if  they got close.  I guess what I'm looking for is probably most helpful in a campaign setting, but could still be fun in one off battles.

Effectively it would be something like:

From Range 30 or greater (to the nearest friendly ship), only the size of the ship in 10 hull increments can be determined.. ie, you can tell if a ship is 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, etc in size. 

From Range 20-29, the hull increment range is reduced to 5 (so 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, etc).

(In both the above ranges, no information on engine rating, shield rating or weapons can be determined.  Any intrinsic capabilities of the ship that provides modifiers to die rolls do not have to be specified when used, only what the actual modifier is.  Or, in the case of Armor Plating, the defending player simply doesn't mark the hits from a 1 damage roll, but doesn't need to tell the attacker that he's not marking the damage.)

From Range 10-19, the exact hull size, engine rating and shield ratings can be determined as well as the number of weapons in each arc, but no other information about the weapons.   

Inside Range 10, all information is known, including damage.

Once a ship has come inside a certain range, the information discovered can always be requested unless the ship cloaks (specifically, if two ships both get inside the Range 10 bracket, and then both are outside range 19 when they cloak again, when they uncloak, only the information at that range is received since it's unknown which ship is which - other rules might also allow this type of behavior to occur).  The other exception is damage.  Damage can ONLY be looked at when the ship is in the 1-10 range bracket.

A ship with Stealth might subtract 5 from all ranges for purposes of information about that ship being detected.

A scout might add 10 to all ranges listed above for purposes of detecting information about other ships.

So.. we come to 'scouts'.   As a note, I dislike Electronic Warfare in Star Fleet Battles.  However, scouts in campaigns are pretty common, so an intrinsic capability called "Scout" could be useful in Starmada.  In addition to the capability above, any scout could in one turn do one of the following:

1. Force one more cloak detection roll against any target in a specified arc within 20 hexes (ie, if the scout states 'Arc A', then any cloaked target in the scout's "A" arc within 20 hexes must roll twice to remain undetected).

2. Give any one ship within 20 hexes the benefits of Fire Control if its target(s) are also within 20 hexes of the scout.

3. Give any one ship within 20 hexes the benefits of Countermeasures.