Well, currently there are NPCs that have cloak that require a certain amount of scan power for it to show up for you.
How about some NPC with scan powers that require a certain amount of cloak to show? Or if you don't have enough cloak, the chance drops significantly.

Here is the logic, some NPCs don't wanna fight and want to run away(perhaps the Dark Smuggler Guild ones) And they have scan systems installed. If you don't have enough cloak to "sneak up" on them, they will find you and run away before you ever see them(in case of reduced chance instead of flat out requirement, it means that you catch them before they run away)

How's that sound? I saw a post about making cloak useful in NPC hunting before and this seems like a reasonable method.

yes please implement this on dark warpers and rogue tech collectors thanks !

+1 I think this is a very intelligent idea.

I see where this is going, give npc's scan so they dont run into you in space. guess its a good idea, but to what extent? Any idea behind the idea?

Yeah, that could be cool, force players to have Cloak if they want to see certain good NPCs. I don't see why not.

-1, this is gonna make me put research into cloak.. and my ship is already jam packed with enough modules.

+1 flamehawks need this lol anyway nice idea

Again, I'll just add that adding scan and cloak is pretty hard for lower rank NPC hunters.

For higher ranks who can afford the space then great ideas for cloak. Both of them.

Well, we don't HAVE TO modify current NPC, but instead can add a few new ones, so it won't affect those who can't afford the space at all.

But I guess it would be Dan's choice on exactly what to do with it if he add something like it.

I personally would perfer the "reduce chance to see" path, so it's not an exact copy of scan. For example, for each 10 cloak too low, your chance is reduced by a multiplier of say 0.95. If you are 100 too low, then it's .95^10=59.9%