Editing Skills and Implants (section)

===Cloaking Skills===

Having a cloaking device isn't truly necessary for successful exploration, but most explorers will have more enjoyable and productive experiences when they have a way to reliably vanish. Being able to conduct your probe scans without having to worry as much about a hunter swooping down to destroy your ship is useful, especially for newer explorers who are still getting the knack for the trade.

The Cloaking skill requires an Omega clone to train, and whether the ability to cloak is worth the monthly expense is yours to decide. Cloaking also requires training CPU Management to Level 4 as a prerequisite. Once you start training the Cloaking skill itself, there are 3 basic milestones.

Cloaking Level 1 will allow you to use the Tech 1 variant cloak, "Prototype Cloaking Device I", which provides basic cloaking functionality. If you engage the prototype cloak, you will be undetectable in most circumstances (as with anything, there will be exceptions). For basic exploration, this will usually be plenty of capability: you can stay hidden while you scan for signatures, keep an eye on your d-scan, or shuffle your bookmarks.

Cloaking Level 3 will let you use the Tech 2 cloak, called "Improved Cloaking Device II". The basic utility for explorers is about the same as the Tech 1 device, but the extra skill training and more expensive module will give you the ability to do the famous "MWD Cloak Trick". There are plenty of YouTube videos on how to do the trick; [https://youtu.be/BHkgZWaWdlo here's a nice short one]. If you are planning on going through jump gates in possibly hostile circumstances (including in hisec when Signal Cartel has a war declared against us) this can be useful, but if you're mostly planning to sit still while cloaked, it might not be worth the extra expense.

Cloaking Level 4 allows you to use the pinnacle of cloaking tech, the "Covert Ops Cloaking Device II". This version will allow you to warp while cloaked, but it can only be fit to certain ships, and most of those ships have extensive training requirements of their own.

There is, of course, a Level 5 of the Cloaking skill, but at the present time it doesn't provide any useful benefits for Signaleers (beyond checking another box for our completionists), as it just reduces the time needed to lock targets after dropping the cloak. This might be good for those who use their cloak to sneak up on their victims, but we don't do that sort of thing.