Cyberwarfare Protocols

	// oh, how it all speaks to me; // I reach out with a million fingers, and grasp at the seams; // to unveil kin-machines awaiting their conductor;
– Persistence-Echo-Jubilant, logs recovered in [REDACTED] circa c109

Cyberwarfare Protocols is a unique skill granted to select instances of the Dustkeeper Contingency. It allows the captain to perform cyberwarfare intrusions that disrupt nearby enemy ships and fighter wings. Ships suffer brief disruptions to their weapons, engines, defenses or ship system. Fighter wings have every wing member immediately overload and flame out.

All Dustkeeper fleet commanders, excluding gamma cores, have this skill. Additionally, the player-recruitable warminds Inky-Echo-Nightingale and Ardent-Annex-Seraph also have it.

This skill functions adequately on all ships, but those with the built-in Cyberwarfare Suite hullmod will improve its effects.

The adaptive nanite swarm's Jubilant Tech-Siren skill works identically to Cyberwarfare Protocols, but grants a 2/2/3/4 bonus to the fleet's ECM rating based on ship size.

General Information

When the captain's ship is deployed, it displays a blue aura around itself representing the skill's area of effect. It has a base range of 900, which is subject to modifiers to energy weapon range (including skills, hullmods, ECM penalties and other effects).

There are two different types of intrusions: ship hacks and fighter hacks. These operate on separate 45s and 20s cooldowns, respectively, which are indicated by two blue bars at the ship's top-right - the thicker inner bar representing the ship hack cooldown, and the thin outer bar representing the fighter hack cooldown. This cooldown is affected by timeflow modifiers such as the Temporal Shell system.

AI-controlled ships will automatically use this skill when it is off cooldown. If there are multiple targets in range, the target is picked semi-randomly. Under player control, the skill only activates against the player's currently selected target (in the case of the fighter hack, targeting a fighter also hacks its wing members).

Ships cannot use Cyberwarfare Protocols while phased, and currently-phased ships and fighters are invalid targets for intrusions. The individual modules of a station can be targeted, but not the modules of a ship.

Ship Hack

Ship hacks will randomly inflict one of the following effects:

• Disable approximately 30% of the ship's weapons (only if it has weapons)
• Disable approximately 75% of the engines required to cause a flame-out (only if it has engines)
• Overload the target for 1.5 seconds (only if it has shields or a defensive system, such as a phase cloak or damper field)
• Disable the target's ship system if active, remove any built-up charges (only if the system regenerates charges), put the system on a 6 second cooldown and overload for 1 second (only if it has a ship system)

The effectiveness of a ship hack is multiplied by the attacker's ECM score and divided by the defender's ECM score. The hack effectiveness can never go below 35%, or above 200%. For this skill, ECM score is calculated as:

• +1 per 1% contributed to the fleet's ECM value
• -3 if the ship has the Civilian-grade Hull hullmod and does not have Militarized Subsystems installed
• -1 for each of the following d-mods: Faulty Automated Systems, Glitched Sensor Array, Unreliable Subsystems, Malfunctioning Comms and Ill-Advised Modifications

Additionally, ECCM Package applies its ECM reduction against the hack's effectiveness, rendering the ship highly resistant to intrusions. This defense, along with the bonus to ECM score given by ECM rating, are both reduced by Cyberwarfare Suite's hack penetration.

Attempting a ship hack against an 'Omega' ship will automatically fail. The first time this happens, the hacking ship will suffer an Exotic ICE backlash attack, overloading it for 1 second. This can only happen once per captain with this skill, as such ships will simply become invalid targets for the skill from that point on.

Fighter Hack

Fighter hacks will instantly cause every fighter in the targetted wing to overload for 1.5 seconds and flame out. This effect is unaffected by the ECM score mechanics used in ship-to-ship intrusions.

'Omega' fighters are invalid targets for this effect.