Cloak and Dagger: Hidden Operations in EVE
First in an occasional series
The “cloak and dagger” elements of EVE Online have long attracted many players. Perhaps no incident illustrates this more clearly than the now-legendary Guiding Hand Social Club operation against Ubiqua Seraph. This alone has drawn hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new players to EVE, who routinely cite the PC Gamer article as “the reason I joined this game”.
This article examines the different sorts of operations and technologies available to players with an interest in subterfuge of various sorts within EVE.
Real Life Terminology
In “real life”, NATO and associated organizations (like the United States Departments of Defense and State as well as the US Central Intelligence Agency) draw a distinction between “covert” and “clandestine” operations. A covert operation conceals the actual identity of the organization that sponsored it (deniable), while a clandestine operation conceals the fact of the operation’s existence itself (hidden). Clearly, these definitions leave room for lots of overlap. Many clandestine ops will also need to occur covertly. This won’t always hold true, though, as a group may use a front company or execute a “false flag” operation to make it appear as though a third organization has sponsored it and thus deny their own connections to it.
While I don’t know whether the term “black ops” actually has an official definition, it usually describes operations that qualify as both covert and clandestine, frequently because they would present significant political or ethical challenges (assassinations, torture, etc.)
EVE Terminology
The above definitions don’t necessarily have anything to do with the ship classes in EVE. But similar terms do have usage in New Eden, as below:
In EVE, covert operations ships refer to small, frigate-size craft that can warp while cloaked. They also focus either on astrometrics (finding facilities and ships otherwise difficult or impossible to pinpoint) or on the use of special weaponry including area-of-effect bombs and the use of battleship-sized siege missile launchers with torpedoes to deal significant damage far above what other ships their size can normally accomplish.
Recon ships have significant electronic warfare capabilities, such as tracking disruption, sensor dampening, electronic countermeasures (jamming), propulsion jamming (stasis webifiers or warp disruption), and target painting. Some classes can warp while cloaked; others cannot, but instead focus even more on greater EWAR capacity.
Blockade runners do not themselves fight. Rather, these transport ships can warp while cloaked and carry much larger cargo than combat ships. This can greatly aid a fleet by carrying jump fuel or moving other supplies securely past enemy-controlled zones.
Black ops ships differ in several significant ways. These ships have battleship-sized hulls and can create jump bridges for other blacks ops ships plus craft that use covert ops cloaks, including covops frigates (as above) plus blockade runners, recon ships, and appropriately-configured strategic cruisers. All these ships have jump harmonics 2, though black ops ships themselves cannot fit these cloaks. They do this via links created directly to other ships that have created covert cynosural fields. This allows most of a fleet to bypass the stargate network, though at some point a lead ship will need to use that network to reach a target location and create the covert cyno field.
Operation types
Broadly speaking, we can class related operations along three axes:
- Deniability: ranges from public declarations of war (no deniability) to discreetly hiring mercenaries to false flag operations using front companies or alts. Tied to covert operations.
- Secrecy: ranges from frontal assaults to moving through unpopulated systems to using cloaked ships or surreptitious information gathering.
- Location: ranges from in-space assets to in-station (not attackable through normal means) to “metaspace”.
Example operations
Using this framework, we can see the relationships between different operation types. At the base point, we have a public war declaration by one alliance on another leading to frontal assaults on in-space assets (such as starbases or territory control units). This has no secrecy or deniability and takes place in a well-defined location.
Moving along the deniability axis, we can have conflicts involving mercenaries, possibly hired secretly, so that no one outside the client and mercenary knows of the relationship. This can go up to using front organizations or alts to execute an operation, with no connection back to the sponsoring organization.
Moving along the secrecy axis, we move up to using scouts to move through empty systems or outside scanner range (thus avoiding defensive reconnaissance) to using cloaked ships or covert cynosural fields. Traditional in-space electronic warfare has little bearing here, since pilots can only prevent others from detection using scanning equipment or seeing ships on the overview with cloaks.
Moving along the location axis, we move from in-space combat (ships and starbases shooting at each other) to in-station operations (e.g. stealing from corporate hangars) to fighting in metaspace. This might include attacks on out-of-game assets (e.g. copying confidential data like battle plans) to attacking the morale and cohesion of an organization.
These operations frequently work best when used in combination to accomplish defined objectives. For example, in alliance warfare, in-space territorial assaults have much greater chances of success when conducted with significant knowledge of the enemy’s battle plans or sabotage of his communication channels. Alternately, stealthy attacks against in-space assets (stealth bombers attacking supply convoys) often require advance knowledge of the convoy’s location and direction, either through direct observation or through infiltration and espionage.
In future articles, we’ll look in-depth at various types of operations, including well-known examples and organizations.
