what are GCT's in Star Wars?

Darth_Nader · Post by **Darth_Nader** » 2002-12-26 05:50pm

can GCT's pick up cloaked ships? because i know there are mini cloakers used by bounty hunters and people, because it says it in the essential guide to weapons and technology. But once again what are GCT's and why would they use them because if i remeber right Star Wars doesnt have any ships that can cloak or something to that effect.

Darth Garden Gnome · Post by **Darth Garden Gnome** » 2002-12-26 05:55pm

"No ship that small has a cloaking device!" -Captain Needa, ISD Avenger;TESB

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2002-12-26 06:04pm

Needa was wrong, Mauls ship had a cloak, as did the Emperor's shuttle

It's actually CGT, an acronym that stnads for crystaline gravfield trap IIRC. It is an extremely sensitive gravitational sensor and the only known way to pick up a cloaked SW ship just standing there.

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2002-12-26 06:07pm

And while the bounty hunters have stealth systems, they don't have true cloaking. There are only 3 ways to do that, one seems to be lost tech, one is unable to be reproduced because the necessary crystals are unavailable by ROTJ era, and one the Imperial remnant has a monopoly on.

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-12-26 06:19pm

Crystal Gravity Traps are in essance massive computers hooked up to many many gravatoinc sensors

They take a fixed based(Starship/Starbase) measures the gravity effecting it and if it ever changes, boom there's your cloaked ship, Its sensative enough to pick up fighters with cloaks at light-hour ranges as its said to be system wide.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2002-12-26 08:35pm

They needed it to pick out 40 m cloaked asteroids among the Coruscant traffic. Those asteroids wouldn't produce any emissions, so they needed the extremely sensitive CGT to find it.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2002-12-27 12:52am

Mr Bean wrote:Crystal Gravity Traps are in essance massive computers hooked up to many many gravatoinc sensors

They take a fixed based(Starship/Starbase) measures the gravity effecting it and if it ever changes, boom there's your cloaked ship, Its sensative enough to pick up fighters with cloaks at light-hour ranges as its said to be system wide.

No, they're apparently a form of gravitic sensor (its possible there is more than one kind..) that works on picking up the gravitic disturbances created by the presence of mass in space. They typically have ranges of hundreds of thousands of km (probably being passive and quite sensitive, explaining the relatively short ranges.)

Their ability to detect cloaked SW ships is only of secondary benefit, because mass-cloaking/baffling is impractical/improbable. Even then, it requires dedicated platforms (IE the Bilbringi CGT array) and can only detect ships at ranges of thousands of km, a fraction of the typical range.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2002-12-27 12:54am

Illuminatus Primus wrote:They needed it to pick out 40 m cloaked asteroids among the Coruscant traffic. Those asteroids wouldn't produce any emissions, so they needed the extremely sensitive CGT to find it.

Its because cloaking shields block all forms of sensor aside from the CGT array (mass baffling seems impractical). Even then, the ranges of the dedicated arrays were no greater htan 10,000 km, even though a CGT array is generally a "common" sensor many tens of times the range.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2002-12-27 02:04pm

Connor MacLeod wrote:Its because cloaking shields block all forms of sensor aside from the CGT array (mass baffling seems impractical). Even then, the ranges of the dedicated arrays were no greater htan 10,000 km, even though a CGT array is generally a "common" sensor many tens of times the range.

The cloaking field can't stop detection of the engine wash. Asteroids lack that, are completely passive...they just orbit. Sensitive enough sensor screening might reveal the presence of a cloaked vessel w/ out where it is; engine wash detected but not easily traced to a position.

There appear to be other gravitic sensors, but whether they could pick up a single cloaked frieghter (like in Thrawn's first scheme) or a cloaked asteroid is something else entirely.

nightmare · Post by **nightmare** » 2002-12-27 08:23pm

"No ship that small has a cloaking device!" -Captain Needa, ISD Avenger;TESB

Now, this obviously implies that largers vessels could have a cloaking device.

Let's also bring up Qui-Gon Jinn in TPM:

"Do you have a cloaking device?"

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-12-28 05:22pm

Incidentally, A-Wings are the smallest ships with any ability to confuse SW sensors that have been observed. They lack true cloaking ability, and it is unclear whether or not Qui-Gon or Needa was mistaken. I would suspect Needa was mistaken, given the prevalence of EU sources that seem to verify Qui-Gon's assessment.

Connor MacLeod · Post by **Connor MacLeod** » 2002-12-28 10:57pm

Master of Ossus wrote:Incidentally, A-Wings are the smallest ships with any ability to confuse SW sensors that have been observed. They lack true cloaking ability, and it is unclear whether or not Qui-Gon or Needa was mistaken. I would suspect Needa was mistaken, given the prevalence of EU sources that seem to verify Qui-Gon's assessment.

They're a sort of sensor mask/jammers.. cloaking seems to be something else.

The smallest cloak capable ship would be the V-38's from "DArk Forces 2" which carry fighter-scale cloaking.

And There are the "Decoy beams" from the XvT and XWA games... which effectively function like sensor masks or cloaks.

Slave-1 had a form of cloaking or sensor masking that didn't visually obscure them, though, too.

Eleas · Post by **Eleas** » 2002-12-29 01:11pm

Mr Bean wrote:Crystal Gravity Traps are in essance massive computers hooked up to many many gravatoinc sensors

They take a fixed based(Starship/Starbase) measures the gravity effecting it and if it ever changes, boom there's your cloaked ship, Its sensative enough to pick up fighters with cloaks at light-hour ranges as its said to be system wide.

Crystal Gravfield Traps. As for the rest of this information, where is it from?

Grand Admiral Thrawn · Post by **Grand Admiral Thrawn** » 2002-12-29 07:32pm

IDIOTS!