ok i am now at rank 157 and have noticed that higher ranks are disabling me now. been hit by a few ppl around rank 300.

so my question is how much cloak should i be putting on my ship now to hide from most of them. as standard i have 300 cloak on me but dont think thats enough.

2400 hull
Space: 911 / 911
Attack: 2759
Defense: 889
Scan: 565
Cloak: 320
Cargo: 1340.7 / 1560
Upkeep: 161M

also if i go the other route of increasing my hull and defence .. how much should i get it up to put off people from seeing me as an easy target

at least by your rank i had 5000-6000 hull and 1k defense which should make you less of a target for higher ranks.

No matter what rank you are, higher ranks are going to disable you. I'm rank 382, and players rank 600+ hit me.

The best defense is a good offense. In this case, get your attack up and then start doing some major PVP, if you haven't done so yet. If you get your combat reputation up to Insane, which is often a deterrent for some PVPers (looking for an easier target).

If you have any cloak mods, drop them add hull.

at 150 i found increased attack did not deter high ranked attackers. even if i hit higher on them they simply had more hull than i could handle. to defend against this i used a defensive heavy hull build.

however it was difficult to get kills with only 2 null's

Normaly heavy pvper use all their deck for atk / def / hull / energy module so they don't have a lot of scan . (I had 50 a rank 300 ) So just had a bit of cloak 100 or 200 and it should reduce the attack you receive ... Should im not a specialist for how the cloak work

I've got about 500 scan just from small mods that are npc drops and now since im actively looking for npcs, im running at about 1800 all the time now..
I had the 500 scan the entire time from about rank 150 till about 20 ranks ago(260ish), when i installed ONE scanner full time and almost all the smaller ones, I've got the 1800.
The higher up in ranks you go, the larger the BT net gets for what you can hit below you... at 40% of THEIR rank I think its a bit much.
Its a lot easier for someone who's rank 400 to install more then enough scan to make and cloaking that I wanted to put on effective.

Like someone else said, get your rep up, raise your HULL most important thing, then att/def.

not sure rep work .. i am already insane with 3 protons .. wasted some reds so i only have 1 mk3 dom at the moment ..
attack has been maxed .. ship is equipped with 8 heavy antiprotons .. been advised not to get nulls yet cus thats going to increase my upkeep too much..
icarium81 .. tx i will try upping my cloak to about 500 .. if 500 was ur standard scan .. at least that should stop me appering on their bt less often.
more hull and def is going to take time as i get more deck space

PVP attracts PVP, if PVP is not your main focus then dont build a PVP ship, if you do the higher level players will see you. Im currently rank 313 and have 1.5k cloak, I only disabled 1 - 2 times a week usually ( barring the ocasional butthurt legion alert ) by players min. 100+ ranks higher than me. There is no sure fire way to stay OFF there BT's but high cloak will remove you from most of them, the modules you get from NPC / missions will probably only take you off roughly half.

if your looking for a hard number, I would say around 700+ cloak and your fairly "safe"

tx elerian.. i am mainly in to npc and pvp.. thats why i have stuck with an attack build.. so seems that i am going to have to get little more cloak. not expecting it to completely hide me just want to reduce my chances of appearing on higher level bt.

I would say most 300 that goes on PvP outa have 4-6k atk.
use the following formula to approximate how many shots it would take to kill you

Damage per shot = tanh( attack*(random(0.6 to 1.666)) / (defense * 5) ) * damagecap
damagecap = 0.5 * deck or 0.5*(rank+19), whichever is bigger. In your case, it's deck*0.5

If you take more than 20 shots to kill, most people would tend to stay away from you, unless they have something against you, in which case unless you take more than 50 shots to kill un-debuffed, you are gonna get killed anyway.
now, a player that is 300 can't badge off you, yet (300*0.6=180). At the time of post, the highest lvl that can badge you is 157/0.6=261, which would have 3500-5000 atk usually after regular buffing(can be higher if they crux and stuff, but at this lvl range, ppl usually don't run crux etc)

Again, approximate how many shots it would take for them to kill you, most ppl would give up if they do a quick calculation based on ur stuff and find it to be more than 20. more is better ofc.

Now, as for cloak, I would say 500 is sufficent for your purpose at your rank. Most ppl usually run below that. And if someone goes over 500, chances are they have over 2k(usually buffed too), and chances are it would put a strain on your module space to put up 2k cloak and make you an easy kill. I don't feel it's worth it to try to avert a very small number of players like that.

Furthermore, if it is really players around 300 hitting you, it's probably not off BT, player above 261 can't see you on BT. They are hitting you off alerts of some sort, and if that's the case, cloak does NOT help you at all.

From the aspect of a fairly heavy pvper the best thing you can do is hide yourself if your ship can be seen it will get disabled

My normal approach is to check to check hull/def att isn't important at all your pvping buffed and there offline and if you need to you have a repair

i check for actions any deviations from the 3 5 5 usually means this player hasn't or cannot halc kvt are an issue but i dont pvp without a ready supply so don't expect them to save you

what i have seen a fair number of players doing is to install 5 decent hull only npc or mission weapons and load the rest with hull
this is effective as it's an energy sink but really negative to general game play

I personally run no cloak or scan i get disabled once a week usually return the disable and move on there not much more to do than that.

I've got less than 500 cloak and I've gone a few weeks now without being on the bt.
For your rank, a good combat rep and powerful weapons will make most people move on. I stress most though. Some people see it as a challenge. When you get higher in rank, beef up your defense.

wow your lucky i guess, i have 2k cloak and still get pegged around once a week, but its by people way over my rank / ship class so i guess they have the space for scanners.

I don't get hit, period, with only 80 cloak. Maybe it's my alluring charm that intimidates people?

I'll start avoiding you..

Nah, you're just too ugly to attack

Never mind, just got tagged by Serenity.

And beauty is in the eye o the beholder. It's your own opinion. I'm actually very pretty

In drannik standards, lol

The green really compliments the... slightly darker green.

Serenity eh? meh.