Malestrom Cloaking

Maelstrom Cloaking is a technology that was developed by Pardigm during the mid-late Maelstrom War period. It was used briefly as a means to hide a few Nexus Force starships from the Maelstrom. Notably, it was used by John Brickman and his crew in Into the Fire to enter deep into Maelstrom territory. However, because of Maelstrom's adaptive nature, it never saw widespread use.

Purpose
Maelstrom cloaking was developed for use hiding Nexus starships from Maelstrom. Because Maelstrom sees long-range by detecting imagination, the cloak was designed to hide the emissions given off by it.

By blocking the Maelstrom's ability to see the imagination on board, ships are rendered practically invisible to Maelstrom. It is worth noting, however, that a cloaked ship is still easily detectable to the naked eye, meaning Maelstrom can use its limited vision to see ships if they get close enough.

Technology
Maelstrom cloaks are actually built on relatively simple technology at their core; the design is similar to a field projector (which is used for shielding normal ships from energy weapons). The design consists of one or more rings which contain rotating emitters, which project a field of energy around the ship.

The main difference between a cloak and a bigger field generator is that the cloak uses anti-imagination, which was found to be excellent at canceling out the emissions from imagination.

Downsides
As mentioned above, the technology does not render the cloaked ship invisible to anyone but Maelstrom.

Besides this, there are several other important limitations that make the technology impractical at best.

First, Maelstrom cloaks require a huge amount of power to operate. This means that sublight speed is reduced, range is reduced, and additional systems like shields and the hyperdrive are unusable with the cloak on. Weapons are also greatly compromised.

In addition to this, the physical structure of the shield itself is massive, requiring large rings that encircle the ship approximately every twenty studs. There is also thought to be an upper limit on the size of the cloak.

Perhaps most importantly however, anti-imagination is not invisible to Maelstrom; they can see it, but they are not trained to look for it. Were the technology to be used commonly, it would quickly lose effectiveness. For this reason, it was kept a secret by Paradigm.

Conclusion
Though Maelstrom cloaking had only very limited usage during the war, the missions where it was used proved very important. Most of the downsides probably could have been reduced or eliminated with additional development. But because of the nature of the technology, it would've been more of a hindrance than a help if overused as Maelstrom could quickly learn to look for it.