Fun topic
. To add to what KW said, it may in fact be possible to have something even closer to proper cloaking, because it
is possible to order the AI to ignore a particular ship. However, even in this case, there would still be a lot of problems.
If the player is the cloaking ship -
1. Guns work while cloaked = bad, because the player is virtually invulnerable.
2. Capships would probably continue blasting away = bad? Maybe not so bad, depending on your point of view.
3. No way to activate/disactivate it. Cloaking works for the duration of the entire mission.
If the enemy is the cloaker:
1. Radar signal remains. The enemy ship remains targettable. It is possible to program the ship to change alignment during cloaking (so that the automatic targetting automatically switches to a different, hostile ship), but this only works if the player has automatic targetting switched on, and even then can be worked around simply by unlocking the target.
2. You can prevent the cloaked ship from being shot at, and from shooting - but if you do the latter, you will also prevent it from taking advantage of its cloaking system. The only manoeuvring it will do while cloaked is to avoid collision.
As for cutscenes, they are nothing more than perfectly ordinary missions, just much more customised to obtain specific results every time.
Finally, atmospheric missions. Strictly speaking, there's no reason why one shouldn't use a 'landscape' mesh in SO, which, combined with a sky-like background would create the
illusion of an atmospheric mission. However, it is difficult to say how SO would handle what would have to be a bloody complex mesh.