What does the cloaking booster on scouts do?

[mindloss]

I thought they were always cloaked anyway, unless tagged by tachyons, in which case they were visible for a short while. What does grouping them together accomplish?

[Ranakastrasz]

Cloaking booster results in an already cloaked ship being immune to tachyon beams, and hence cannot be revealed. However, a ship cannot boost itself, nor can a ship boost another ship that is already supplying a cloaking boost.

The result of this is that to be able to detect (and destroy) the scouts, the AI has to reveal, and destroy the non-boosted scouts, to reveal another group of them, and so on, the group shrinking each time, rather than the 1 scout dying instantly in a puff of smoke as soon as it gets revealed.

[x4000]

Yep, it makes them better in groups, exactly. The wiki has an extensive article on this one, too.

[mindloss]

Oh, okay, I do remember reading that and apparently immediately forgetting. So when I send a glot of Mk2-3 scouts through a wormhole and only one or two out of a dozen make it through alive, that implies that there were about ten enemies ready to take shots within close range? (Or to be more precise, enough enemies to take ten shots.)

[x4000]

Yeah, that sounds about right.

[Hearteater]

If you don't mind the micro, you can scout a little deeper by positioning the boosted scouts in FRONT of the boosting scouts at max boost range.  Line them up and formation move them to the next system.  The boosted scouts will enter the warp point before the boosting scouts reach tachyon range (esp. if you are using Mk II+).  Then the boosting scouts reassign their boosters amongst themselves, so you can get 50-75% of a scouts blob through.

In particular, I often use this when I have 2 scouts in a deep system to scout one system further.

[mindloss]

ooooh, cool! I was wondering if there was something like that. So the boost translates through the wormhole or whatever, I take it... I'll have to give it a shot

[Hearteater]

The boost DOESN'T go through the warp point.  But it does protect the front scouts until they transition.  Once on the other side a new boost network will be set up, and any non-boosted scouts will get tachyoned and killed.

Pushing boosted scouts through a warp point is mainly useful when you have too few scouts to make it through in a clump.  Because at best your scouts go through as two groups instead of one, the other side of the warp point will just wreck them much harder than a single clump.