Do we have an idea of when that stuff [the gas cloud with EM interference from Kirk's test level] might actually make it into the persistent universe?

Hopefully soon(TM). Ambience has a direct impact. Well, there's two different types of ambience. So there's ambience that a bigger ship interferes onto a smaller ship, or bigger emissions interfere onto smaller emissions. And that will never 100% bleed out the emissions. It's more of a modifier, so that even if you're really up close to it, you'll eventually see it. And then there's more of an environment ambient, where you have to be above it in order to see the object. So in order to know what those values that we need are, we need to have reasonable signature generation across the board. And the first pass of that is going to be working with VET on what emissions we should be seeing, so that we could get reasonable ranges for ping, for regular passive radar, and also for scanning. But once we're there, then we could take those values and plug them into the environment so that you could have stealthier areas, like an asteroid field could completely hide CS and you're completely allowed with EM and IR. We have to be careful what those values are, because we want them at a range that makes it harder to see and not completely blind players. So we will have some areas that emit ambient, because we're going to toy with values to get it there. And once we have a baseline of how we want this stuff to be, we're just going to keep pushing more and more until eventually more systems have it, and then ambience everywhere.

But 3.14-wise, we will have an ambient level within the PU. So that is not way far away. That has to come with this, because otherwise the whole ambient signature side of it is kind of moot. So there will be an ambient level, plus coming from the ships.