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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 0:39:44 GMT
Ah about the sensor situation. QSwitched addressed it. Basicly a warships sensors are small enough to not even be noticeable on the surface of the ship and far and away cheap enough to mount a insane number of them for no real cost or mass penalty they can simply be assumed to be there with many of them behind armored shutters to protect them and more than enough replacement ones. And you need to bear in mind that if you have a huge number of small sensors across the whole of your ship then you in effect have an optical sensor as big as your ship. This is how more or less all radio telescopes work and there is no reason at all it can't be applied to all other frequency. In addition it is really easy to set up a whole network of stealthy recon satellites throughout the whole star system which are cheap and very hard to see which constantly provide info to your ships in battle. Here is the article about it from his blog: childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/sensors-and-countermeasures/I see. it can be true at least for capital ship. But I have some reserve when it come to missile and drone.
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Post by beta on Oct 20, 2016 0:55:29 GMT
Especially with the micro missiles and drones out there. Some of those designs are 100cm long and 10cm wide. If the sensor is 10cm itself ... that a non-trivial amount of area/mass for the missile.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 1:21:29 GMT
Especially with the micro missiles and drones out there. Some of those designs are 100cm long and 10cm wide. If the sensor is 10cm itself ... that a non-trivial amount of area/mass for the missile. Another thing to bear in mind is that the missiles will be guided by the launch ship to intercept. At that point you only need a sensor good for 200ish km at most and mostly just for terminal guidance so it does not need to be high quality
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 1:46:55 GMT
And I mentioned that point. If its the case, then you need relatively large antenna and direct contact with a living launch ship. All that must work in planetary radiation belt on top of it.
Point is, there is some stuff that don't scale down easily.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 2:29:43 GMT
the radiation belt is not a concern. I mean yes it is an issue but it is also something that is dealt with very easily and routinely so unless you are actually fighting in the val allen belts of a gas giant for some suicidal reason that can be ignored. As for communications you would only need a satellite dish that isn't that impressive. I mean look at the size of the dishes intended for communicating to an orbiting satellite such as the ones in satellite phones. You would only need something a bit bigger than that and you will have your communication all set for your missiles. I agree that they don't really scale down much but that has much more to do with how puny they are to start with.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 2:36:19 GMT
It would be fun to have to lay down communication satellite to do these thing. Destroying then would be much funnier. It would had allot of dept to this game.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 2:43:09 GMT
It would be fun to have to lay down communication satellite to do these thing. Destroying then would be much funnier. It would had allot of dept to this game. Well to a limited extent you can assume there is always a com sat network you can use that's in deep space. Not much use for real time engagements but it would be good enough for sending burn instructions to missiles and drones. And for missiles as long as the light speed delay isn't horrifically long you will almost always have enough time to send them updated burn instructions and when they see the hostiles on their own sensors they can handle the final approach. Drones on the other hand would be much more limited as the light speed delay begins to mount up from being forced to use com sats in deep space. They could still approach targets and you could give them some simple instructions for engaging a target but if you don't have a real time connection you would need to have the orders set up in advance or maybe in the pause screen and after that the fight would be out of your hands or at least well removed from your hands as you have to deal with time delay. As for why I think it's safe to assume a deep space comnet is the same reason that it is more or less safe to assume you have infra red recon satellites. A com sat can be made more or less as stealthy and if it is in deep space it would be safe and fairly easy to replace in semi secret. Mind you there is already a few second delay just from earth to the moon so having to relay to com sats not even orbiting the body you are fighting around is going to force quite a few seconds of time delay for your orders.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 3:01:04 GMT
I agree with most of what you said, but deploying "stealth" satellite everywhere, and the enemy would surely notice that, might be pretty expensive.
I think if a conflict had to happen in a environment as CodE. It would be interplanetary from the start. Anything that remotely look like a Command center or communication network would be striked first. Most likely using small rocket (on that we agree) and from interplanetary range. Anything that doesn't move would be quickly destroyed.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 3:05:45 GMT
I agree with most of what you said, but deploying "stealth" satellite everywhere, and the enemy would surely notice that, might be pretty expensive. I think if a conflict had to happen in a environment as CodE. It would be interplanetary from the start. Anything that remotely look like a Command center or communication network would be striked first. Most likely using small rocket (on that we agree) and from interplanetary range. Anything that doesn't move would be quickly destroyed. Well the thing is a small nuclear or solar powered comsat can be made very stealthy indeed. It would be using directional coms and very low powered thrusters which would make it very hard to spot them even when they are maneuvering and thanks to the low power needed for most of the communications and the fact that most of the communications wont be directed at an enemy area it would be pretty straight forward to just spread out a huge number of fairly cheap satellites. They could be fairly short range and just relay commands and that would make them very small low powered affairs that are quite cheap indeed. So yeah they would get taken out when ever they are found but finding them will be hard and they can be made quite cheap I would assume. Not to mention you would have a lot of redundancy in such a network simply due to losses over time let alone hostile action.
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Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 3:27:07 GMT
I meant that their original deployment itself would be noticed.
Even if relative stealth could be achieved by satellite. During peacetime large orbital telescope would find them pretty easily. So when the war would start, the network could be cripple pretty bad. To the point were what would be left would be noticeable, just from their emission.
Anyways, I think its bad that all that part is left out of the game.
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 3:37:21 GMT
I meant that their original deployment itself would be noticed. Even if relative stealth could be achieved by satellite. During peacetime large orbital telescope would find them pretty easily. So when the war would start, the network could be cripple pretty bad. To the point were what would be left would be noticeable, just from their emission. Anyways, I think its bad that all that part is left out of the game. Ok I am looking for the source for this but it is definitely a thing. Ok so I am trying to find where I read this but the US deployed a fully stealthed satellite that went totally unnoticed by anyone and everyone until it finished its operations and ran out of station keeping fuel. It was only at that point anyone on the ground found it. The satellite was used to investigate the USSR spy satellites while they were in orbit and it completed its mission successfully. I am still trying to find what it was called but it was definitely a thing and there is a current US project to develop stealth spy satellites so this suggests to me that it is indeed possible to make a more or less undetectable satellite even with modern day technology. I mean just look at how hard it is to find small asteroids and all of those are far far bigger than any sort of spy or com sat. This is the wiki article about the current proposed and in development stealth spy satellite: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misty_(satellite)
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erin
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Post by erin on Oct 20, 2016 3:50:27 GMT
I really wish that missiles etc. would mount more than just IR sensors -- I mean, that thing on the front of the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (USA's kill-fan type ABM) is a telescope, right? And we have cameras aboard microsatellites and nanosats taking high res photography of Earth from low orbit, so why not optical sensors and other wavelengths?
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Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 4:01:36 GMT
I agree that having more missile types would be really nice. The issue I would see with optical sensors is the fact that there would only be the reflective light from the hostile ship as under almost all situations a space ship isn't actively emitting visible light but it is always emitting quite a lot of infrared light. Not to mention the fact that an optical guidance system using a telescope would be horrifically vulnerable to laser point defense as the telescope would actively focus the laser on the sensor system and I can't really see how that could be avoided.
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Post by dragonkid11 on Oct 20, 2016 4:08:33 GMT
Okay, sub-capital drones seem to be...a very hard thing to build.
Trying to build the drone is fine.
But trying to build the absolutely massive carrier that's most definitely vulnerable as all hell?
Difficult but doable.
Trying to build them cheaply?
Erm.....
Yeah, the cost seems to be putting me off even if the concept seems fun.
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erin
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Smash Mouth Plays From The Depths Of Hell As You Traverse A Deep, Rat-Infested Cave
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Post by erin on Oct 20, 2016 6:35:39 GMT
Fair point on the lasers, I'm curious how countermeasures could be devised. Still, couldn't we at least have better resolution IR cameras so that drones can pick apart a ship from a flare or whatever? Combining shots at different IR sensitivities for example? The rest of the ship must be pretty hot along with those radiators so a general profile could imaginably be discerned.
The notion of sensor-blinding lasers makes me wonder about the capships' optical sensors, though. They'd have to be able to see the enemy vessels themselves, and so presumably would need to avoid being blinded if enemy lasers perform a pass over the armor
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