|
Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 13:25:46 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. I did one that was pretty effective. I posted it on the post your design armor tread. The sub capital (Tashi I) as only 60t but I raised it to (450t Tashi III) on my latest version. It was mainly a armor upgrade+fuel. It had the same coilgun and missile loadout. I think that say allot about armor weight impact. The mothership had no real armor, just something to counter light flak, nuke and laser. But with a leg of 15km/s Dv full and 28km/s once the 5 Tashi deployed. I don't need armor against anything I have seen on the forum so far. Anyways, the total cost was about 53mc if I remember correctly. about 1/3 of it was coilgun ammo. That material is so expensive... I am considering removing them for that reason.
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 14:16:27 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 As for lasers destroying sensors it is most applicable when the enemy has very few sensor systems. So it would work great against a system which has a telescope attached as that would distinctly limit the number of them that you can carry and make the sensor clearly visible and easy to target. Meanwhile for a cap ship you can assume you have sensors over the whole ship with a lot of redundancy so that a laser going across the surface wouldn't be able to take out a worthwhile number of them. Not to mention the fact that if you don't need light gathering optics like what you would need for a visible spectrum sensor it would be much much harder to detect the sensors and therefore to target them. So basicly the main appeal of infrared sensors is the fact that the enemy is always emitting a whole load of infrared light so you can make very low profile small and cheap sensors that can pick it up. But for other sensor systems you are going to need to either emit something to reflect off the enemy ship or use fairly substantial light gathering optics which would limit the number and minimum size of those sensor systems. Not to mention reducing their field of view.
|
|
|
Post by redmars on Oct 20, 2016 20:10:03 GMT
As for lasers destroying sensors it is most applicable when the enemy has very few sensor systems. So it would work great against a system which has a telescope attached as that would distinctly limit the number of them that you can carry and make the sensor clearly visible and easy to target. Meanwhile for a cap ship you can assume you have sensors over the whole ship with a lot of redundancy so that a laser going across the surface wouldn't be able to take out a worthwhile number of them. Not to mention the fact that if you don't need light gathering optics like what you would need for a visible spectrum sensor it would be much much harder to detect the sensors and therefore to target them. Do you actually need to destroy the sensors, though? I'm thinking a wide beam could dazzle the whole ship. Or does this not work with the kind of thermal sensors modeled? Supposedly, the Soviets did this to Skylab with a ground-based laser. Anyway, I've been thinking a bit about stealth recently, and I'd like to offer some thoughts. I should preface this by saying that I'm not making any claims about what qswitched should or shouldn't have included in the game. It's their game, and adding the whole interplay of sensors, communications, fire control etc. in realistic detail would be a massive undertaking. That said, it would be cool to see at least some black boxes representing the mass and cost of different sensor and communications capabilities.I think you can divide the process of finding and targeting something into at least four possible bottlenecks: (1) Physical detection. This is the easy part. I don't have much to add here, other than that I think something as simple as a shroud might work in some circumstances. (2) Signal processing. This is the first big bottleneck. This might take a variable amount of time/processing power depending on the frequency range and resolution of the sensor. If you're trying to hide, the important point to make is that you don't have to be invisible, you just have to fool the computer or person behind the sensor into thinking you are noise (debris, a decoy, background radiation, other signals) that they should filter out. 'Active stealth' in the form of jammers or tiles might be able to do this. Note that I'm not talking about white noise jamming, which is yet another technique. (3) Communications. If you gave a scanning/comms net, you need to actually transmit data. If your spysats do the data processing onsite, they need to carry the equipment to do so (equipment with mass/power costs which may additionally reveal how to fool your sensors if it is captured). If they do not, they need to do a lot more transmitting, and in a sufficiently high frequency to give them lots of bandwidth. I don't see these actually being very stealthy in practice, since 'tight' beams aren't that tight by the time they reach their destinations, there will be some heat/reflections due to generators/solar panels, and active scanners remain a thing. Also, not only do you have to worry about your spy/telemetry net being physically attacked (I think the entry-level ship for any self-respecting space navy would be a sort of minesweeper that cleans satellites and debris, and/or lays its own) but communications might also be jammed (though I think this is difficult with encrypted signals). (4) Fire control. This must be done with sensors that have a sufficiently fine resolution to do precision targeting. Not too difficult if you want to launch guided weapons, but a bit more tricky if you want to hit drones or turrets before they can shoot first, or munitions midflight. Directional IR ECM etc. can dazzle or confuse these fire control sensors (remembering that you don't just have to use white noise, you can find other ways of messing with signal processing). None of which adds up to 'can haz stealth', exactly, but I think the difficulties of finding and fixing a target tend to be understated. A lot depends on the scenario, of course: I imagine a defender with access to a complete sensor/communications infrastructure would have a big advantage.
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 20:16:59 GMT
As for lasers destroying sensors it is most applicable when the enemy has very few sensor systems. So it would work great against a system which has a telescope attached as that would distinctly limit the number of them that you can carry and make the sensor clearly visible and easy to target. Meanwhile for a cap ship you can assume you have sensors over the whole ship with a lot of redundancy so that a laser going across the surface wouldn't be able to take out a worthwhile number of them. Not to mention the fact that if you don't need light gathering optics like what you would need for a visible spectrum sensor it would be much much harder to detect the sensors and therefore to target them. Do you actually need to destroy the sensors, though? I'm thinking a wide beam could dazzle the whole ship. Or does this not work with the kind of thermal sensors modeled? Supposedly, the Soviets did this to Skylab with a ground-based laser. Anyway, I've been thinking a bit about stealth recently, and I'd like to offer some thoughts. I should preface this by saying that I'm not making any claims about what qswitched should or shouldn't have included in the game. It's their game, and adding the whole interplay of sensors, communications, fire control etc. in realistic detail would be a massive undertaking. That said, it would be cool to see at least some black boxes representing the mass and cost of different sensor and communications capabilities.I think you can divide the process of finding and targeting something into at least four possible bottlenecks: (1) Physical detection. This is the easy part. I don't have much to add here, other than that I think something as simple as a shroud might work in some circumstances. (2) Signal processing. This is the first big bottleneck. This might take a variable amount of time/processing power depending on the frequency range and resolution of the sensor. If you're trying to hide, the important point to make is that you don't have to be invisible, you just have to fool the computer or person behind the sensor into thinking you are noise (debris, a decoy, background radiation, other signals) that they should filter out. 'Active stealth' in the form of jammers or tiles might be able to do this. Note that I'm not talking about white noise jamming, which is yet another technique. (3) Communications. If you gave a scanning/comms net, you need to actually transmit data. If your spysats do the data processing onsite, they need to carry the equipment to do so (equipment with mass/power costs which may additionally reveal how to fool your sensors if it is captured). If they do not, they need to do a lot more transmitting, and in a sufficiently high frequency to give them lots of bandwidth. I don't see these actually being very stealthy in practice, since 'tight' beams aren't that tight by the time they reach their destinations, there will be some heat/reflections due to generators/solar panels, and active scanners remain a thing. Also, not only do you have to worry about your spy/telemetry net being physically attacked (I think the entry-level ship for any self-respecting space navy would be a sort of minesweeper that cleans satellites and debris, and/or lays its own) but communications might also be jammed (though I think this is difficult with encrypted signals). (4) Fire control. This must be done with sensors that have a sufficiently fine resolution to do precision targeting. Not too difficult if you want to launch guided weapons, but a bit more tricky if you want to hit drones or turrets before they can shoot first, or munitions midflight. Directional IR ECM etc. can dazzle or confuse these fire control sensors (remembering that you don't just have to use white noise, you can find other ways of messing with signal processing). None of which adds up to 'can haz stealth', exactly, but I think the difficulties of finding and fixing a target tend to be understated. A lot depends on the scenario, of course: I imagine a defender with access to a complete sensor/communications infrastructure would have a big advantage. As for this most of those are good points but they ignore the fact that manned space ships have nuclear engines and nuclear powerplants on board that are more or less constantly running. As such any space ship you can make will be emitting a whole load of thermal radiation simply due to having to keep people alive on board the space ship. As such you can rest assured that it will be really easy to see any ship that has people on board or even big drones. And any time you do a burn you will be detected and from the analysis of that burn the enemy will know where you are and where you will be. Now as for close in fire control yeah you will need pretty good sensors in order to get it but having a ship wide sensor system you will have the resolution fairly easily to do so. And a laser is pure crap if you use it for a wide beam. As a laser spreads out it looses a huge amount of power rapidly becoming useless.
|
|
|
Post by redmars on Oct 20, 2016 20:44:09 GMT
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the example resolution figure given in the blog (70cm at 100km) is at all adequate for aiming guns unless you're going for the centre of mass of a capital ship. IRL, naval guns have their own fire-control radars because search radars don't have a sufficiently fine resolution. You can spread these across the ship (but not across the nose of a needle?), but these can't be infinite, and they come with their own costs.
Anyway, yeah, I wans't trying to argue that you can somehow hide a ship in space any absolute sense. You can't do that on earth, either, thanks to satellites etc. But you might be able to rig things so you get the first shot off, or make an escape. Which is enough.
As for lasers, I have no idea how wide is 'too wide', only that dazzling should be possible against individual ships. qswitched makes the point in the blog that a wide missile formation is too big a target for a laser, but given how quickly lasers eat the guns of drones even when they are massive metal things connected to heat-spreading layers (give your drones a couple of mm of zirconium copper, btw, it helps), I imagine a laser ship should be able to pop the sensors on a missile or drone cloud in very short order.
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 20, 2016 20:57:34 GMT
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the example resolution figure given in the blog (70cm at 100km) is at all adequate for aiming guns unless you're going for the centre of mass of a capital ship. IRL, naval guns have their own fire-control radars because search radars don't have a sufficiently fine resolution. You can spread these across the ship (but not across the nose of a needle?), but these can't be infinite, and they come with their own costs. Anyway, yeah, I wans't trying to argue that you can somehow hide a ship in space any absolute sense. You can't do that on earth, either, thanks to satellites etc. But you might be able to rig things so you get the first shot off, or make an escape. Which is enough. As for lasers, I have no idea how wide is 'too wide', only that dazzling should be possible against individual ships. qswitched makes the point in the blog that a wide missile formation is too big a target for a laser, but given how quickly lasers eat the guns of drones even when they are massive metal things connected to heat-spreading layers (give your drones a couple of mm of zirconium copper, btw, it helps), I imagine a laser ship should be able to pop the sensors on a missile or drone cloud in very short order. Ok you definitely have a point about needing fine resolution but with modern technology if you have a lot of low performance sensors you can combine their images into one much higher resolution image. This is how most radio telescopes work and how a few visible light telescopes work. Each sensor on its own will not provide much useful information but when combine their images together with the correct method you will end up with an image that looks like it came from a sensor with the size of your ship. As for dazzling you can simply have a huge number of redundant sensors to make it very hard indeed to take them all out and you can have them be able to retract behind an armor shutter when they are getting zapped. Not to mention the fact that for infrared sensors they would not have to be hugely sensitive to pick up a heat source against a nearly 0 degree kelvin back ground making them much tougher to fry.
|
|
|
Post by redparadize on Oct 20, 2016 21:08:53 GMT
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the example resolution figure given in the blog (70cm at 100km) is at all adequate for aiming guns unless you're going for the centre of mass of a capital ship. IRL, naval guns have their own fire-control radars because search radars don't have a sufficiently fine resolution. You can spread these across the ship (but not across the nose of a needle?), but these can't be infinite, and they come with their own costs. Sorry if isolated that part specifically. Being able to see a target does not translate into firing solution. With radar, you know how far the object because of the Doppler effect and delay, that combined with a 2d vector and you can calculate fire solution. I would have do some check for IR tracking and such. But with multiple sensor you can simply triangulate the target to get the distance. Wave of missile that communicate with each other could be very good at this. About low powered laser that harm sensor without doing any serious damage to the rest. I thing it would be the prime tactic in space. With local sensor damaged, electronic warfare, flare and maneuver would be a effective counter.
|
|
erin
Junior Member
Smash Mouth Plays From The Depths Of Hell As You Traverse A Deep, Rat-Infested Cave
Posts: 57
|
Post by erin on Oct 21, 2016 1:23:19 GMT
Ok you definitely have a point about needing fine resolution but with modern technology if you have a lot of low performance sensors you can combine their images into one much higher resolution image. This is how most radio telescopes work and how a few visible light telescopes work. Each sensor on its own will not provide much useful information but when combine their images together with the correct method you will end up with an image that looks like it came from a sensor with the size of your ship. As for dazzling you can simply have a huge number of redundant sensors to make it very hard indeed to take them all out and you can have them be able to retract behind an armor shutter when they are getting zapped. Not to mention the fact that for infrared sensors they would not have to be hugely sensitive to pick up a heat source against a nearly 0 degree kelvin back ground making them much tougher to fry. But you have to have some sensors online at all times to be able to see anything at all, and redundancy won't simply guarantee survival if the whole hull can be saturated. Laserships fielding 100+kW of energy shouldn't have altogether much of an issue dazzling if not popping sensors at range, I'd think. Especially if the beam can be spread out over a certain area; it's traveling at lightspeed, it isn't going to miss, and if it can cover ground of, say, 10m^2 per second of tiny sensors, it'll be able to cover the cross section of a vessel presenting 100x20m in 200s or a bit more than 3 minutes. I assume CoaDE lasers can do better than that.
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 21, 2016 1:31:58 GMT
Ok you definitely have a point about needing fine resolution but with modern technology if you have a lot of low performance sensors you can combine their images into one much higher resolution image. This is how most radio telescopes work and how a few visible light telescopes work. Each sensor on its own will not provide much useful information but when combine their images together with the correct method you will end up with an image that looks like it came from a sensor with the size of your ship. As for dazzling you can simply have a huge number of redundant sensors to make it very hard indeed to take them all out and you can have them be able to retract behind an armor shutter when they are getting zapped. Not to mention the fact that for infrared sensors they would not have to be hugely sensitive to pick up a heat source against a nearly 0 degree kelvin back ground making them much tougher to fry. But you have to have some sensors online at all times to be able to see anything at all, and redundancy won't simply guarantee survival if the whole hull can be saturated. Laserships fielding 100+kW of energy shouldn't have altogether much of an issue dazzling if not popping sensors at range, I'd think. Especially if the beam can be spread out over a certain area; it's traveling at lightspeed, it isn't going to miss, and if it can cover ground of, say, 10m^2 per second of tiny sensors, it'll be able to cover the cross section of a vessel presenting 100x20m in 200s or a bit more than 3 minutes. I assume CoaDE lasers can do better than that. Well that is assuming the laser is still strong enough at that distance and after you do this one hull sweep you then need to do another to take out the next level of sensors and the next and the next and with how lightweight and cheap the sensors are on the ship that means you could be forced to do dozens of passes and even more if they just shut down most of the sensors then you wont even be taking out a whole level of redundancy per sweep. And if you make your sensors hard enough which should be possible you would force your foe to use an even more focused beam further increasing the required sweep time and if you can predict the sweep pattern you can just seal the sensors in its path or just seal sensors all around the impact point of the laser and just keep that up. I mean really you are going to end up in a situation where it is just going to take forever to kill all the sensors to the point of pointlessness. Now doing this in combat would be more effective but then you are wasting combat lasers against targeting systems when you could be taking out weapons or the enemy ship.
|
|
erin
Junior Member
Smash Mouth Plays From The Depths Of Hell As You Traverse A Deep, Rat-Infested Cave
Posts: 57
|
Post by erin on Oct 21, 2016 1:55:50 GMT
Let's not get into dogmatic territory here. You're talking about tiny smartphone camera type sensors, right? How much power do you need to pop one? How quickly can CoaDE lasers perform a clean sweep over the hull? I think those questions need to be answered with numbers before anything else, and I think the answer to the second question is really "seconds if not less", especially for higher-powered lasers at longer ranges (when the beam is naturally wider-spread). The example I gave was just a crude thought.
Additionally, how many sensors are you mounting? Are they literally all over the ship, covering the entire hull? How many do you need to get an accurate fix on the target? How are you armoring them and how does that affect the way your ship's armor is built? If the entire hull is covered then I wouldn't think this a negligible question.
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 21, 2016 2:21:32 GMT
Let's not get into dogmatic territory here. You're talking about tiny smartphone camera type sensors, right? How much power do you need to pop one? How quickly can CoaDE lasers perform a clean sweep over the hull? I think those questions need to be answered with numbers before anything else, and I think the answer to the second question is really "seconds if not less", especially for higher-powered lasers at longer ranges (when the beam is naturally wider-spread). The example I gave was just a crude thought. Additionally, how many sensors are you mounting? Are they literally all over the ship, covering the entire hull? How many do you need to get an accurate fix on the target? How are you armoring them and how does that affect the way your ship's armor is built? If the entire hull is covered then I wouldn't think this a negligible question. Eh I am not arguing with you here. I agree we need a lot of answers before we can start digging into it in greater depth. So far I have been basing my argument off of this blog post: childrenofadeadearth.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/sensors-and-countermeasures/From reading it it very much seems laser dazzling is going to be very hard to do let alone sensor destruction. Now all I know is that QSwitched definitely put thought and research into this subject in order to make the game. While I think he did not quite communicate entirely how he was getting his figures for how hard it would be to even dazzle a missile I feel quite safe in assuming there is quite a lot of research behind the decision. It isn't there but all things considered I am willing to trust his research on this.
|
|
|
Post by nerd1000 on Oct 21, 2016 2:39:43 GMT
Let's not get into dogmatic territory here. You're talking about tiny smartphone camera type sensors, right? How much power do you need to pop one? How quickly can CoaDE lasers perform a clean sweep over the hull? I think those questions need to be answered with numbers before anything else, and I think the answer to the second question is really "seconds if not less", especially for higher-powered lasers at longer ranges (when the beam is naturally wider-spread). The example I gave was just a crude thought. Additionally, how many sensors are you mounting? Are they literally all over the ship, covering the entire hull? How many do you need to get an accurate fix on the target? How are you armoring them and how does that affect the way your ship's armor is built? If the entire hull is covered then I wouldn't think this a negligible question. This, I think, is why a combat ship would not use wide band IR sensors when in combat range- instead you would use systems that can be protected against laser fire, e.g. IR sensors with filters that only allow one specific wavelength through or phased array radars. Also worth noting- for ranging by parallax to work you need the sensors as far apart as possible, so optimally the long range passive systems would be clustered at the front and rear of the ship and used to scan broadside, wheras in combat you want to be presenting your smaller frontal cross-section to the foe.
|
|
|
Post by captinjoehenry on Oct 21, 2016 2:47:59 GMT
Let's not get into dogmatic territory here. You're talking about tiny smartphone camera type sensors, right? How much power do you need to pop one? How quickly can CoaDE lasers perform a clean sweep over the hull? I think those questions need to be answered with numbers before anything else, and I think the answer to the second question is really "seconds if not less", especially for higher-powered lasers at longer ranges (when the beam is naturally wider-spread). The example I gave was just a crude thought. Additionally, how many sensors are you mounting? Are they literally all over the ship, covering the entire hull? How many do you need to get an accurate fix on the target? How are you armoring them and how does that affect the way your ship's armor is built? If the entire hull is covered then I wouldn't think this a negligible question. This, I think, is why a combat ship would not use wide band IR sensors when in combat range- instead you would use systems that can be protected against laser fire, e.g. IR sensors with filters that only allow one specific wavelength through or phased array radars. Also worth noting- for ranging by parallax to work you need the sensors as far apart as possible, so optimally the long range passive systems would be clustered at the front and rear of the ship and used to scan broadside, wheras in combat you want to be presenting your smaller frontal cross-section to the foe. Honestly as long as your ship is a few 10s of meters across it should be big enough. Most war ships have used optical range finders using about that range and the human eye so I am fairly sure a computer and advance sensors should be able to make it work with the width of a ship
|
|
|
Post by nerd1000 on Oct 21, 2016 4:07:58 GMT
This, I think, is why a combat ship would not use wide band IR sensors when in combat range- instead you would use systems that can be protected against laser fire, e.g. IR sensors with filters that only allow one specific wavelength through or phased array radars. Also worth noting- for ranging by parallax to work you need the sensors as far apart as possible, so optimally the long range passive systems would be clustered at the front and rear of the ship and used to scan broadside, wheras in combat you want to be presenting your smaller frontal cross-section to the foe. Honestly as long as your ship is a few 10s of meters across it should be big enough. Most war ships have used optical range finders using about that range and the human eye so I am fairly sure a computer and advance sensors should be able to make it work with the width of a ship Increasing the distance between the sensors increases the maximum distance that can be accurately measured by the rangefinder. You can have front-mounted ones with a smaller width too, but over really long distances you want the extra length that a side-mounted set of sensors provides.
|
|
erin
Junior Member
Smash Mouth Plays From The Depths Of Hell As You Traverse A Deep, Rat-Infested Cave
Posts: 57
|
Post by erin on Oct 21, 2016 5:10:34 GMT
Really want to develop that sensor girth, you know what I mean
|
|