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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 8, 2016 4:38:43 GMT
Well, theoretically (If I understand this part), you could make a ship that run a very cold reactor with around several dozen kilowatt power, giving away maybe several hundred kilowatt heat.
The ship would then run a very low powered missile launcher while having a very small NTR reactor that push out around several kilowatt of heat only.
The ship will have to be practically unarmored and run on near minimum power using a dual reactor design to shut one off for the cold run.
The ship would most likely dump a bunch of missiles to the target from deep space before running away back home to resupply, leaving nothing behind.
Well, at least in theory that would work.
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Post by kjakker on Dec 8, 2016 16:56:10 GMT
Well, theoretically (If I understand this part), you could make a ship that run a very cold reactor with around several dozen kilowatt power, giving away maybe several hundred kilowatt heat. The ship would then run a very low powered missile launcher while having a very small NTR reactor that push out around several kilowatt of heat only. The ship will have to be practically unarmored and run on near minimum power using a dual reactor design to shut one off for the cold run. The ship would most likely dump a bunch of missiles to the target from deep space before running away back home to resupply, leaving nothing behind. Well, at least in theory that would work. Your description sounds like a space-going SSBN/SSGN analog.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 8, 2016 18:46:20 GMT
Well, theoretically (If I understand this part), you could make a ship that run a very cold reactor with around several dozen kilowatt power, giving away maybe several hundred kilowatt heat. The ship would then run a very low powered missile launcher while having a very small NTR reactor that push out around several kilowatt of heat only. The ship will have to be practically unarmored and run on near minimum power using a dual reactor design to shut one off for the cold run. The ship would most likely dump a bunch of missiles to the target from deep space before running away back home to resupply, leaving nothing behind. Well, at least in theory that would work. How do you get rid of a few hundred KW of heat without people noticing? If you use radiators, you're screwed. If you use open cycle coolant, you need to carry a huge amount of coolant. MPDs produce minimal thrust. 200 GW of MPD produces maybe 6 MN of thrust; 10 KW of MPD produces less than 10 millinewtons of thurst. Add coolant in and the whole setup becomes impossible; the more coolant you add the more your ship weights the slower your acceleration, and the more coolant you need. It's a death spiral. It doesn't work in theory, because the amount of power you can produce from a cryogenically cooled reactor is never going to be enough to drive an MPD to propel the entire assembly. What you need is some sort of externally-powered propulsion; EM coil launch, laser sail, solar-thermal furnace... and then you have the hydrogen steamer.
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Post by goduranus on Dec 8, 2016 19:34:58 GMT
If you used a catapult to launch the ship in the first place, might you be able to keep the enemy from tracking it? Then it could be a case of making short burns between enemy sensor sweeps?
Although, how long can the gaps between sensor sweeps get? If you are trying to watch the entire sky, then it could be hours, but suppose the enemy has placed sensors far away, then it could watch over an area of interest continuously and relay the information to another sensor closer to you to acquire targeting information.
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Post by amimai on Dec 8, 2016 20:51:17 GMT
If you used a catapult to launch the ship in the first place, might you be able to keep the enemy from tracking it? Then it could be a case of making short burns between enemy sensor sweeps? Although, how long can the gaps between sensor sweeps get? If you are trying to watch the entire sky, then it could be hours, but suppose the enemy has placed sensors far away, then it could watch over an area of interest continuously and relay the information to another sensor closer to you to acquire targeting information. the farther away a sensor is the less sensitive it gets, after a certain distance it gets to the point where you would not be able to distinguish a ship from background... its what newageofpower seems to not understand, you aren't likely to find anything beyond a light minute away from your detector either because the time it takes to get a reading is too long or the detector cant reliably distinguish a reading from background. and space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space...
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Post by dragonkid11 on Dec 8, 2016 23:12:07 GMT
And then I realise that won't work at all because space in CoaDE most likely have a shit load of satellite everywhere, rendering the cold runner useless.
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Post by shurugal on Dec 8, 2016 23:21:36 GMT
until you nuke the observation sats. It's not like those things can run dark, they gotta transmit what they observe.
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Post by jasonvance on Dec 9, 2016 0:06:28 GMT
until you nuke the observation sats. It's not like those things can run dark, they gotta transmit what they observe. If you can make an entire ship carrying a payload stealth you can make a probe with sensor / laser relay stealth... unless you plan on nuking all of space... but space is really really big and the nuke warhead is probably more expensive than the probe so you could win the war by attrition by just sending out more probes for them to nuke.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 0:13:34 GMT
until you nuke the observation sats. It's not like those things can run dark, they gotta transmit what they observe. Passive scan obsats can use whiskerlaser to transmit data, which is very difficult to detect. If you're willing to accept low bandwith, even very long range transmission is practical. Much easier if receiving station is beacon'd, making the receiving site easy to ID and kill, but usually a smart faction will orbit that thing somewhere near the core of their sphere of influence ; ) However, it's pretty hard to pick up a good stealthship (Hydrogen steamer comes to mind) without Active Scan. Active Sensor Suites are also an order of magnitude more expensive. You either position them where they're more easily defended or suck it up when someone nukes them. At least the sensor-clearing fleet will be obvious.
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Post by shurugal on Dec 9, 2016 0:23:26 GMT
until you nuke the observation sats. It's not like those things can run dark, they gotta transmit what they observe. Passive scan obsats can use whiskerlaser to transmit data, which is very difficult to detect. If you're willing to accept low bandwith, even very long range transmission is practical. Much easier if receiving station is beacon'd, making the receiving site easy to ID and kill, but usually a smart faction will orbit that thing somewhere near the core of their sphere of influence ; ) However, it's pretty hard to pick up a good stealthship (Hydrogen steamer comes to mind) without Active Scan. Active Sensor Suites are also an order of magnitude more expensive. You either position them where they're more easily defended or suck it up when someone nukes them. At least the sensor-clearing fleet will be obvious. wouldn't bother trying to detect them from space in that case, plain old espionage will do to find them. after that, they can be destroyed at leisure. also wouldn't bother with a fleet. The sats can't dodge, so a shower of unguided nuclear rockets fired from the dark side of another planet will do the trick.
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Post by jasonvance on Dec 9, 2016 0:29:05 GMT
Passive scan obsats can use whiskerlaser to transmit data, which is very difficult to detect. If you're willing to accept low bandwith, even very long range transmission is practical. Much easier if receiving station is beacon'd, making the receiving site easy to ID and kill, but usually a smart faction will orbit that thing somewhere near the core of their sphere of influence ; ) However, it's pretty hard to pick up a good stealthship (Hydrogen steamer comes to mind) without Active Scan. Active Sensor Suites are also an order of magnitude more expensive. You either position them where they're more easily defended or suck it up when someone nukes them. At least the sensor-clearing fleet will be obvious. wouldn't bother trying to detect them from space in that case, plain old espionage will do to find them. after that, they can be destroyed at leisure. also wouldn't bother with a fleet. The sats can't dodge, so a shower of unguided nuclear rockets fired from the dark side of another planet will do the trick. The simplest counter to that is not knowing exactly where they are You don't need to know the exact coordinates of your own probes; the probe just needs to know where the relay station is to send its messages back. Just knowing the general area within a few hundred thousand km the probes return information is all that would need (nowhere near accurate enough to have a high enough probability to hit it with a projectile or even nuke flash from a reasonable yield nuke) to be saved after deployment they only send information about the location of other things not themselves so once launched their location should be unknown. Also spys could easily give away the plans for a stealth ship launch much easier and would be much more worth the risk of espionage than trying to take out probes. Something manned by people has a much higher chance of a leak than a fully autonomous probe launched into a mostly unknown location (you could even fire them into position from a fairly inaccurate coilgun to insure that no one on board the deployment craft even knows where the probes actually end up.
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Post by shurugal on Dec 9, 2016 0:56:47 GMT
wouldn't bother trying to detect them from space in that case, plain old espionage will do to find them. after that, they can be destroyed at leisure. also wouldn't bother with a fleet. The sats can't dodge, so a shower of unguided nuclear rockets fired from the dark side of another planet will do the trick. The simplest counter to that is not knowing exactly where they are You don't need to know the exact coordinates of your own probes; the probe just needs to know where the relay station is to send its messages back. Just knowing the general area within a few hundred thousand km the probes return information is all that would need (nowhere near accurate enough to have a high enough probability to hit it with a projectile or even nuke flash from a reasonable yield nuke) to be saved after deployment they only send information about the location of other things not themselves so once launched their location should be unknown. Also spys could easily give away the plans for a stealth ship launch much easier and would be much more worth the risk of espionage than trying to take out probes. Something manned by people has a much higher chance of a leak than a fully autonomous probe launched into a mostly unknown location (you could even fire them into position from a fairly inaccurate coilgun to insure that no one on board the deployment craft even knows where the probes actually end up. someone knows where they are, because they need maintenance. If they transmit to a central relay, then all i have to do is knock the relay out, and someone *definitely* knows where that is, because it will need lots of maintenance (if network hardware is good for only one thing, it is keeping techs employed)
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Post by jasonvance on Dec 9, 2016 1:08:18 GMT
The simplest counter to that is not knowing exactly where they are You don't need to know the exact coordinates of your own probes; the probe just needs to know where the relay station is to send its messages back. Just knowing the general area within a few hundred thousand km the probes return information is all that would need (nowhere near accurate enough to have a high enough probability to hit it with a projectile or even nuke flash from a reasonable yield nuke) to be saved after deployment they only send information about the location of other things not themselves so once launched their location should be unknown. Also spys could easily give away the plans for a stealth ship launch much easier and would be much more worth the risk of espionage than trying to take out probes. Something manned by people has a much higher chance of a leak than a fully autonomous probe launched into a mostly unknown location (you could even fire them into position from a fairly inaccurate coilgun to insure that no one on board the deployment craft even knows where the probes actually end up. someone knows where they are, because they need maintenance. If they transmit to a central relay, then all i have to do is knock the relay out, and someone *definitely* knows where that is, because it will need lots of maintenance (if network hardware is good for only one thing, it is keeping techs employed) I think you are thinking about waaaay more complicated probes than I am... I am talking about a disposable probe that just transmits on a laser band back to a relay station in a 1 way transfer. The station is just a giant dish (well within friendly controlled territory) that captures incoming laser waves from the probes and reads the information. The probe would only need to be a small sphere with a small hydrogen tank (to vent cold hydrogen to stabilize its orbit on initial launch and orient itself to send messages), a small amount of control electronics, a relay laser, and a the passive sensor suite. It would be covered in ventablack (just like the stealth craft) and fairly cheap. You would fire thousands of them into varying locations around anything significant. The probe would be very cheap and not maintained simply replaced when it runs out of hydrogen and / or power.
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Post by newageofpower on Dec 9, 2016 1:10:57 GMT
someone knows where they are, because they need maintenance. If they transmit to a central relay, then all i have to do is knock the relay out, and someone *definitely* knows where that is, because it will need lots of maintenance (if network hardware is good for only one thing, it is keeping techs employed) It's possible to build working sensors (and drones, the Voyager probes come to mind) that function for decades without maintenance. The lower energies they operate at, the more easily this is done. So you can hurl out waves of disposable cheap IR sensors that are cheaper than my medium missiles (hundreds of credits) by EM-Launch/Laser/Solar Sail (preferably a combination), that given months or years will drift to where you need them, and will continue to function for at least a decade or so. Some will fail due to electronic manufacture defects, since we're building them cheap. Others will have folded/ejected their sails at the wrong moment, or freak accident induces an uncorrectable spin, etc, because you didn't install backup systems or redundancies or enough emergency cold gas thrusters, but that's why you spam more. Tiny, cheap, low power, hard to detect. I orbit Central Relay deep in my 'territory' (say, if I'm playing Earth, put it at Earth-Sun L2 and Backup relay in LEO) where I can see you coming from months out. Of course, the sensitivity and capability of these sensors is low, but they are supremely cost effective against most conventional threats.
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Post by shurugal on Dec 9, 2016 1:40:29 GMT
someone knows where they are, because they need maintenance. If they transmit to a central relay, then all i have to do is knock the relay out, and someone *definitely* knows where that is, because it will need lots of maintenance (if network hardware is good for only one thing, it is keeping techs employed) I think you are thinking about waaaay more complicated probes than I am... I am talking about a disposable probe that just transmits on a laser band back to a relay station in a 1 way transfer. The station is just a giant dish (well within friendly controlled territory) that captures incoming laser waves from the probes and reads the information. The probe would only need to be a small sphere with a small hydrogen tank (to vent cold hydrogen to stabilize its orbit on initial launch and orient itself to send messages), a small amount of control electronics, a relay laser, and a the passive sensor suite. It would be covered in ventablack (just like the stealth craft) and fairly cheap. You would fire thousands of them into varying locations around anything significant. The probe would be very cheap and not maintained simply replaced when it runs out of hydrogen and / or power. The listening post is still a vulnerable spot, and a much easier target than hundreds or thousands of individual probes. Your ventablack probes are also going to soak up solar radiation like a sponge and burn themselves out very quickly, while in the process becoming hot enough to be detectable at ranges greater than they can usefully detect other targets. someone knows where they are, because they need maintenance. If they transmit to a central relay, then all i have to do is knock the relay out, and someone *definitely* knows where that is, because it will need lots of maintenance (if network hardware is good for only one thing, it is keeping techs employed) It's possible to build working sensors (and drones, the Voyager probes come to mind) that function for decades without maintenance. The lower energies they operate at, the more easily this is done. So you can hurl out waves of disposable cheap IR sensors that are cheaper than my medium missiles (hundreds of credits) by EM-Launch/Laser/Solar Sail (preferably a combination), that given months or years will drift to where you need them, and will continue to function for at least a decade or so. Some will fail due to electronic manufacture defects, since we're building them cheap. Others will have folded/ejected their sails at the wrong moment, or freak accident induces an uncorrectable spin, etc, because you didn't install backup systems or redundancies or enough emergency cold gas thrusters, but that's why you spam more. Tiny, cheap, low power, hard to detect. I orbit Central Relay deep in my 'territory' (say, if I'm playing Earth, put it at Earth-Sun L2 and Backup relay in LEO) where I can see you coming from months out. Of course, the sensitivity and capability of these sensors is low, but they are supremely cost effective against most conventional threats. As you mention in your last line, the sensitivity and capability of these sensors is indeed quite low. If we want to go back to the previous example in this thread of a modern IR telescope, one sensor by itself while the cheapest possible option, would only have a detection range of ~15Mm against a relatively cold burn, and a full-sky scan time of nearly 14 hours. you would need hundreds of them with overlapping fields of view to provide anything approaching real-time coverage, and even then, if you put them in Earth-Sol L2, they won't even be able to detect ships around earth, forget picking up a fleet running on a purely ballistic, life-support power only trajectory inbound from mars. Even if you saturate space between earth and the moon with them, you still won't pick up the inbound fleet with your disposable sensors until it burns to capture. If a flyby attack is planned, you won't see them until they start shooting. no super-stealth ships required, detecting spacecraft at interplanetary ranges, when they are making even a token effort to run quiet will require massive arrays of massively powerful sensors. your throwaway sensors work for detecting local traffic (of course, they also present a ludiculously reckless hazard to navigation), but the difference between using a massively powerful telescope to track a known contact and scanning the whole of the sky continuously for possible contacts is the difference between shooting a rabbit with a scoped rifle, and attempting to locate an unknown fly with a pair of field glasses.
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