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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 10, 2017 4:04:32 GMT
Well if it occludes background stars, you'll know it's there. Assuming it passes in front of one, while you're looking in the general area, with the proper instrumentation.
Or try to pick out spectra from artificial alloys/compounds.
Still, requires a lot more complexity than picking up a 2400k radiator.
Given that combat itself is a very very short period of time compared to transit and maneuvering, a significant amount of time would be spent looking.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 10, 2017 4:17:54 GMT
Well if it occludes background stars, you'll know it's there. Assuming it passes in front of one, while you're looking in the general area, with the proper instrumentation. Or try to pick out spectra from artificial alloys/compounds. Still, requires a lot more complexity than picking up a 2400k radiator. Given that combat itself is a very very short period of time compared to transit and maneuvering, a significant amount of time would be spent looking. The probability of a ship occluding a star your sensor is observing is miniscule. Not zero, but very, very small. Furthermore, to determine that the occluding object was a ship, and not an unidentified space rock or a piece of space junk or even just a sensor error is a non-trivial task in and of itself. Picking out spectra would be okay... if the Hydrogen Steamer gave off any spectral emissions. It's coated in the whatever the leading absorbent coating is - currently VantaBlack, which absorbs everything below UV (in theory, more advanced coatings can absorb anything below Xrays) and emits only IR... Which is problematic, because the IR emissions are pretty close to the background radiation of the universe, due to supercooling. Your move. How do you detect this thing without active scans? By the way... these arguments have been made before. Many times. Argued and debated to death on multiple threads. Not just on this forum.
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Post by Enderminion on Feb 10, 2017 4:18:07 GMT
Tactical Officer: Captain we have detected a stelth ship based on the reflection of (whatever nukes do) after our nuclear exchange with the NSF Yamato Captain: Nuke it too, just to be safe Tactical Officer: Aye Aye Captain
Thats how I think it would go, if its close, or you know, Light it up with Active Sensors
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Post by apophys on Feb 10, 2017 4:19:18 GMT
How do you easily tell a hole in space from space, in a space combat setting ?If the "hole in space" passes in front of something that should not have such a hole - like the sun, a planet, or a known star - it is clear that something dark passed by. The more angles of observation you have, the more likely it is for this to happen, and for the object to be trackable by seeing what else it subsequently covers up. Whether it is easy I don't know, but it is feasible. If it was a rock, it would have an infrared signature.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 10, 2017 4:22:20 GMT
How do you easily tell a hole in space from space, in a space combat setting ?If the "hole in space" passes in front of something that should not have such a hole - like the sun, a planet, or a known star - it is clear that something dark passed by. The more angles of observation you have, the more likely it is for this to happen, and for the object to be trackable by seeing what else it subsequently covers up. Whether it is easy I don't know, but it is feasible. The problem is, space is really, really freaking huge. So if it got close enough to a high res, wide angle sensor system, you could pick it up. Ditto with high-energy active scanner sweeps. But the volume of space that such a ship could move about in is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the sensor systems (within an order of magnitude of cost of the stealthship) could cover; meaning that such ships would retain a disproportionate degree of cost-effectiveness over a large timescale.
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Post by bdcarrillo on Feb 10, 2017 4:25:44 GMT
Definitely agree that detecting the hydrogen steamer would be difficult, but not impossible.
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Post by Enderminion on Feb 10, 2017 4:27:14 GMT
If the "hole in space" passes in front of something that should not have such a hole - like the sun, a planet, or a known star - it is clear that something dark passed by. The more angles of observation you have, the more likely it is for this to happen, and for the object to be trackable by seeing what else it subsequently covers up. Whether it is easy I don't know, but it is feasible. The problem is, space is really, really freaking huge. So if got close enough to a high res, wide angle sensor system, you could pick it up. Ditto with high-energy active scanner sweeps. But the volume of space that such a ship could move about in is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the sensor systems (within an order of magnitude of cost of the stealthship) could cover. If you pass in front of anything, and anything is looking in you're general direction... they can spot the dimming of that object
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Post by apophys on Feb 10, 2017 4:35:26 GMT
But the volume of space that such a ship could move about in is multiple orders of magnitude higher than the sensor systems (within an order of magnitude of cost of the stealthship) could cover. Why would the sensors have to be within an order of magnitude of the cost of the stealth ship? You could have kilometer-wide telescopes scattered all over the solar system, transmitting data to strategic command. An analogy is comparing a large military satellite network to one enemy submarine. You'll be needing that network anyway, and if the enemy field lots of marginally-trackable ships, expanding your network may even be cost-effective. Too many variables to say anything definite, imho.
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Post by newageofpower on Feb 10, 2017 5:15:19 GMT
Why would the sensors have to be within an order of magnitude of the cost of the stealth ship? You could have kilometer-wide telescopes scattered all over the solar system, transmitting data to strategic command. An analogy is comparing a large military satellite network to one enemy submarine. You'll be needing that network anyway, and if the enemy field lots of marginally-trackable ships, expanding your network may even be cost-effective. Too many variables to say anything definite, imho. *shrug* many sensors = many stealthships Sooner or later, you hit saturation and more stealthships does not require more sensors. This is known, yes. Very crude and basic sensors can pick up a Hydroflourine drive going off halfway across the solar system. The kind of sensors you need for anti-cryoship duties, though, are orders of magnitude larger. Also, sensor installations would need at least *some* mobility, to prevent kinetic cheese, if nothing else. The fact they need to have *some* level of acceleration would put a limit on their size, since IRL systems (unlike current CoADE ships, lol) have certain mechanical stress-loading limits.
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Post by lawson on Feb 10, 2017 6:06:03 GMT
The disadvantage of a ballistic cargo container is the launching ship has to reverse course in high orbit and then travel to wherever it is needed. There is a second tug on the receiving end. It docks with the cargo in high orbit and then maneuvers the cargo to its destination. You end up having two ships make two large burns at each planet. One burn with the cargo and one with only the tug. Having the Tug do two big burns to launch a barge and return isn't much of a problem. Climbing from Jupiter low orbit to an optimally timed Holman transfer *only* takes around 20km/s. Big MPD ships in CoDE have exhaust velocities that exceed 260km/s! So ball parking it with the good old rocket equation, my tug and cargo need a wopping 1.08 combined mass fraction. Aka, 7.4% of launch mass is fuel for the departure burn. If the tug is 1/10th the mass of the barge, getting home would need less than 2.2% (0.74%*3) of the launch mass. So the tug only has to reserve at most 30% of it's fuel for the return trip. TLDR even with tugs returning to base, cargo mass should easily be 8x larger than the tug's initial fuel mass.
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Post by bigbombr on Feb 10, 2017 7:36:15 GMT
unmanned would work just fine for both a traditional cargoship and for the flung container and tug. At least until something breaks. It would still be more cost effective than manned cargohaulers: mass spend on crew could be spent on extra cargo and redundancies. Anything too big to have redundancy for is probably too big to fix outside a dock.
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Post by Easy on Feb 10, 2017 14:26:37 GMT
How do you easily tell a hole in space from space, in a space combat setting ?If the "hole in space" passes in front of something that should not have such a hole - like the sun, a planet, or a known star - it is clear that something dark passed by. The more angles of observation you have, the more likely it is for this to happen, and for the object to be trackable by seeing what else it subsequently covers up. Whether it is easy I don't know, but it is feasible. If it was a rock, it would have an infrared signature. Depends on the range and resolving power of the telescope. Which means you're going to have to detect it like NASA detects planets. A temporary dimming of the background object through partial occlusion. You know know how many pixels were occluded (assuming the background object is multiple pixels) and by how much the pixels were dimmed. The object itself is likely much smaller than a single pixel. And this does assume the occlusion is significant enough to notice in the noisy night sky. But the amount of information you gained is pretty damn low because you don't know the distance or size of the transiting occluding object. A geostationary satellite looking down won't see a higher orbit object at the edge of the hill sphere or an object in near solar orbit. And the other bit where you won't find what you're not looking for. If you're not expecting a stealth ship, you're going to be looking for natural objects heated by the Sun and whatever types of spaceships you do know about. Your computers might record every pixel of a stealth ship from launch to attack, but if the software raised no alarms and no human reviewed the data and connected the dots, you will only see it in retrospect.
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Post by Easy on Feb 10, 2017 14:37:18 GMT
The disadvantage of a ballistic cargo container is the launching ship has to reverse course in high orbit and then travel to wherever it is needed. There is a second tug on the receiving end. It docks with the cargo in high orbit and then maneuvers the cargo to its destination. You end up having two ships make two large burns at each planet. One burn with the cargo and one with only the tug. Having the Tug do two big burns to launch a barge and return isn't much of a problem. Climbing from Jupiter low orbit to an optimally timed Holman transfer *only* takes around 20km/s. Big MPD ships in CoDE have exhaust velocities that exceed 260km/s! So ball parking it with the good old rocket equation, my tug and cargo need a wopping 1.08 combined mass fraction. Aka, 7.4% of launch mass is fuel for the departure burn. If the tug is 1/10th the mass of the barge, getting home would need less than 2.2% (0.74%*3) of the launch mass. So the tug only has to reserve at most 30% of it's fuel for the return trip. TLDR even with tugs returning to base, cargo mass should easily be 8x larger than the tug's initial fuel mass. I like the tug idea and it becomes very economic if fuel is cheap relative to engines/powerplant and shipping prices. It won't work for torchships or routes that need lots of maneuver burns mid-tour but it lets you keep those reactors, thrusters and crewmen (on-ship or remote) working rather than drifting.
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Post by apophys on Feb 10, 2017 15:17:50 GMT
And the other bit where you won't find what you're not looking for. If you're not expecting a stealth ship, you're going to be looking for natural objects heated by the Sun and whatever types of spaceships you do know about. Your computers might record every pixel of a stealth ship from launch to attack, but if the software raised no alarms and no human reviewed the data and connected the dots, you will only see it in retrospect. If stealth ships are built and known to exist, every military with the capability of finding them will be looking for them. For certain.
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Post by Enderminion on Feb 10, 2017 15:42:08 GMT
Two things, one why are you using a tug to launch cargo, from astroid mines with more smaller payloads you could use a mass driver. 2. I would like to think a gentlemens agreement that says "if we find stelthships in are territtory you can count on us nukeing them, no war needed"
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