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Post by Pttg on Jul 20, 2018 0:08:36 GMT
If you can't hide your ship, hide your guns! Let's discuss ships that are designed to look like civilian ships up until the moment they start firing... or at least long enough to get the first shot.
Ship designs should also mention some detail of the strategy such a ship would use.
Things to consider:
Anyone with a telescope can see what your ship is using as fuel and how hot it is. Civilian ships are going to have lower-enrichment fuel, and they are probably going to use cheaper reaction mass rather than better ones.
Civilian ships will probably rely on whipple shields more than bulk armor, as they are only expecting debris strikes, not intentional attacks.
If your armor is thick enough that the turret could reasonably be retracted into it, then you can have turrets on your ship. Likewise, if your surface armor is the same as the armor on your blast launchers and regular launchers, they can be "hidden" for free.
Crew size can be guessed at by the number of radiators at room temperature. Either keep 'em small or explain why your "gas freighter" has 50 drone controllers aboard.
The most basic Q-ship is a civilian tanker with a couple megatons sitting in the water tanks. X-ray inspection is probably mandatory for every ship before they get too close, so even a perfectly civilian exterior isn't quite enough.
I'm working on a design myself, but examples and design considerations from others are welcome.
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Post by bigbombr on Jul 20, 2018 6:16:50 GMT
Even civilian spacecraft are likely to have whipple shields. You could hide weapons (or illicit cargo) underneath them.
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Post by alias72 on Jul 20, 2018 14:25:21 GMT
Even civilian spacecraft are likely to have whipple shields. You could hide weapons (or illicit cargo) underneath them. if your cargo isn't rad sensitive you can stick it near your drive and then no inspector from Venus to Saturn will inspect it. |
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Post by AtomHeartDragon on Jul 20, 2018 16:12:44 GMT
Crew size can be guessed at by the number of radiators at room temperature. Either keep 'em small or explain why your "gas freighter" has 50 drone controllers aboard. Make a passenger liner (or a cargo/passenger hybrid). |
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utilitas
Junior Member
I can do this all day.
Posts: 59
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Post by utilitas on Jul 20, 2018 18:19:55 GMT
The best place to hide your bad intentions is on the other side of the nearest celestial body. And keep them hidden there until the enemy first spots the telltale shimmers of guided missiles.
Though honestly, this game misses many civilian construction aspects because it focuses so much on the combat. A civilian ship would likely have more permanent and safer power sources - like solar panels or lowly enriched reactors - and a civilian ship would likely have larger and more diverse crew compartments, possibly even including inertial crew compartments with simulated gravity for longer duration flights. The first sign of a civilian design shouldn't be the lack of any armor, but rather the lack of glowing fins - instead replaced with large rotating solar panel or concentrating thermal arrays.
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Post by bigbombr on Jul 20, 2018 18:22:58 GMT
Crew size can be guessed at by the number of radiators at room temperature. Either keep 'em small or explain why your "gas freighter" has 50 drone controllers aboard. Make a passenger liner (or a cargo/passenger hybrid). You also might be able to decrease the emitted heat by your crew module by dumping waste heat into your propellant tanks. If your propellant is water that starts at 278 K, and passively absorbs heat until it's as warm as your crew module (293 K), every kg of propellant can store 62.76 kJ of energy. If you use a heat pump or start with a cooler propellant or propellant with a higher thermal capacity, you would be able to store even more thermal energy. This is actually the reason I look at how wide the liquid range of a propellant is when choosing a propellant. |
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Post by Pttg on Jul 20, 2018 19:56:11 GMT
On the other hand, civilian ships would very likely use MHD thrusters as the absolute credits-per-v cost is far more important to civilians than is pure mass.
Your Q ship might have a secret thruster to get it out of trouble quickly, but its main drive will likely be an ion cloud.
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Post by apophys on Jul 20, 2018 23:22:13 GMT
Anyone with a telescope can see what your ship is using as fuel and how hot it is. Civilian ships are going to have lower-enrichment fuel, and they are probably going to use cheaper reaction mass rather than better ones. Civilian ships will probably rely on whipple shields more than bulk armor, as they are only expecting debris strikes, not intentional attacks. Crew size can be guessed at by the number of radiators at room temperature. Either keep 'em small or explain why your "gas freighter" has 50 drone controllers aboard. The most basic Q-ship is a civilian tanker with a couple megatons sitting in the water tanks. X-ray inspection is probably mandatory for every ship before they get too close, so even a perfectly civilian exterior isn't quite enough. You can't tell from the outside how highly enriched the ship's uranium is. It doesn't correlate with how hot it gets.
You can see thrust plumes, and from those you can deduce the position, acceleration, thrust power, and thus mass of the ship - you know how strong the drive is, whether the ship is loaded or empty, and what chemical the propellant is. Doesn't much help distinguish a warship from a civilian, though.
It is very easy to pretend to have a whipple shield by coating everything other than radiators with 0.5 mm aluminum. You can't see through it to the armor. Crew radiators could get heat pumps to raise the output temperature and hide it with the main radiators. It's extremely inefficient to do, but that's fine, because the amount of heat involved is miniscule compared to the power waste heat.
X-ray inspection can't be done before entering weapons range (whatever weapon you use).
A civilian ship would likely have more permanent and safer power sources - like solar panels or lowly enriched reactors - and a civilian ship would likely have larger and more diverse crew compartments, possibly even including inertial crew compartments with simulated gravity for longer duration flights. The first sign of a civilian design shouldn't be the lack of any armor, but rather the lack of glowing fins - instead replaced with large rotating solar panel or concentrating thermal arrays. Civilian ships will go for fuel economy - this means power-hungry ion drives. Whether you power them with concentrating solar thermal or PV, or nuclear, 10 GW of power can only be generated along with plenty of waste heat; large glowing fins will be necessary. Unless you use non-concentrating PV, but that's prohibitively expensive.
Interesting to note is that a ship with solar thermal power can swap its heat source to a reactor and use the same radiators in order to fire its weapons (though at a lower total power if cooling weapons, and probably lower temperature for weapon cooling). A solar concentrating mirror made of aluminum can even double as a huge laser aperture. In fact, when not in combat, the only thing visually distinguishing this warship from a civilian ship is the large cargo bay... which can be full of drones/missiles.
TL;DR: Any large cargo vessel could easily be a warship in disguise.
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Post by Pttg on Jul 20, 2018 23:25:34 GMT
What realistic countermeasures would there be, then?
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Post by apophys on Jul 20, 2018 23:46:48 GMT
What realistic countermeasures would there be, then? Very good traffic control and lots of paperwork. If everyone knows where everything came from and what its purpose for travel is, you can't really have surprise encounters. This is necessary anyway because even a civilian cargo freighter is a kinetic WMD if its trajectory is aimed differently.
Mandatory inspections for all departing vessels (mostly automated if the manpower is prohibitive), would reduce the number of weaponized refits of civilian vessels - you'd need to outrank the inspectors by being part of the government, or bribe them successfully, in order to have a Q-ship.
You'd still need to fly on your pre-arranged schedule to avoid raising red flags in transit.
Actually using Q-ships as a government entity is a war crime, iirc.
A particularly paranoid dock would be able to send a tele-operated drone or two out to a potential arrival and inspect them en route before allowing them to come closer. Any unscheduled and emergency flights would probably be handled this way.
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Post by doctorsquared on Jul 21, 2018 3:25:55 GMT
If you were running NTRs for propulsion (especially are larger ships) you could probably smuggle weapons-grade fuel hidden in the form of the engine's fuel rods. This is assuming that docks aren't equipped with sensor arrays designed to detect the energetic particles that something running highly enriched fuel would be giving off.
You could also disguise a smaller warship to look like a Belt Trawler or similar vessel by disguising the silhouette of the vehicle with massive drop tanks and a disposable fission reactor/RTG and radiator set up that powers the crew module and disguises the heat signature of the vessel. It would allow you to hide the ship from automated observation/listening posts, then once you were nearing your target you fire up the warship's reactor, blow the bolts holding your disguise on and engage.
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Post by doctorsquared on Jul 22, 2018 0:41:28 GMT
For a proof of concept the Q-Class Trawler: - Armament is a pair of long-range KKR launchers mounted amidships near where the standard Belt Trawler's xenon refuelers are located.
- The five front 2kt xenon tanks have been replaced with five ammunition canisters containing 80 KKRs a piece for a total of 400 shots.
- Crew modules have been increased to 24 crewmembers each to accommodate the needed weapons support staff.
- The launchers are cooled by a duplicate set of the radiator design used to cool the crew modules, thus appearing as a redundant cooling system when the launchers are powered down.
- Power and propulsion systems are identical to the standard Belt Trawler design.
- KKRs are used to not draw the attention of any radiological or explosives scanners.
The primary weakness is that the ship is unarmored, extended range missiles are used in this case so the ship can either launch defensive salvos or unleash on undefended targets from long distances. Secondary issues stem from reduced propellant capacity due to the ammo canisters displacing half the fuel tanks and a lack of maneuverability from the continued use of the standard MPD thrusters.
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Post by jonen on Jul 22, 2018 7:57:19 GMT
For a proof of concept the Q-Class Trawler: - Armament is a pair of long-range KKR launchers mounted amidships near where the standard Belt Trawler's xenon refuelers are located.
- The five front 2kt xenon tanks have been replaced with five ammunition canisters containing 80 KKRs a piece for a total of 400 shots.
- Crew modules have been increased to 24 crewmembers each to accommodate the needed weapons support staff.
- The launchers are cooled by a duplicate set of the radiator design used to cool the crew modules, thus appearing as a redundant cooling system when the launchers are powered down.
- Power and propulsion systems are identical to the standard Belt Trawler design.
- KKRs are used to not draw the attention of any radiological or explosives scanners.
The primary weakness is that the ship is unarmored, extended range missiles are used in this case so the ship can either launch defensive salvos or unleash on undefended targets from long distances. Secondary issues stem from reduced propellant capacity due to the ammo canisters displacing half the fuel tanks and a lack of maneuverability from the continued use of the standard MPD thrusters.
The problem here is that while the dimensions are similar, the thing you'd be looking for is mass and acceleration. The Belt trawler has 21kt wet mass (1kt dry), you have 12 kt wet mass (and closer to 2kt dry). Your ship can pull 15 microGs, the trawler 8.6 - the trawler also has higher dry acceleration and far longer legs - but I suppose if you're going to be pretending to be a trawler with your design you'd have to play at being fully laden and puttering around fairly close to a support base (or rather - far from prying eyes). Because anyone bothering to check is going to see you're not hauling Xenon. I'd suggest using the Cargo freighter, research craft or passenger liner as the base for a Q-ship instead. The cargo modules are by their very nature probably going to be loaded up with different stuff so you can replace them missile magazines fairly straightforward. |
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Post by treptoplax on Jul 24, 2018 2:21:28 GMT
What realistic countermeasures would there be, then? Very good traffic control and lots of paperwork. If everyone knows where everything came from and what its purpose for travel is, you can't really have surprise encounters. This is necessary anyway because even a civilian cargo freighter is a kinetic WMD if its trajectory is aimed differently.
Mandatory inspections for all departing vessels (mostly automated if the manpower is prohibitive), would reduce the number of weaponized refits of civilian vessels - you'd need to outrank the inspectors by being part of the government, or bribe them successfully, in order to have a Q-ship.
You'd still need to fly on your pre-arranged schedule to avoid raising red flags in transit.
Actually using Q-ships as a government entity is a war crime, iirc.
A particularly paranoid dock would be able to send a tele-operated drone or two out to a potential arrival and inspect them en route before allowing them to come closer. Any unscheduled and emergency flights would probably be handled this way.
The original Q-ships, IIRC, were unobviously armed transport ships intended to give a nasty surprise to stealthy, lightly armed subs raiding unescorted transport convoys. I suppose a similar use case might apply. |
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