|
Post by mofosyne on May 24, 2019 17:37:27 GMT
For any future missions in Children of a Dead Earth... or maybe any other hard scifi stories. How do you have a surprise attack?
I think most detection would be via passive infrared detection by countless sensors spread around space. If that's the usual way of detecting spacecraft... then
* Could you disguise as civilian shipping?
* Could you mask your heat signature by hitching a ride of a suitable asteroid moving the desired direction?
* You can't hide engine size or mass size... but you could mask the force composition of your force. So all your spacecraft is attached to a truss with foil wrapped around the whole thing. Battle tactics might differ between having one large spacecraft vs lots of little spacecraft and inbetween.
I'll be interested to hear what else you guys can come up with.
|
|
|
Post by mofosyne on May 24, 2019 18:05:45 GMT
|
|
|
Post by bigbombr on May 24, 2019 18:45:57 GMT
Keep in mind that detection and identification are different things. It's pretty easy to detect a 50 GW drive signature, it's a lot harder determining friend from foe, or determining specific spacecraft classes. Determining exact weapon loadout might be close to impossible outside of using espionage, especially in the case of VLS systems.
|
|
|
Post by dragon on May 24, 2019 23:52:59 GMT
"Stealth" in modern combat is always subterfuge. Arguments against "stealth in space" tend to focus on complete invisibility, which is not really possible on Earth, either. Unless you hide behind something, of course, but space is rather short on things to hide behind (not that you can't do it, if an opportunity arises). Stealth in modern warfare is always about subterfuge. You can't make your warship disappear, but with the right tricks you can make it appear like something it isn't. At least one F-117 found out the hard way that a goose zipping around at subsonic speed and making repeated passes over a radar site is a little conspicuous. For instance, let's say we've got a heavy ship with a small heat signature (about what you can find out by observing it). Is it a freighter, a drone/missile carrier, or a dreadnought running on a secondary reactor? Sometimes, you can figure this out by keeping track of the ship's point of origin and destination. However, this requires information which may not be as easily obtained as the ship's thermal signature. This kind of subterfuge is a strategic move, so outside COADE's gameplay scope, but is a very possible thing. Tactical stealth isn't really possible in space, but keeping up a strategic guessing game very much is.
|
|
|
Post by airc777 on May 24, 2019 23:56:47 GMT
Civil merchant fleet is still a threat by itself regardless. If not as a disguise for a warship or hidden weapons or directly as kinetic weapons then indirectly as commandeered fleet tenders and personnel transports. During war all unidentified ships should be assumed a potential threat and treated as such until proven otherwise.
|
|
|
Post by dragon on May 25, 2019 0:01:56 GMT
Yes, but if you send your whole dreadnought fleet after a merchant with an old reactor in the cargobay and spare radiators bolted on, which promptly surrenders just short of engagement range, then you may find out they're out of dV to catch an actual dreadnought, which in the meantime snuck in running cold and received only some patrol craft as a welcome committee. Indeed, I would expect a delta-V gambit to work really well if you can fool the enemy into thinking you're a craft with much less endurance than you actually have (freighters loaded with spare propellant in the cargobay may be especially good here).
It could also be done on an interplanetary scale, where you send a decoy force onto one planet, and once the response is under way, send your real force somewhere else, so there's no way in hell the response force could catch them in time, nevermind the fact they're not likely to have dV for such a drastic trajectory change, anyway.
|
|
|
Post by airc777 on May 25, 2019 0:34:39 GMT
Well, you wouldn't mobilize your entire fleet against every loan merchant, but you would mobilize enough tonnage to sink the merchant if it's determined to actually be a threat during its approach to whatever gravity well you are operating out of. These first responeders could easily be purpose built tiny fast things, and you would probably have dedicated merchant fleet hunters (like uboats) which could easily be tiny high delta V things. Saving your biggest gunships and carriers for engaging the enemy fleet proper and treating every ship as a threat are not mutually exclusive choices.
|
|
|
Post by dragon on May 25, 2019 9:34:00 GMT
This is exactly the point of subterfuge. A hunter ship closes in on the supposed merchant... upon which it deploys its main radiators and opens up with GW-class railguns. Whether you can commit your main fleet after that is a matter of the orbital situation, but it probably won't get as good an intercept as the hunter did. Enough tonnage to take down a merchant is, typically, not enough tonnage to take down a dreadnought. Even if you treat every ship as a threat, you need to assess how much a threat it is. Especially if, as seems to be the case in COADE, you don't have all that many ships to work with in first place.
|
|
|
Post by airc777 on May 25, 2019 10:21:46 GMT
I'm not suggesting that can't work, I actually think it could potentially work amazing well in the right circumstances with the right setup. The problem that I'm attempting to address is that your opponent is probably also a competent strategist and would believe that under the right circumstances things like that could work amazingly well, and they would do everything in their power to try and prevent that. I.E.: a strong focus on merchant hunting and merchant escorting. Also grand total fleet tonnage is a better metric of the amount of resources spent then total number of ships. More smaller ships in more places policing the civil fleet is more valuable then fewer bigger ships that can't be in as many places while the civil fleet runs amok. You're probably going to still want a hand full of proper battleships that can solve problems the merchant hunters can't, and a lot of your strategic planning will be around where and how to deploy them, but I think the bulk of your fleet will be merchant hunters. The civil fleet is so valuable because ships are a limited resource, and you're probably not going to want the ones on your side to be in harms way either, because they're probably more valuable in the longer term as a fleet tender or personnel shuttle or tanker then they would be as suicidal diversions. Again I'm not saying you can't, but I am saying it seems like a really big gambol so if you absolutely had too you better strategically stack the deck for a big payoff if you're going to bet your civil fleet assets.
|
|
|
Post by dragon on May 25, 2019 22:00:09 GMT
It is a gamble, and of course your bluff might be called, but the payoff can make it worth the effort. It all depends on the strategic situation. For instance, if your end goal is the capture of an entire planet's Hill sphere, surrendering (nobody sane would actually attempt to fight with the decoy fleet) a few freighters as decoys wouldn't matter, since if it works out, you'll have them back soon enough, together with anything they decoyed. That's assuming the enemy doesn't try to scuttle everything, which they may, but scuttling a spaceship without killing its crew is a rather though job to do on a short notice. Of course, if it doesn't work out, you lose everything, but that's the case with any interplanetary fleet operation.
The goal of a decoy operation is to get the enemy to waste delta-V. If you then proceed to knock out their refuelling capability (a perfectly viable target for this kind of thing), then you have an enemy battle fleet and their prizes dead in space, with not enough prop between them to make a retreat (high velocity intercepts are expensive, so is getting back from one). Assuming your own dV management is up to snuff, and the enemy doesn't pull any surprises out of their hat, you end up at a huge advantage and may even be able to force a surrender with minimal combat. Of course, this is just a single scenario.
Of course, that brings us to another kind of "stealth" in space: landing on a planet/moon. A landed vessel can be made effectively invisible from space, so if you can get it there unnoticed (or build it planet/moonside in first place), then you have a perfect way to surprise any would-be interplanetary invaders.
|
|
|
Post by Apotheon on Jun 5, 2019 4:07:49 GMT
I would reference modern surface ship warfare here. Disguising warships is just ridiculous, but keeping their exact capabilities unknown would be important as heck.
Another relevant scenario that comes to mind is “mining” space by having warships drop small, black fleets of drones that can be activated later.
|
|
|
Post by dragon on Jun 5, 2019 21:56:20 GMT
Actually, many modern warships use "stealth" designs, which tend to reduce their radar returns quite a bit. So you can very much pretend that you're sailing in a much smaller boat than you actually are, though in surface ship warfare the reduction in detection range would probably be more important. Of course, in real world, air recon is the big problem. Nobody goes in without checking things from the air first, if they can help it. In space you have no such luxury.
|
|
|
Post by eternalsorrow on Apr 16, 2020 22:13:50 GMT
The main assumption why the stealth is considered impossible is a dense net of spy satellites everywhere. That's the wise assumption for the game, but outside it there may be few points to criticize. The most reasonable direction to radiate is a normal to the ecliptic - that's the most difficult region to cover due to the dV costs of entering such an orbit. I cannot calculate how expensive it is, but I assume that creating a net constantly having a satellite on highly inclined orbit in distance closer than a few AU's to the every possible attack direction may be too much even for the superfaction like RFP/USTA. The reaction speed of enemy is limited by the speed of light, and every AU of distance gives a bit less than 17 minuts of a handicap (lower bound) for an enemy. And the further the combat is from the Sun, the more this distance definitely will be.
The close-range sensors near the battlefield are a problem, but they are vulnerable to the electronic warfare measures.
So, even with the complications with the strategic stealth, the stealth in tactical range is possible. 4 AU from the closest viewing sensor will give an additional hour for the attacker, which may be enough to pop up from behind a planet and attack an enemy from an unpredictable direction. Also, there are some possibilities for a strategic range stealth too. Using the "Accelerate once, coast long" method, we can mask the ship acceleration by doing it over the planet disk. Don't remember the calculations, but the planet disk reflects by orders of magnitude more than the ship emits, especially the stealth one.
|
|
|
Post by sage on Jan 30, 2022 19:04:34 GMT
The main assumption why the stealth is considered impossible is a dense net of spy satellites everywhere. That's the wise assumption for the game, but outside it there may be few points to criticize. The most reasonable direction to radiate is a normal to the ecliptic - that's the most difficult region to cover due to the dV costs of entering such an orbit. I cannot calculate how expensive it is, but I assume that creating a net constantly having a satellite on highly inclined orbit in distance closer than a few AU's to the every possible attack direction may be too much even for the superfaction like RFP/USTA. The reaction speed of enemy is limited by the speed of light, and every AU of distance gives a bit less than 17 minuts of a handicap (lower bound) for an enemy. And the further the combat is from the Sun, the more this distance definitely will be.
The close-range sensors near the battlefield are a problem, but they are vulnerable to the electronic warfare measures.
So, even with the complications with the strategic stealth, the stealth in tactical range is possible. 4 AU from the closest viewing sensor will give an additional hour for the attacker, which may be enough to pop up from behind a planet and attack an enemy from an unpredictable direction. Also, there are some possibilities for a strategic range stealth too. Using the "Accelerate once, coast long" method, we can mask the ship acceleration by doing it over the planet disk. Don't remember the calculations, but the planet disk reflects by orders of magnitude more than the ship emits, especially the stealth one. I wish that some of you were still around, I would have liked nothing more than to add to this debate.
|
|