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Post by goduranus on Dec 13, 2016 5:35:09 GMT
It's not like you need to take a detailed picture of something to detect it. A faint point of light will do. I mean, even your plain old Mk1 eyeball is able to detect flashes of light as faint as 5 photons and perhaps even a single photon that struck the retina. It's not something new either, it was known since the forties. So yes, an iphone camera, if used without the interference of the atmosphere can take a "photo" of the space station from 1Mm away, which will look like a dot, but it won't because it will fry. Electronics in space has to be insulated (to protect from sunlight) and cooled, so perhaps 1.1 kg may be overly generous. It's the fact that everything else can be made so small in comparison that I find hard to believe. P.S. By the way, for the same reason you don't need an array of Hubbles for your interplanetary vessel detection network and why a full-sky survey able to detect -20 magnitude light source can be done in four hours with today's technology. The guided shells are only active for about 9 seconds (10 kms and 90km range) so the cooling would only have to last that long. If they are proximity fused you need to also install a millimeterwave radar and a battery, to fire them out of a gun they will need to be structurally reinforced and if it is a coilgun you'll also need some pretty hefty shielding for your electronics. |
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Post by RiftandRend on Dec 13, 2016 11:24:11 GMT
Isn't the assumption made that the proximity sensors are in the warhead?
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Post by goduranus on Dec 13, 2016 12:31:46 GMT
Well, you can make the warhead as little as 1.1 gram, which surely wouldn't be enough to carry the proximity sensor.
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Post by themohawkninja on Dec 13, 2016 16:47:44 GMT
Well, you can make the warhead as little as 1.1 gram, which surely wouldn't be enough to carry the proximity sensor. Well, the flak rounds are able to detonate just shy of the target without an RC unit somehow. |
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Post by lawson on Dec 13, 2016 17:04:34 GMT
Well, you can make the warhead as little as 1.1 gram, which surely wouldn't be enough to carry the proximity sensor. I'd think a programmable delay fuse and a range-finder on the ship would be enough for most flak and nuke shells. May even work with a fixed delay and a "hot" temporary storage bay to run down the fuse delay before firing. (probably only safe to do with tiny flak shells...) Would still be hard to do for the smallest <300 mili-gram flak shells. |
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Post by themohawkninja on Dec 13, 2016 17:22:27 GMT
The guided shells are only active for about 9 seconds (10 kms and 90km range) so the cooling would only have to last that long. If they are proximity fused you need to also install a millimeterwave radar and a battery, to fire them out of a gun they will need to be structurally reinforced and if it is a coilgun you'll also need some pretty hefty shielding for your electronics. Why millimeter wave? Why not just a basic camera with some image recognition software like we see in cellphone cameras and a laser rangefinder. A commercial one for hunting is only about 200 grams, and you can get decently high resolution cameras that are probably in the singular gram, or low tens of grams range. As far as launch shielding is concerned, if you were to fill up the entire volume of said rangefinder with epoxy, you'd bring up the total to around 900 grams, which while close to 1 kg, is assuming you aren't stripping the rangefinder of any unneeded components (e.g. rubber, plastic, LCD screen, control knobs, etc). So, there does seem to be some definite room to cut down at least 10% of the mass of the RC modules. P.S. Turns out it's really easy to get information on how the U.S. military shields electronics from the forces of being fired from a gun: www.arl.army.mil/arlreports/2006/ARL-TR-3705.pdf |
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