your friend is an idiot

Obviously you're also too "dump" to spell and grammars correctly as well.

>>12995135
Ain't NO stealth in space.

Stealth = St
Space = Sp

Sp = 0St

I present math.

>>12995135
You can definitely have the thing at near-zero emissions, moving completely on inertia, until it's so close to the target that it doesn't matter that you found the thing.
But that would kind of make it more of a mine than a missile.

>>12995170

and your point is... ?

>I'm too dump for do the proper math
THERE IS NO NEED FOR MATH.

THERE IS HEAT.
THERE IS NOTHING THE HEAT CAN BE TRANSMITTED ACROSS SAVE FOR THE OBJECT.
THEREFORE THE HEAT CANNOT BE REMOVED OR HIDDEN APART FROM THE OBJECT.

>>12995187
The manliest way would be by hand during EVA.

>>12995178

yeah, but how would you get it near enough? I mean without inertia you need to now where the enemy will be, even days befor. depends on range. And you have to accerate somehow to a reasonable speed

>>12995192

well, i understand thet you can radiate the heat to the back of the missle and you can use heat shields of some kind. But than bast you can get is that you radiate at a 60 degree cone.
This is from http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php
So how hard would it be to detect a missle of this kind?

>>12995174

There IS some stealth in space. Given the distances involved, visual detection is basically impossible unless you're right next to it. The Mass Effect's ship, Normandy, is a stealth ship not because it tries to turn invisible like Bond's car, but because it hides and captures it's emissions. Things like heat or radiation, which are how spaceship sensors are more likely to work.

> and you can effectively can hide the heat of hit.

I assume you mean "effectively hide the heat of shit." In which case your friend would be correct. All you need to do is have a material that does not transfer heat well (aerogel for example) between the cool exterior of the ship and your heat sink.

The aerogel will not conduct the thermal energy to the outside of the ship, thus masking the IR signature. Of course dump too much heat into the sink and it will probably explode, but that's another issue entirely.

>>12995192
>>12995135
Hmm, a super-conducting railgun with a liquid oxygen sheath firing a lump of metal (or some element with a high specific heat capacity, though it's meaningless as you approach absolute zero) at some significantly-below-speed-of-light-but-high-enough-to-ruin-your-day velocity would be quite difficult to detect, depending on the technology available to the opposing force.

>>12995178

Kinetic projectile is more what you're looking for there, Anon. Like, a gun.

Of course, you could always use the mine idea too. Leave the little fuckers scattered around, with nothing more than simple guidance, an IFF, and a passive array that detects sensors and targets the source when it comes within X range via thrusters.

But no OP, there is no stealth in space because there is no Radar in space. Stealth is for foiling radar, not sensors. Though, I suppose you COULD use radar in space, and have stealth as a result, but why? It'd take too damn long to get a reading at the distances you'd need to be able to sweep at.

>>12995212
IMAGINE A FIELD OF PERFECT BLACKNESS STRETCHING ON FOREVER AROUND YOU.

IMAGINE MY ILLUMINATED FIST PILEDRIVING TOWARDS YOU.

HOW DIFFICULT IS IT TO SEE MY FIST?

>>12995202
>days before
Welcome to sneakiness. Patience runs this show, you'll find him in the third door to the left. Be prepared to be monitoring lots of communications and doing jack squat most of the time waiting for Opportunity. She doesn't come around often, but things really get exciting when she shows up.

>>12995192
So that's why the ISS is nothing but fire, burning, and fire all of the time, and can never cool down, especially not with the cooling systems that were installed to radiate heat energy away from the station.

You should watch Crest/Banner of the Stars.

>>12995216
and they would all bake to death inside the ship if it weren't for applied plotonium

>>12995239
which makes it fucking easy to find

>>12995222
Here the problem. Space is 0 kelvins. Absolute zero. -273 Celsius. Cool your ship all the way down to 1 kelvin? Which is next to impossible since heat dissipation is a big issue in space, but whatever, sake of argument.

You're a big freaking target.
Stealth in space doesn't exist.

>>12995232
>implying space is actually a complete vacuum
>implying that you can't use some form of external propulsion so that the boooolet is relatively cool
>implying that you're going to be able to detect a 0.8c missile fired at you
>implying that even *if* you were able to detect such a weapon that you can do anything to get out of the way.

>>12995222

what about a rocket that fully closed with heat shield and you don't give a fuck about the overheating inside it because it will explode befor it can be turn bad.

Or because of the engine in the missle it's impossible to make it fully heat shielded?

>>12995192
Hello, I am a form of heat transfer as well. Convection and Conduction can do it faster, but those medium-needing motherfuckers can suck my dick.

>>12995228
>Stealth is for foiling radar, not sensors
Radar is a type of sensor. Modern stealth systems on aircraft are not only designed to reduce radar cross section but also minimize IR output and minimize high energy EM transmission in general (communications et al).

That being said Radar works even better in space because there's no LOS issues or ground clutter to weed out. The only limiting factor is, as you said, time for the wave to bounce back, but at a propagation of light speed that's not a terrible issues.

>>12995271

actually it's 3 K which is fucking cloes to absolute zero but still...

>>12995228

maybe you meant sonar

>>12995271
>Space is 0 kelvins
yeah, unfortunately it isn't. You see, SPACE isn't a perfect vacuum. One *would* detect a transfer of heat close to -260 degrees centigrade, but one would also have to remember that there's 1) plenty of loose hydrogen floating around, and 2) ambient radiation from nearby stars

>http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/379068main_Temperature_of_Space.pdf

The second issue is detection. Just because you've got a heat signature doesn't mean you're going to necessarily stand out. If you can get the temperature of the projectile below 3 Kelvin, it's completely masked by the cosmic microwave background radiation. Which means it'd be undetectable by at least infrared, which is presumably how you'd detect heat

>>12995283

English isn't your first language, is it? Your first statement makes no sense whatsoever so I'll address your second;

>Or because of the engine in the missle it's impossible to make it fully heat shielded?

The nice thing about space is that there's no friction to slow your missile down so a constant burn is not required.

Depending on how mobile the target is only a terminal maneuvering burn would be required if you gave it a good enough initial push.

The upside of a long burn is that your speed is only limited by your acceleration and a missile accelerating at 10-11g can get up to a pretty impressive speed in relatively short order. Meaning that even if it is detected from it's engine output it's speed will minimize the target's ability to intercept it.

>>12995290

Radar = short-range sensors, or probing sensors for checking an area days or weeks ahead of time.

Passive Radiation/Heat/Ion/Light sensors = long range sensors that can react much faster to objects at a distance, but only objects that interact with said energy sources.

Radar would be sweet for sweeping an area to find floating rocks or other materials that would be 'dark' to passive sensors. But as we agree, you'd have to wait on results.

Yeah, radar is a type of 'sensor', you are correct though. It was fallacious of me to talk about it like it wasn't.

>>12995216 There IS some stealth in space. Given the distances involved, visual detection is basically impossible unless you're right next to it. The Mass Effect's ship, Normandy, is a stealth ship not because it tries to turn invisible like Bond's car, but because it hides and captures it's emissions

Well yeah; there's stealth in space as long as you have some magical future technology that justifies it, but given our current understanding of physics stealth in space is impossible.

But then, so's faster than light travel - you need to break some laws of physics to make your SciFi interesting, so why not break this one as well? Just be aware that it's no more realistic than going Warp Speed.

>The only limiting factor is, as you said, time for the wave to bounce back, but at a propagation of light speed that's not a terrible issues.

Wouldn't it be better to, well, essentially shine a bloody large lamp on appropriate frequency and see where the light "stops"? It's, if working, probably the fastest method since it's literally working at the speed of light, though I imagine it'd take some time to "shine" in all possible directions.

>>12995332
>>12995303
Forgot about that ambient shit. Point still remains that getting rid of heat in a vacuum is a bigger deal than attempting stealth, if it's possible at all.

Question. If space is so damn damn wouldn't that mean the ships in habiting them would absorb that coolness until it matched?

IF so why not just have a second hull of perfectly bitch black element that absorbs heat at extremely low rate. Your ship will generate heat but the second hull will be a cold shell to mask it.

Work?

>>12995322

No, I meant radar. Sonar doesn't work inspace AT ALL, because sound doesn't travel at all in a vacuum. Radar would just take ages to do long range scans with (long range in space is NOT several thousand miles. That's short range). But it would have its uses. Just not as a long-range combat device. Not at the ranges most ships will probably actually engage at.

>>12995333

well yes, and I didn't get enough sleep either.

But if the missle do this acceleration than that will be detectable and from it you can calculate where is the missle.

>Question. If space is so damn damn wouldn't that mean the ships in habiting them would absorb that coolness until it matched?

Things DUMP heat to get cooler, things can't take cold in. When you stand around in the snow, your body isn't "taking the heat in", there;s enough mass of cold particles to take your heat in faster than you can produce it, leading to hypothermia and death.

>>12995353
>absorbing coolness

It doesn't fucking work like that FFFUUUUUUU

>>12995353
MY BRAIN IS FULL OF FUCK!

>>12995353
The first issue is why you have people in ships to begin with. Us squishy humans (and I am assuming that we're all humans here, but you never know) spend upwards of 60-70% of our metabolic reserves simply to maintain ideal body temperature (so that our enzymes work most efficiently, etc.) A robot can be built to work around this. Now, yes, heat dissipation is the leading issue in having people onboard space ships (the US. Shuttle must have its bay doors open, where its radiators are, while in orbit lest it overheats in under 30 minutes). However, remove the person, and it's really not an issue anymore

You want stealth in space?

Hack the enemy computers. Delete your coordinates from their computer systems.

YOU'RE INVISIBLE!

>>12995382
Aright, same concept. Build a ship that retains heat as efficiently as possible. Build a ship sized shell of black composite that can encapsule the ship. Flood the space in between with a cooling agent that will cause the shell to meet the ambient temperature outside.

>>12995408
There is no internet in space, you'd have to be actually on-board with physical acces to do it. Now, you could send signals, provided you know how his computer works, to confuse him, but it will just mean the comp will see dead people, not that it won't see you at all.

>>12995417
and it still won't be enough

>>12995341
>Wouldn't it be better to, well, essentially shine a bloody large lamp on appropriate frequency and see where the light "stops"?

Congratulations you've just described radar.

In general, stealth in space is impossible unless you can somehow contain all of the heat that the ship produces... Within the ship.
This is completely impossible. Thus, unless you have science-fu to explain your ship breaking the laws of thermodynamics, or something like putting your ship in another dimension, then you cannot have stealthy space ships.

That being said, the above impossibilities are just about as impossible as moving faster than the speed of light, as far as we know right now. So really, it costs you nothing to go full retard and have stealth missiles that skip into hyperspace and then out again to make tracking them impossible.

>>12995432
Oh god, I have the dumb today, radio is just another...well, never mind.

>>12995417
>Build ship that retains heat
>Crew roasts to death

>>12995429
Who says the hacking is done from your ship?

Just stick a hacking computer inside a fake banana, give it a wifi card, AI sorts his own shit out, and hacks the enemy systems.

>>12995430
'splain

You all are saying building a cold ship is so damn complicated and yet expect a heat sensor to be able to pick up minute temperature variances over thousands of miles of open space in every direction?

>>12995417
I think you were asleep when they taught thermodynamics in high school, right?

>>12995354
>Radar would just take ages to do long range scans with (long range in space is NOT several thousand miles. That's short range).

That's not true at all. A radar wave would be able to get to the sun and back in 16 minutes, far less time than whatever it would detect could do.

The issue is getting a powerful enough transmitter and large enough antennae to provide a decent return at 93 million miles.

>>12995448

>>12995457
Do you have any idea how empty space is?

99% of space is empty.

That means, that even a fart will flare up like BIG NEWS in space on a heat sensor. Because there's so little around there.

>>12995353
>If space is so damn damn
>absorb that coolness
>bitch black element

We got ourselves a jive-ass turkey here, boss.

>>12995451
That my friend implies you can TRUST your agents to succesfully plant such equipment on enemy vessels all the time. And hope they don't find them with routine sweeps or have a huge alarm bell going off whenever something new tries to log in the network. Assuming the enemy is dumb enough to use open-acces shit like WI-Fi for his internal computers. Anyone with half a mind would have any console used for external communication separated from the main combat systems to avoid hostile takeover.

>>12995486
I've heard some funny things about the US cyber security on their naval vessels.

I doubt your concerns will be a problem... when we're fighting Americans. In space.

>>12995438

It's exceedingly easy to design something that can effectively mask its heat in space. The issue is how to store said heat so it doesn't cook the inside of the ship.

Now while not impossible doing stuff creates a lot of heat which will buildup wherever you store it and will eventually cause something (very very) bad to happen.

Fine you niggers. Automated ship. Entirely cut off from human occupants. Retains all heat with massive sinks that line the interior of the ship.

fuck you all I'm drunk and this is my science.

Questions for the more scientifically oriented.

1. Could a clever pilot mask his passing by coming at you "from the sun" (or any significant heat source) using all the energy flying out from the star (or whatever) to mask the fact that a ship is flying in from that vector?

2. Radar jamming (at least as I understand it) involves tossing so much "noise" out there that your radar is basically staying DICKS, DICKS EVERYWHERE. Could a ship (or group of ships) also do that, shooting out enough heat that you know that the enemy is "thataway" but cannot pinpoint their position enough for any meaningful engagement?

I was thinking, for example, of something like nuclear chaff - toss a few 10mt missiles in all directions and you'll be creating quite a series of heat signatures. If your entire fleet does it then selecting the right target becomes finding a needle in a haystack, right?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I am doing a little writing and would like it to be "believable" at the very minimum.

>>12995513

It'd be cool if you rationalized using all the waste heat to produce more energy for the ship. Plausible, and effective as a 'stealth' tool as well.

>>12995502
>Implying anyone but America will have a combat-capable space fleet

U mad, everyone we bombed back to the stone age?

>>12995524

>
1. Could a clever pilot mask his passing by coming at you "from the sun" (or any significant heat source) using all the energy flying out from the star (or whatever) to mask the fact that a ship is flying in from that vector?
yes

>
2. Radar jamming (at least as I understand it) involves tossing so much "noise" out there that your radar is basically staying DICKS, DICKS EVERYWHERE. Could a ship (or group of ships) also do that, shooting out enough heat that you know that the enemy is "thataway" but cannot pinpoint their position enough for any meaningful engagement?
They would still be able to pinpoint the source of the noise eventually unless you were able to spread it out over a large area.

>>12995521
Still too much heat.

>>12995524
Distances in space are too big for that. Just so astronomically big...

If you wanna cloak yourself behind nuke explosions and make it matter, you're better off detonating them while they're still in the missile pods.

>>12995534
>implying US will be relevant after another 50 years

>>12995521
>he thinks the electronics would not inevitably burn and melt

>>12995546
Them's fightin' words.

>>12995545

Its not hiding your signature. Its putting out too much noise for them to figure out which one is you.

Ex: Your ship shoots off 50-100 nukes in all directions and then shuts engines off. You obviously still radiate heat BUT you look like the energy from the nukes. Eventually the gig is up but it allows you to confuse the enemy while you get your own weapons into play and hopefully buys you enough time to strike the blow.

>>12995541

Well, no jamming/confusion technique is perfect (eventually your own radar's return signals are powerful enough to "burn through" radar jamming, for example) but the point is just that it buys time for you to get a few salvos in or run away, even if you are in range of their weapons.

>>12995513

question is, can you make a missle that is don't give a shit about the overheating till its hit the target?

>>12995521
Well, you were almost right there. Heat sinks are less of a problem if you can run your ship near or below 3 kelvin (which is actually ideal if you're using superconductors). It'd almost be completely invisible to microwave detection methods

>>12995524
>1
nope. Space is fricken huge. And 3 dimensional. Trigonometry solves this issue right quick. A few satellites in orbit, say, at the Lagrange points, and you can detect this shit

>2
>nuclear chaff
yah, nukes are pretty much worthless in space. They're primary one-two punch is the propagating EMP followed by the blast. Both are severely reduced due to the low amount of matter floating around in space. Even if you were to hit a baddy with the nuke, the blast will propagate towards the least resistance (i.e., into space and not into your presumably six-foot-thick adamantium-laced pimp-ship)

As for chaff? again, you'd need some form of particle that can be quickly distributed over a humongous volume that would disrupt multiple forms of detection. In other words, Minovsky particles, from Gundam

pic is /tg/ related too

>>12995541
>They would still be able to pinpoint the source of the noise eventually unless you were able to spread it out over a large area.

Slap a jammer pod on an engine and go to town matey.

>prillow panet
Captcha related I guess?

>>12995192
Can't you use a cooling agent?

>>12995593
It was stated here >>12995227. No propulsion on the missile = low heat signature. Inertia wins the day in space

>>12995590
No you won't. Shit will look like a heat anomaly, and anomalies are prone to detection.

Ergo, you're going to get raped.

>>12995629
yeah, and then when you flush the cooling agent ITS BRIGHT AS FUCK

>>12995629
Where are you going to leave the cooling agent?

>>12995629
Not exactly. Current ways of getting rid of heat is to literally not transfer it anywhere (insulation). If you reduce the heat loss of items that are already hot, you can protect the crew. Which is pointless if you're going for STEALTH IN SPACE.

>>12995629
All that does is move the heat into the cooler. Which will eventully be full of heat.

Hm, i see, thnaks

>>12995666
No one is trying to create the perfect space black hawk here. We all know that at SOME POINT the heat will need to be dissipated. But if I can mask my ship for even an hour and get an alpha strike on my target then the ship is successful.

>>12995604

If you're at sufficient distance and the satillites aren't too far from your ship (say, because you're a fleet in action and not fighting around a gravity well,) the angle would be too shallow to detect you outside of the heat signature of the star.

But in cases of assautling into a planet or any prepared position, you are obviously correct.

Regarding 2, did you even read what I fucking wrote? Go back and try again.

>>12995685
aaand now you're ship is fucking huge

which means you have to expend more fuel to move

which means you make more heat

which means you need more coolant

>>12995685
And your missile will hit the enemy in 49 hours, so when your one hour stealth wears off, the enemy still has 48 hours to find you and send a missile to you.

EVERYONE DIES! YAY!

>>12995703
are you going somewhere with this?

if my ship can avoid detecting in any battle for at least long enough to give me the edge and destroy the target then I have to flush my heat afterwards it can be 100 times the ship and expense of the ships I am blamming.

You cannot destroy what you cannot see.

Gentlemen, the answer is clear.

We must heat space.

>>12995722
You're forgetting there is no such thing as a fast strike in space.

There are only slow strikes.

>>12995744
slow strikes. I launch my missiles, he launches his missiles. I go dark before they hit and they lose their target. I still don't see how a temporary stealth ship isn't winning these battles.

>>12995732

>Heat Space

>Brilliant!.jpg

>>12995604
>2
>nuclear chaff
yah, nukes are pretty much worthless in space. They're primary one-two punch is the propagating EMP followed by the blast. Both are severely reduced due to the low amount of matter floating around in space. Even if you were to hit a baddy with the nuke, the blast will propagate towards the least resistance (i.e., into space and not into your presumably six-foot-thick adamantium-laced pimp-ship)

I like what i read in the Honorverse series and some other scifi. bomb-pumped lasers. Channel the energy pulse with some heavy magnetic shielding, push it into some form of reactive lasing material. Lasing material, etc, get eaten up by the blastwave, but you are able to squeeze a fraction of that destructive energy into a directed beam.

>>12995722
Considering how long the ranges involved, and that we'd be using missiles, most likely, as primary offensive weapon, it doesn't matter. They WILL see the missile, they will calc your course, light up that area with whatever sensors they have, and find you. And fire their own missiles or railgun shots. Unless of course you fight at ranges measured in only thousands of kilometers, but what the fuck, if they couldn't detect you at point-blank they deserve it.

>>12995732

call in the trolls!

>>12995784

You may call me foolish, but they once thought it was impossible to put a man on the sun, and now look at where we are.

>I go dark before they hit and they lose their target.

HAHAHAHAHA

>>12995782
Those missiles can just stop until you reappear. Not like you'll move...

Moving = heat = detection = death.

>>12995703
You set up your attack run from a good distance away and accelerate to whatever your attack speed is. Then dump whatever coolant was used during that initial setup of maneuvering (via a laser or a drone filled with anti-freeze or whatever) and engage your stealth system. Using compressed cold fluids you make whatever last minute maneuvers are necessary and let newton bring you in the rest of the way.

Once in range your use compressed liquid oxygen to launch a number of missiles. The missiles begin their acceleration burn after you're outside of the target's active detection envelope.

For added lulz throw in a couple jammers with the missiles that broadcast der humpink on as many frequencies as possible while the missiles use passive guidance systems to home in on their target.

Point of order. If all space battles will be fought with missiles and rockets that take a long time to reach a target won't they be shot down by point defense armaments? I mean a missiles is hot as fuck as easy to track, put a couple thousand slugs of steel into it when it reaches a close distance and you're golden, no?

>>12995689
>(say, because you're a fleet in action and not fighting around a gravity well,)
see, the problem is that there wouldn't be fleet action where there's no strategic location (i.e., gravity well, Lagrange points) precisely because detection is so easy. You know exactly where and how many ships the opponent has ever since the USS SHITSTOOLARGE left drydock. Conversely, you've no idea where it is because it's an AI-run ship who's core temperature is below 2 kelvin and is thus all but undetectable. Microwaves travel at the speed of light, bro. You're going to be seen.

As for the second part, again, nuclear explosions are far too small in space to cause anything *but* increased scrutiny.

>>12995722
Heat doesn't work that way. Look, I know Mass Effect was being all cute with the heat storage issue, but the fact of the matter is that in our dinky little world which doesn't have mass-changing particles, you're still going to have to maneuver and fire weapons, all of which generate heat. And besides, it's not as if heat is the *only* way of detecting someone

>>12995833
Yeah.

What basically proves that space combat is utterly stupid and useless.

>>12995830
Half a year later, the target isnt there anymore and you couldn't change course to avoid detection.

>>12995782
Enemy launches lots of guided missiles
Activate stealth
Deactivate stealth so you can vent heat before your ship melts
Guess what? those missiles just found you again

You can't beat space man.

You can't.

>>12995833
Space Battles will be one gigantic semi cold war.

We'll show off our first "Cruiser" capable of staying combat ready for exactly 30 seconds until it starts overheating and be able to take exactly one hit before the entire crew has to evacuate.

Science fiction was a whole lot more fun before /tg/ got ahold of it.

>>12995899
>and be able to take exactly one point-defence stopped "hit" 3 kilometer away from the ship before the entire crew melts like in Indiana Jones and the Lost Ark.

Fixed, mate.

>>12995846

I'm not an expert in these matters, but you're saying there's no way for a nuke being set off to give off a heat signature that looks something like a ship's? (Or, conversely, to vent your heat into space in such a way as to look like a nuclear explosion and so make it easy to mask yourself with nuclear explosions.)

Again, the idea would be: shoot a bunch of nukes out at random intervals/directions, set them off, now the enemy has no idea which one of these heat sources is you and which one is just nuclear noise. Is that not doable?

The point of jamming ISN'T stealth, when you are being jammed or decoyed you KNOW there is something there, but that doesn't help because you can't pinpoint with any regularity which one is which until they are closer. That means the assaulting force gets additional time, which means additional salvos sent out at the defending force.

Tell me why this would not work.

>>12995833
Not at all. Let's set up a scenario. I'm an evil alien overlord on, say, Jupiter (where, according to /m/, all evil alien overlords go to first). Now, I saw Independence Day and don't want to get raped by some guy from Jurassic Park with a 1980s Apple computer. So I get my suitably-impressively-phallic-shaped gun out. Let's say it can fire a metallic rock the size of, oh, a school bus, at 0.8c.

Let's say I fire it when Earth and Jupiter are closest to each other. You've now got about 1960 seconds (32 minutes) to detect it before the entire state of Maryland becomes a crater. And guess what, it'd be impossible to do so. The Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program can cover, oh, maybe 4% of the night sky on any given day.

>>12995899
Slap engines on missile pod. Make fausaands of them, send at enemy. Overwhelm the point defense, hope some get through. Afterwards, launch the troopships to invade target object and hope you took all of his missileships. As grorious as playing Sapper, but cheap and efficient.

>>12995906
>Science fiction was a whole lot more fun before /tg/ got ahold of it.

>I never read some proper scifi.

>Please Monoliths, rape my face, for I am not worthy of intelligence!

>>12995722
I'm trying to imagine what would happen if a system in mass effect that allows for heat stealth actually existed and what would be required for it.

They would have to absorb all passive body heat emanating, all heat from computer systems, and every thing that has a single iota of electricity running thorugh it.

That heat sink, whatever its made of, would heat up to its maximum heat capacity in seconds, and as soon as the ship moves, it';s intertia would melt right through the back of the ship

>Please Monoliths, rape my face
You have no idea how much I hate you.
Fetish fucking aquired!

>>12995906

yeah but now it's much more real so we are not so nerdy, because we don't live in a fantasy word.
I mean... well... fuck...

... What is one were to project a diffused cloud of hydrogen gas before the ship/projectile? Deep space isn't a complete vacuum, and a slightly more dense cloud won't be at all noticeable and may be enough to distort or masks a small source of radiation. Hell, mix a bit of dust into the cloud, who would suspect a cloud of dust in space?

>>12995935
That's assuming you *can* launch a projectile at that accel, and in fact, that you *want* to do it. Unless you've run into an alien race that's so paranoid it shoots every intelligent life on sight, warring factions will want to preserve life-bearing planets and their resources instead of vaporizing them.

>>12995949
Is it so unconceivable that we discover some kind of new metal or element that just soaks up ambient energy, like heat, and seemingly registers none of it back.

Some kind of odd heat absorbing substance that converts it into some other kind of energy that we are unaware of by modern (FUTURE) science and we haphazardly line ships with so they can run hot 100% with no need to dump the heat.

IS IT SO HARD TO IMAGINE?!!

>>12995932
You're basically trying to use jungle ghillie suits in the Arctic.

I have no other way to explain it, that the other anons didn't already post.

Nukes exploding aren't the same thing as spaceships flying "stealthy".
Unless you're talking about the time where we become like post-human Cthulhu like GODS.

By then, we could do ANYTHING that the laws of physics tell us "you can't."

This thread is a perfect example of why I really don't even try to run real hard scifi. Keeping track of all the technology, and all of its possible applications and the inevitable implications of those applications will just stuff your brain full of fuck. Trying to model space combat in particular becomes so futile and complex that its just a hell of alot more fun to say 'fuck this shit' and play Rogue Trader or Traveler.

>/tg/
>space tactics
never change /tg/... never change

Haters gonna hate. I change course with a cooled mass-driver augmented with photon drives. Oh, and I can close the lid on the thermos and be invisible for decades.

There is stealth in space, but it has nothing to do with heat.

Hide behind shit.

There's your stealth

>>12996001
Yes.

>>12996005

...I never said you'd be flying stealthy. I am not talking about stealth. I am talking about generating enough noise - enough points of data that from enough distance look like they might be ships - to allow you time to get in shots unharassed.

Basically, if your 1 ship deploys 50 decoy targets, you have a 1/50 chance of hitting them at distances where you cannot detect the difference between the two IRs. It doesn't defeat radar, it multiplies possible targets to overwhelm the enemy.

And now I am thinking you're just trolling because you and I aren't talking about the same thing.

>>12995932
>nuke... heat signature that looks something like a ship's
>now the enemy has no idea which one of these heat sources is you and which one is just nuclear noise.

I'm saying that it's not a good solution as you're drawing more attention to yourself than you would otherwise if you were just in your ship. Which leads to the second point: there's other ways of detecting your ship (hell, the mass of your ship will cause distortions in space-time by bending light which can be picked up by an as-of-yet-only-theoretical sensitive light detector).

>you can't pinpoint with any regularity which one is which until they are closer.
the problem is that you can detect the composition of the atmosphere of a planet hundreds of light years away, but there's absolutely no chance that the human species will exist to travel there. Ever. (Most species have a turnaround period of 1 to 2 million years. We're 200,000 years in). That is, detection is much, much easier than moving, stealth, or what have you. If you're really going to attack a target, you do it with close-to-speed-of-light kinetic weapons from millions of kilometers away.

>>12995906
But of course. Reality sucks hardcore.

>>12996029
If people really want to find you, they can always look at the gravity calculations of said object you're hiding behind.

>>12996046
You don't need decoys.

You need clone ships. Exact clones of your ship.

With the same amount of fuel, same amount of people inside, same amount of cargo.

>>12996001

you need to... TELEPORT THE HEAT!!!!
or... SEND IT TO THE WARP!!!

>>12996007

thats why it will be much more fun in real life

>>12996048

Are you the same kind that wonders why every invasion isn't just a nuke-fest until all life is burned away?

And this is why shields>stealth

You found me, congratulations. You require a weapon platform of generating the kenetic force of a small moon traveling at .7% the speed of light to overwhelm my self-agitating partially cohesive black matter envelope surrounding my ship.

While you're busy trying to harvest the energy of several suns for the task I will ram your ship like bumper cars until your crew is nothing but a fine red mush on the deck walls.

>>12995994
Well, yes, but it's an example of how to do it. Stealthily

>>12996001
>Is it so inconceivable that we discover some kind of new metal or element that just soaks up ambient energy
Actually, yes, because it violates both the second and third law of thermodynamics.

>>12996001

>>12996070
You don't use decoys until they're already firing at you. Before then you come in low-observable and at cold temperatures the singal-to-noise ratio makes it extremely hard to see anything.

Not to mention that once you are spotted your ship is protected by relativistic phase space as long as you have the delta v for course corrections AND there is the old maxim that if they are in your weapon's range you are in theirs.

Not to mention the impossibility of defending a static objective like a planet which can be effectively attacked from ANY vector.

>>12996085
I cannot even begin to explain how this entire post violates everything we know about everything.

>>12996085
Too bad I just sacked by solar systems and unleashed the Wars. You have exactly 72 hours to kiss all matter in Milky Way goodbye. And no, I don't expect anyone on tg to get the reference.

>>12996118
*my, not *by.

This type of theoretical argument is completely pointless. Under modern technology you would eb right, but in hypothetical sci-fi settings there is nothing stopping an author for imagining a technology, that defies our current understanding of thermodynamics in order to create almost any device that can make it through suspension of disbelief. Arguing over these things from a modern point of view is the equivalent of cavemen arguing over the physics of modern armor.

>>12996085
Sorry, but no. It goes Stealth/Suprise>Maneuver>Armor.

You can't hit what you can't see.
You can't damage what you can't hit.
You can kill what you can damage.

>>12996091

anon, seeing your pictures I have to wonder... do you know what is /tg/ booru?
http://grognard.booru.org/

>>12996084
You mean an alien invasion? If so, then yes. But it's also not relevant to the discussion. The question was whether or not STEALTH in SPACE was possible (using our current understanding of physics). The answer: not the way one would normally think of it, but not impossible either.

>>12996007
seriously. I mean take a look at this pic. This is, on the one hand, a great idea of how to take advantage of microwave radiation to propel a ship. On the other hand, goddamn is it boring and ugly. Where's my 3m tall beige hallways filled with green-skinned alien babes? Where's my pocket-less jumpsuits? Where's my goddamned jetpack?

Okay, so after reading this thread I want to know if some of my conclusions are "safe" within the realm of known science.

If interplanetary war occurred, it would most likely be conducted 100% by ground troops as ship-to-ship combat would most likely end in all ships blowing each other apart regardless of who fired first. Orbital defense platforms would essentially be sitting ducks for space-faring ships and would only be useful in providing orbital-to-ground strikes.

This is so interesting. Have they written any sci-fi novel where humanity struggles with the complexities of interstellar war? I mean from the sounds of it, each commanding officer needs to have a physics degree to make informed decisions about war in space.

>>12996091
/tg/ is like a more sarcastic /sci/ sometimes. i love it

>>12996085
Yeah until I lock down auxiliary power and fire a tackeon beam right through my proton field. Then you're fucked.

>>12996163
Nope, completely off base. You're as relevant and battleship zeppelins trying to cross the T.

>>12996163
Space-based combat would basically be the rival captains making stern faces at each other over their viewscreens.

"Come at me bro."
"What the fuck ever."
"You mad."
"I ain't even mad."

>>12996085
>behold my magical forcefields
Sure is science

>>12996163

try this page: http://www.projectrho.com/

>>12996163
>implying that by the time we have (if we have) interstellar travel, itll be humans commanding the ships

yeah, no. i dont think so. human reaction times too slow, space travel isnt intuitive at all, the incredible time spans involved, and stuff just make it seem rly ineffiecient to build what would undoubtedly be a very expensive piece of hardware, and then trust a piece of wetware with it. some advanced ai (purely hypothetical, i know i know) would be better for the task at hand.

why yes, i am a massive culture fanboy, why do you ask?

>>12996025
This would work.

>>12996148
I do but I'm also a lazy ass who's spending time on /tg/ when he should be writing a term paper. Or two.

>>12996132
>You can't hit what you can't see.
See, there's this lovely thing called quantum mechanics. It's like the Cthulu version of classical physics. In it there's many nice treats, including such diverse thing as knowing the location of an object without knowing where it is, having an object both exist and not exist at the same time, and other tidbits of useless trivia. With it, it's quite easy to detect the baddies.

Example: Quantum Encryption. Remember Schrodinger's Cat? I'm sure you do. The cat's both alive and dead (by the Copenhagen interpretation) at the same time, but you don't know which until you open the box. That is, the mere fact that you *observed* an occurrence can change reality. Hence, the same thing can be done with data transfers and encryption, and even detection systems. The instance the baddy even casually scans anything in your system, you've got his ass.

>>12996209
Sorry, but AI assisted humans is the correct answer. And no you shouldn't be putting a human on every single missile-drone.

>>12996163
This ain't WH40k, bro.

>>12996234
what part does the AI assist with? the cortex, brainstem, or other?

i imagine a human cortex (thats the think part, right?) on top of an AI taking over the brainstem functions and helping with intuition would be fucking amazing

>>12996218

>The cat's both alive and dead (by the Copenhagen interpretation) at the same time, but you don't know which until you open the box.

Nnrgh. People keep forgetting that Schroedinger's Cat is a REFUTATION of the Copenhagen Interpretation - namely, that it's absurd to apply quantum super-positions on a macro-scale. A thing cannot be alive AND dead.

>That is, the mere fact that you *observed* an occurrence can change reality

Also nrgh. It's not that observation changes reality, it's that ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS NECESSARY FOR OBSERVATION change reality. It's impossible to observe something without bombarding it with light, hence it's impossible to truly observe something's natural state.

fucking faggots. Stopped reading halfway through, but if you're going to plotwave breaking physics in all kinds of ways to go faster than light or fucking rip a physical hole in spacetime then is it so fucking difficult to make a stealthy spaceship?

>>12996163
>If interplanetary war occurred, it would most likely be conducted 100% by ground troops
completely off base here. If interplanetary war occurred, it would consist entirely of putting thrusters on asteroids and glaring very angrily into a pict-viewer while making ridiculous demands of ONEHUNDREDBILLIONBILLIONDOLLARS. No, seriously. A Railgun in SPACE is the equivalent of a nation holding a nuke now.

>each commanding officer needs to have a physics degree to make informed decisions about war in space.
Well, at the very least.
>"What do you mean the ship will take 1,000 years to reach OMINOUSSOUNDINGPLANET?"
>"Well, it'll only be like 5 years for us"
>"Why is this ship turning around? We're only halfway there"
>"This ship has escape pods, right? Right?"
>"What do you mean we're falling 'towards' the planet?"
and other such things

>>12995135
>So, we all know there is no stealth in space.

No, you assume there is no stealth in space, because you have never been there yourself, and your assumption is inaccurate.

>>12996283
>HEY GUYS I MISSED THE POINT

>>12996218
>Quantum mechanics tells you where an object is
Nope. Quantum mechanics tells you what you can't know. Like you can't know exactly when a specific atom decays until it decays. Or how you can't measure fundamental particles without changing their state.

What quantum mechanics tells you that if you observe a 3K object for one second, that you can't be sure if its actually 3K or if it might actually be obscured by another object between 2.5K or 3.4K. The reason is because of quantum mechanics the photos you measure arrive irregularly and you can't narrow those error bars until you measure over a longer period.

tl;dr Quantum Mechanics is a reason why stealth in space absolutely can exist.

>>12996272
>A thing cannot be alive AND dead.
well, the problem is that Schrodinger was in fact wrong, the Copenhagen Interpretation stands, and the cat IS both alive and dead. That is, our intuition of the matter is wrong and there needs to be a more rigorous approach.

On the second issue, er, I suppose you're right.

>>12996264
Why would you need to mesh a person that closely to the circuits? Humans make high level decisions, AI fills in the rest.

Human, "yes they bad, weapons free."
AI, "Beginning program rapeface."

>>12996316
how can a cat be both alive and dead

>>12996302
I wasn't thinking of uncertainty in so much as mentioning entanglement. Though the conclusion is the same.

>>12996339
Science!

space distances make resolution and range of vision incredibly limited. Not making yourself a beacon makes this all the better.

Note pictures from, say, the hubble, only pick up STARS. No meteors, no comets, STARS. Even on difference frequencies, this means there can be stealth... You just have to use realistic diatnces (which involves more math than most GMs are willing to give)

>>12996329
First thing to come mind is boredom. Any space involved shit would take forever. A human would age or die in the time scales.

Secondly, and this is purely theory, but, it might help us have a better intuition for the quantum matters. We evolved to swing from one branch to another, and later to hunt in groups. We weren't designed for interstellar travel, and sooner or later, we'll run into the roof of what our evolutionary background can support. Then we'll need machines to help us along.


Man, that sounds very transhumanist. Also completely ignoring genefixing or anything because I don't fully understand it.

>>12996344
Entanglement is poorly misunderstood. Basically you're bouncing two particles of the same mass off each other so that they are coherent in phase and energy.

It doesn't grant you any special powers and any changes in one particle after they've been separated has no effect on the other. The only interesting property is that you can measure one particle and have a decent idea of the properties of the other particle.

>>12996163
If you want to see the closest analogous vehicle to a wartime spacecraft that we have currently - look no further than nuclear submarines.

If you can imagine submarines dogfighting in the air, and the air acts like black ice does to an 18-wheeler...

>>12996025
For once the troll physics has the correct answer.

>>12996339
According to one current theory? In one reality the cat is dead. In the other, it's alive.

Here's how it goes:
Schrodinger wanted to disprove the Copenhagen interpretation of QM with this example: You've got a box with a cat in it. There's a switch, that when pressed, will release an isotope that has a 50% chance of decaying. Should it decay, a Geiger counter will detect it, and release a poison to kill the cat. Because we can't see into the box we don't know whether or not the cat is alive. QM says that the particle exists in two states simultaneously, one of which will cause the toxin to be released. Schrodinger says that therefore, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time, which is intuitively incorrect.

Now, the thing is, he's wrong. (At least for the time being) The particle *does* exist in both forms, hence, in his experiment, the cat is alive and dead at the same time.

>>12996295
That's funny. You're a funny guy.

>>12996339

It CAN'T hence Schroedinger using the cat as a refutation of Copenhagen.

Basically, the universe doesn't (currently) operate under a single set of rules. On our scale, the macro-scale, we can observe a lot of classical and newtonian physics going on and everything functions like it should. On the sub-atomic, quantum scale, stuff is different. A thing can occupy two positions at once, which it can't do on our level of reality. What set of physics you use depends on how closely you're looking at the universe, essentially.

But the problem is that it's impossible to use quantum-level physics on macro-scale objects and vice versa. A sub-atomic particle CAN occupy a superposition of both here AND there, but a cat CAN'T occupt a superposition of alive AND dead. That's why the holy grail of physics is a so-called "Unified Theory" that unifies the different kinds of physics into one, simple explanation for Why Everything Is The Way It Is.

The reason everyone remembers the cat is because a) people like cats and b) the dead/alive dichotomy is one common to everyone. So Schroedinger kind of shoots himself in the foot with the Cat by creating a thought experiment that actually nicely illustrates the point he's refuting.

>>12996389
unless it crosses a known star or there is a way to see the relative gap background radiation.

>>12996388
>If you can imagine submarines dogfighting in the air, and the air acts like black ice does to an 18-wheeler...

Fund it.

>>12996366
Hubble doesn't take pictures of asteroids, etc. because yes. They are too far away. The closest asteroid not in our solar system would be, what, several light years away? Very tiny. Because it's several light years away.

However, check out this picture of Pluto. Pluto is anywhere from 30 to 49 AU from the Sun, which means anywhere from 29 to 50 AU from the Earth, I'm not going to bother figuring out how far it was when they took those pictures because 30 AU is around 4.4 billion kilometers, and even the fanciest Sci-Fi gizmos generally don't zap shit that far.

anyways, if they can't see you, how the hell are you supposed to see them?

>>12996419
>>12996392
The biggest issue with the cat is that it shows just how weak our intuition is. Superposition aside, the actual issue of defining "alive" and "dead" is extremely difficult (current US medical doctrine refers to brain death, particularly lower structures near the basal ganglia as the definition of "death"). It really brings up the fact that our intuition is faliable and that a more rigorous approach is necessary

pic unrelated

>>12996368
>Times too long, humans die
Nope. If you can build up enough speed, time dilation will allow a person to explore the entire galaxy in their own lifetime. And there are other social issues where you don't usually start conflicts with people who are several generations of travel away.

>HURR ITS PURE THERORY
Partially. We have the technology to cool objects far below 3K, and could build an interstellar craft that could reach Alpha Centari in 70 years already. Its mostly that we lack both the will and the need to do so.

Finally, there is low observability in space. The Air Force, NSA and lots of other governments and organizations have satellites they try to conceal. Yes they're findable, but they try all kinds of tricks like changing orbits, keeping solar panels perpendicular to Earth, and pretending they provide television services.

>>12996441
The stars are known and have spaces between them, you can plot the course to coming in a hole with no near stars behind you. You can even vary the cold shield temperature to imitate a very distant star behind you and the target you are heading towards.

Problem?

"There is no stealth in space" is wrong.

It is far more difficult, and several prefered terrestrial methods do not function nearly as well.

But the idea of avoiding detection for a time IS there and remains a possibility.

The question therefore is not "why not, I think it would somehow" but rather "okay, what CAN we use".

For example, all the "you're instantly detected" bits on IR are ALSO assuming sci-fi quality sensors, as opposed to some extremely low-res widefield that you can narrow and improve to get something clear.

Heat has little to absorb it in space, sure. But it could be made so as to radiate mostly away from one's intended facing, and what's left is thus far "dimmer". Sure, you're not invisible, but spotting you could be like noticing a dead black pixel on your old lcd screen while watching a horror movie in a well-lit room.

Certainly possible, but to avoid false alarms even sensors need a threshold, and operators have one too. Otherwise a 3-atom clump of hydrogen reflecting sunlight might set it off, or you might go chasing the dark spots.

Now the thing about space, is its black.
And the thing with grit, is that its also black.

>>12996025
so once you pass the outlying sensor stations, you're fucked

>>12996467
we wont instantly start with hyperfast craft tho

>>12996467
>much cooler than 3K
Like, into the negatives, man.

>>12996450
The defender is much easier to see, because he's on a planet or in orbit around something he deems important. Now planets are big, hot, and have predictable orbits. So all you need to know is where the planet was, and the knowledge could be decades or older and still accurate. You don't even have to look until you're there.

The defender doesn't know when you're arriving, how you're arriving, what you're bringing, or even that you're actually coming.

>>12996498
That's equivalent to saying: "Once you hit us with bullets we know you are killing us and then you are fucked."

Try again.

>>12996523
but what if you're just chillin' in deep space, both of you "stealthin'"

once one of you sees the other, the other should technically be able to see you

>>12995135
OP: missiles ride an exhaust stream of some kind that would make them super fucking obvious to starship sensors (heat emission).

You could have stealth missiles as a sort - missiles that sit until they're close to the enemy ship (relatively speaking, this is space) before waking up and attacking.

>>12996498
Then I'm already close enough to fuck him up. Cover the whole ship in heatshields and it will provide full stealth until you coolant tanks are warmed.

So what this thread has essentially taught me is, spacecraft of the future will be built cheap and disposable, essentially. Suddenly space travel sounds a lot less fun.

>>12996556
no, what I'm saying is that if you're coming in towards a planet from the edge of a solar system, and you point your thing towards the place you're trying to hide from. The people are going to have sensors placed really far away from themselves, at the edges of the system, once you are detected by these, you are no longer hidden.

>>12996565
But space is fucking huge, and there's no real bottlenecks either. You'd have to mine such a huge area, unless you had prior knowledge of where they were going to be, to get a confirmed kill.

>>12996575
that's not how thermodynamics works

>>12996557
Why do I give a shit about you chilling in deep space? You aren't doing anything. If you're heading to attack me, sure that's a problem, but if you're chilaxing, keep on doing it.

>>12996489
No. Actually, they assume our current day sensors. Our passive sensors can cover a large portion of space and can easily pick up minute amounts of heat

>>12996577
You try not to risk the indisposable assets. A bullet is disposable, because I'm willing to spend $0.10 to make you dead. The soldier that I spent $100K on training, equipping, paying, an supporting is not as disposable. But there is shit that I'm willing to risk him and his $400K life insurance policy to achieve.

>>12996579
You don't even try to understand what you read.

Each and every one of those observation posts will get targeted with their own coordinated, undetectable, cold bullet. Once the outer most observation post gets destroyed you know you are getting attacked, but you don't know from where.

>>12996614
Can you tell the difference between a 3K object and a 3.000000000000001K object?


Do you have the resolving power that requires the effective lens diameter of 4AU to get anything more than a point source?

>>12996651
>undetectable

how, exactly, does this work. If it's the same as the image, then each would be detected by a sensor that is not the one they are headed towards, and it would be easy to then extrapolate whence they came

>>12996667
please explain how you are going to go about achieving that difference in temperature

>So you know, university Physics is essentially three years of this discussion among like-minded enthusiasts.

>Done with supercomputers, access to the textbook collections of five continents and thirty languages.

>On four hours sleep a night.

>With no sex.

>You're not going to find the loophole these guys missed.

There is no stealth is space. Seeing something in empty space is way easier than hiding, to the point where stealthing a spaceship is a physical impossibility. Why are we still talking about this?

We'd be better off talking about designing warships that don't need to be stealthy to be successful.

>>12996678
One would assume the chilled shield to be wide enough to give protection from sensors a bit off to a side too.

Are you even trying?

>>12995192
>THERE IS NOTHING THE HEAT CAN BE TRANSMITTED ACROSS SAVE FOR THE OBJECT.
Heat produces electromagnetic radiation. That's why when you heat shit up really hot, it glows. But even at lower temperatures, when your eyes can detect nothing, it is still glowing at longer wavelengths (which is why you can see people using infrared goggles, even though they don't glow in the visible spectrum). So even in an absolute vacuum (which space isn't... and especially not within a solar system where you have solar wind to consider), you would still have a heat signature.

>>12996651
each and everyone? how the butts do you shoot across the solar system without being detected and have it hit something at the same time as you hit something that's on your side of the solar system

>>12996713
those would be pretty darn big shields then, would make for some very obvious distortions in starfields

>>12996699
With active cooling. Its trivially easy to cool something down to 3K. We've achieved colder than 0.0000001K=.1µK in laboratories.

Its quite simple. You have a power source which happens to generate heat, you get the power, and dump the heat in a radiator. You use the electricity to run a cooler which pumps the heat out of the heat shield onto another radiator. You could actually use a single radiator, but its more efficient to have multiple radiators at different temperatures.

tl;dr its an engineering problem, theory and experimental practice is sound.

Who needs stealth, when you have terapedoes?

>>12996725
You don't hit them at the same time.

As long as you hit the outermost detection post in sequence, you can approach them behind the directional cold shield, undetectable.

>>12996791
again, the remaining sensors will detect you from the side

>>12996700
They need to write a book on this. "The University Physics Primer - A Collection of Student Conversations So You Don't Have To"

It would be this ~100 page guide with mostly references to textbooks or specific classes that answers every sci-fi, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. question ever conceived by nerds with straight to-the-point answers. It provides every single layman counterargument ever conceived and shoots them down. It will also cover basic sci-fi memes that every nerd should know. Anytime somebody brings up the topic everyone can just say, "Read the fucking primer".

And it ends with, "Now go have other conversations about new topics or have some sex (sorry we can't provide help there)."

>>12996756
No they don't need to be. With speeds and the warheads in question there is a range after which detection doesn't matter as the target will die anyway.

And after destroying the target, defenses will know in any case, and that won't matter either, as explained before.

THe only way I could think of something approaching stealth in space is to increase your speed to near the speed of light. Because the distance between you and the target can't decrease faster then the speed of light, your effectively limiting your target time to react to your obvious and hideously blueshifted heat.

As for other methods of detecting you, who knows, if things follow the speed of light, i dont see why this wouldnt work.

As for missiles, go read the fucking website again because it accounts for all this bullshit, it dont matter if your tiny or small your lit up in space.

>>12996725
Stagger the rounds so the arrival rate is simultaneous. These rounds are small, cold and relativistic. You might see reflected sunlight if it crosses too close in the inner solar system, so you can't hit everywhere without risking the attack being seen too early.

>>12996830

No, they won't. Draw a picture of the detection post configuration and I will show how they will get destroyed.

>>12996833
I'm sorry, but could you explain yourself a bit more clearly.

>>12996830
You're going to be detected eventually, the point is to remain undetected "long enough."

>>12996859
it's a sphere, like a dyson sphere made of sensors

>>12996891
and of course with more sensor spheres beyond that

>>12996885
yes and the thing that I'm saying that is if you're trying to stealth into a solar system then you are going to be detected once you pass the sensors at the edge of the system

It is still possible to mask heat signatures.

Ex: Polar Bear

They're nearly invisible in the infrared because their hairs trap nearly all of their body heat.
(yes thats fucking awesome)
>>12995271

space is not 0 K. I'm sorry. space is at 3 K. This is a huge difference.

Space is also not a complete vacuum. Hydrogen atoms are dispersed through out space (albeit sparsely).


I'd also argue that given all of the solar activity in space, its nearly impossible to use visual sensors, and would also interfere with any electromagnetic radiation detection (read: all)
This means you rely upon electronic sensors, or polarized cameras. This is an indirect means of detection that can easily be foiled through electronic countermeasures (to disrupt long range sensor detection such as sonar or infrared), or through a polarizing field to fool cameras.

Of course, the engines would have to be off, but its totally possible to mask a heat signature, or to fool heat sensor devices through interference.


Especially because this is in the future.

This thread is five million posts long but did we ever define what the fuck "sensors" a fictional spaceship would even have? You can't hide something or know if you can hide it unless you know how it's being detected.

What's picking up heat signatures? How are they scanning for it? IR telescopes checking for radiation? Are they using radar instead? Can radar be baffled in a vacuum? Will Batman survive the Shenanegan of the Stealth Spaceship? Tune in next time, same bat channel

>>12996855
A cooled craft isn't lit up in space and heat management doesn't need to be steady state. Project Rho is about justifying space battleships which are covered in radiators all glowing cherry red. Simply adding insulation and isolated cooling subsystems fixes 80% of his "Durr, its not possible." examples.

>>12996948
do you understand how insulation works? It's not a magical cloak of heat-invisibility

>>12996917
>>12996903
You destroy the outermost detection sphere first.

You approach a point in sphere perpendicularly with wide enough shield that when the next point in the sphere can detect you, you have enough mass/momentum nuclear payload that any countermeasures won't matter.

(As an aside: More dense detection point configuration you have, the higher tech level it usually implicates on the assaulting side too, meaning effort spent on making a dense detection sphere is technologically equivalent to the effort of making cold bullets with wider cold shields accordingly.)

>>12996891
>>12996903
How many resources are you going to spend on this sensor net? Its a stupid argument that devolves into "infinity+1 more than you".

If you're smart some sensors will survive undetected, however the further out your sensors are the more you need and a lower percentage will be able to detect an attacker. But, maybe the attacker is only visible in a 3° cone, or has the heat capacity to give off "no" emissions for the entire transit through your sensors.

Ever watch ships at night? It sure sucks when they turn off their lights.

>>12997050
Very little. A very small amount of passive sensors can cover the entire circular area around a ship and detect even very small changes in heat, because in the vastness of space, even a tiny discrepancy is gonna cause senors to g o off.

Also there is no way a warship is going to be able to contain it's heat. A Space shuttle, uses the ENTREITY of its body as a radiator to cool its systems. Are you telling me that a battleship, without using radiators the size of a moon, will be able to hold all that heat it? Never

>>12996971
Insulation + Active cooling = Hot parts, cold parts.

I cool the side towards you, insulation lets the rest of my ship get plenty hot to run reactors and life support. If I'm really worried I bolt heat shields all over the thing, shut off the reactors and let those coolant tanks slowly heat up.

>>12997033
If anything the cost benefit is on the attackers side.

It'll be much cheaper to make cooled bullets than to make detection stations with good enough countermeasures that the post wouldn't get taken out with it's dedicated bullet.

Remember, it doesn't matter that the defender knows they are getting attacked when they don't know precisely from where.

>>12997102
You just denied basic thermodynamics. May the gods have pity on you.

>>12997109
You cool the size torward the enmy to 3k. You're gonna need a way to contain all that heat, as well as the continuous running of the heat pumps required to keep that heat flowing, of course the heat pumps themselves create heat.

Your ship will turn to slag

>>12996832
>And it ends with, "Now go have other conversations about new topics or have some sex (sorry we can't provide help there)."

Why the hell didn't they have something like this for when I was in college? I could have saved so much time and maybe gotten laid more.

>>12997136
>HERP DERP
Radiate heat in a cone. Make the cone smaller as needed. Eventually cap the cone when you get close. Yes you will eventually heat up, but it isn't instantaneous. Your hand doesn't burst into flames the moment you pass it through a candle.

"In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. Even that figure gives only a faint idea of the immensity of space. In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world.

"Your race, in its present stage of evolution, cannot face that stupendous challenge. One of my duties has been to protect you from the powers and forces that lie among the stars-beyond anything that you can ever imagine. It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for Man."

"The stars are not for Man."

>>12997050
hi, I'd like to point out that a 3 degree cone in space is huge

thanks for you time

>>12997033
if you're detected beyond the orbit of Neptune then that's ok with me. You're months, maybe even years away.

>>12997050
you cannot give off no heat, and ships at night with lights out are visible with infrared technology

Ok guys here is how space combat will work at current levels of science:

Step one: find the other guy on radar or something neather of you can hide but if your lucky/good you might find them first.

Step two: Fire the Missiles the'll be onbord computer gided and probberly only use there thrusters for initial acceleration and manuvering to stay on target.

Step three: use your sensors to try and detect their missiles and shoot them down.

Most likely conclusion: both die.

>>12997245
Also hiding heat on a planet is MUCH easier than in space, due to the atmosphere and heat already being everywhere. It's harder to pick at things and find what you want.

>>12997245
Oh yeah? What are you going to do with your time?

Remember, you are unable to detect each new incoming attack early enough to defend against it.

Problem: obscure thermal signature in forward direction, lower engine particulate exhaust to near-cryogenic temperatures.

Ambient radiation makes space look to be about 3K hot. (2.7K to be precise).

Radiative emissions can be lowered near to this pretty easily in one direction. We use liquid helium to chill stuff to just under 4K in the lab, and the whole 'earth has an atmosphere touching your shit and heating it up' makes this way harder than it is in space. Stick a big helium cooled shield ahead of your vehicle and fly right at the target and your ship has virtually no thermal signature.
As for your exhaust, choose engine design that can impart high velocity to particles (translational energy) without raising their temperature (vibrational energy). Namely, use a fucking ion drive (as for ways of producing a cold beam of ions to push, google supersonic expansion. Not as easy as a hot source, but still technically feasible). It would be nonideal for speed, but then that's not what we want to optimise here.

The effective range of a large-scale laser weapon allows you to engage at a distance where your vehicle still has an absolutely miniscule angular size. You are now very cold and small compared to the huge numbers of stars visible at any given point in space, even when you have closed to a distance where attack is viable. You are not invisible. But then, neither is any stealth vehicle. You are just very, VERY hard to see before it's too late, even if someone is actively looking for you.

People who say 'NO STEALTH IN SPACE' either have no grasp of the real thermodynamics of space, or have the uninformed idea that 'stealth' means 'totally undetectable, evereverever'.

>>12997326

Ok guys here is how space combat will work at current levels of science:

Step one: Pull up the orbit path of the other guy's planet. calculate how long it would take our missiles to get there and where the planet will be by then. adjust missile flight plan accordingly.

Step two: Fire the Missiles. or, heck. launch kinetic warheads from giant slingshots.

Step three: use your sensors to try and detect their missiles and shoot them down.

Most likely conclusion: both die.

fix'd.

>>12997403

replace the coupler heatsink crap with a helium refrigeration loop and that actually works. Namely because that's exactly how we DO cool stuff to ~3k. The radiators on the system cannot magically radiate 'through' the shield: incident radiation will mostly reflect backward since you weren't dumb enough to not polish the back of your cold shield, and the remainder is absorbed and then just removed again by the refrigerator loop. end result is you are only warm in a cone that you can choose to point away from the target.

Hey guys, what about something like this? You just create a radiator system that vents out the engine exhaust ports for the heat shields, localizing the signature into one, more manageable area.

Bad MSPaint doodle is bad, but is the concept sound for something that wanted to at least try to mask its presence?

>>12997749
So, then what direction are we going to point the heat at?

Are we going to assume the enemy is coming at us in a flat 2d plane and guess a direction?

Or are we gonna do a 3D plane and realize that unless the enemy always comes at one approach vector, you idea is useless without perfect intel.

>lower engine particulate exhaust to near-cryogenic temperatures.

Congratulations, you now have a engine that has all the power of a 1989 ford taurus towing a semi trailer AND will take you years to get anywhere in a solar system AND makes a hummer look like a fuel-efficient hybrid AND if anyone does spot you better hope you have a higher thrust engine onboard because the one you have is going to do combat maneuvers about as well as a cow pumped full of barbiturates.

>>12997764
This isn't going to work. The engines don't have the cross section to radiate heat at any decent rate.

>>12997857

Larger engines then?

Also, I'm curious about the forward heat shield. There are no aerodynamics in space, but for heat masking concerns, should it be concave (as it is), or convex to the fore? Both seem to offer differing advantages.

Also, before anyone asks, I figured the engine exhaust would be blue, assuming some manner of atomic drive, and given that the only visible radiation is bluish.

>>12997879
No. Doesn't work that way.

You need tremendous amounts of area to radiate heat. trying to do that with the engines would requre engines the size of gigantic radiators, which then destroys the point of having the stealth in the first place.

>>12997900

Hm, point taken. I suppose that's what the stern rod is for though as well. It'd be at least as long as the rest of the ship, I'd think.

Maybe the others are right, and you just have to make hot, large, stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb piles of armor if you want to do space combat. Also, you'd need equal weapons coverage from all angles, so a sphere seems to make the most sense in that regard.

>>12997764
You are designing a supposedly hard science warship with a FLYING BRIDGE. That pretty much the picture-next-to-the-textbook-definition of doing it wrong.

Also, your forward shield is only going to hide you from a fairly small section of the sky. Even if this idea were workable it would need to be MUCH MUCH larger.

>>12997780
Short answer: At an angle that it is behind the cool shield (is there a more catchy name for this mechanism?), when looked at by approached observation posts. See post >>12997403


(Targeting first closest observation posts and only after destroying/overwhelming the defense measures target the main goals. Really how many times does this need to be repeated?)

>>12997947

Part of the reason was for crew comfort. That's literally where the people are, to avoid the insane amount of cooling and machinery required to run the heat shields, weapons, and other systems. It seemed to make more sense than packing them into a thermos in the main hull of the ship. It's also a small-ass target, so unless you're an amazing gunner (AI or otherwise) you're not gonna hit that at engagement range anyway.

Yes, it'd make more sense for the crew to be nestled into the main body of the ship. But logistically, how big is this thing, and how much room would it really have?

Trying to be realistic with an answer that looks unrealistic, but made sense at the time.

Yeah, the fore heat shield should be at a larger scale, I agree. The rear ones should extend back farther too, I think.

>>12997918
Nah.

Space combat will never happen in any form seen in comics games and shows. At least not in the forseeable future, but contemplating the future past a couple hundred years is impossible.

No economy can sustain the expenses of upkeeping a space battleship fleet. We can barely keep the ISS running, much less a damn battle worthy ship.

Armor just makes the ship heavier and makes it harder to turn and maneuver, and at a point, will cause the entire thing to rip itself apart.

A solid ding to the main radiators will cause the ship to overheat in minutes and shut itself down.

Also relativistic weapons mean that armor and speed are even less effective.

The best way to do scifi is just to handwave everything. As soon as you try to justify it, it becomes that much harder to believe it as anyone who knows something about space will pick out the billion holes in that justification

>>12997879
'atomic drives' don't emit radiation, blue or otherwise. They use the reactor core to superheat gas which they then shoot out an exhaust nozzle. One problem that a lot of people don't consider is that any warship with a decent engine is going to be sitting on top of a huge plume of superheated gas every time it changes its course, and making your ship IR stealthy isn't going to do anything to hide that.

>>12997962
Also, maneuvering will require maneuvering thrusters. So unless you thought up a way to completely shield them to, as soon as you try to align, you'll light up like a torch in the middle of the night,

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Atomic Rockets/Project Rho, yet.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/

It covers real world space combat in detail, including stealth, heat management and detection. Good stuff for games (even if Attack Vector Tactical pretty much nails realistic 3D space combat.)

>>12997999

Ah, didn't realize that no radiation vented into space at all from them. At least I got the color right if it did.

>>12998012

Most decent thrusters are compressed gas, so really, there would be no more heat signature, but there would be a 'vapor trail' so to speak.

It is almost impossible (not completely depending on opposition) to make an undetectable spacecraft. What you can do very easily, however, is make a spacecraft that LOOKS much _larger_ than it actually is. This makes weapons have difficulty making contact on the actual ship rather than the "image". Depending on the size this could become very effective against most enemy weapons.

As for actually disguising your presence...I'd say that's only going to be effective at long range. It's certainly possible to dampen a lot of the heat, radiation, and light reflection that a ship would give off, such that it would dissipate below detectable levels at a shorter distance.

>>12997999
You forget ranges don't matter either if you can fire undetectable warheads.

There's really no need to make a 'spaceship'. Only the warheads.

>>12997998
>No economy can sustain the expenses of upkeeping a space battleship fleet. We can barely keep the ISS running, much less a damn battle worthy ship.

That's one of the dumbest things I've read on /tg/.

You're seriously comparing the funding given to the ISS to that of a military organization?

Just go to bed.

you can, in fact, conceal yourself from detection in space.

this involves saturating the space around you with lots of "noise" and hiding behind shit. so it's utility is limited.

>>12998059
Yes. We are talking about other planets and technologies not yet discovered, what is he doing bringing contemporary real world issues into this discussion.

>>12998030
Well, I'm not saying that they DON'T all time time. An open-cycle gas core NTR would put out a pretty wicked amount of glowing blue atomic nastiness. It's just that it's a secondary issue to the actual propellant.

compressed gas thrusters are ok for orientating a ship in a new direction, but they are pretty much bottom of the barrel in terms of fuel efficiency. I don't even think the shuttle uses them and it's an outdated relic of 70s aerospace engineering.

>>12998044
Range does matter. It will take your 'undetectable warheads' months to close with my ship, by which point even small course corrections will have have changed my possible so much that they'll all go gliding by into the undetected depths of space.

>>12998059
What argument can you give that any sort of space warfare can be economically feasable?

What about ships that have reaction-less drives, so-called gravity drives? There would be no exhaust plume.

What if you simply radiate heat away from the center of the solar system, where most of the sensors are going to be? You might not elude detection forever, but it would certainly help.

If it detects or tracks things, it can be jammed, spoofed, or manipulated. It's simply a fact of life. Electronic Warfare is just as old as Electronic detection, and the two have been in an arms race since inception. How about I detect you, shine a very high energy IR laser right into your face, how you gonna track my IR signature now, fucker? Your sensors are so overloaded they can't see shit.

>space fighters

>>12998118
>It will take your 'undetectable warheads' months to close with my ship,

That's assumes I'm targeting your ship and not your home planet/moonbase.

Why should I care about your ship?

>>12998149
>The shortest distance between two points is zero. And that's what the gateway does-- it folds space so that Point A and Point B coexist in the same space and time. When the spacecraft passes through the gateway, space returns to normal. It's called a gravity drive.

You know, I had a thought.

I wonder if maybe the opposite notion of 'stealth in space' is the real direction to go: make your ship run as externally hot as possible. Instead of heat shields masking IR, make them heat sinks instead. Make yourself look like some kind of fireball or small star, at least at a distance. Use vented hot gasses from engines to maneuver. Make all the flat surfaces of the ship solar panels that gather energy but also reflect other radiation at many vectors. It'd be confusing to see what amounts to a moving astrological phenomenon, or many of them. I dunno, it might work. Or at least it might make their weapons systems have difficulty hitting you, if you make your signature oblong or otherwise unsymmetrical. It'd be hard to get solid hits then.

>That's assumes I'm targeting your ship and not your home planet/moonbase.

Bases in planetary bodies have the advantage of being able to pile of pile of more armor than any spaceship would ever dream of carrying. Right now NORAD is built to withstand a direct hit from a multi-megaton nuke. This can easily be improved if it had to be. Just how big of a stealth bullet are you planning on using? Because anything that big enough to cause problems from something that hardened is going to be very expensive to cover in radar-stealth paint, and is going to need a whole lot of very visible engine pushing to get it moving in the first place. And will probably be big enough to pick up with optical telescopes.

...Or you could aim for less-hardened (i.e. civilian) targets, in which case you're a huge dick and you're probably going to get dog piled by every other major power once you get found out.

>What about ships that have reaction-less drives, so-called gravity drives? There would be no exhaust plume.
They also kind of rape and murder relativity as we understand it, but yes, that would solve the exhaust plume problem.

>What if you simply radiate heat away from the center of the solar system, where most of the sensors are going to be?
There's no assurance of this. You could have 10 sensor platforms in the inner solar system, or you could have 20 out in the Oort cloud doing the same job for only twice the cost.

>If it detects or tracks things, it can be jammed, spoofed, or manipulated. It's simply a fact of life.
Modern EW gets a lot harder when you try hiding in an empty room.

OMG! None of you. And I really do mean this, not a single person in this thread has ever been laid. And from the looks of it never will. No one should be able to argue this subject this well.

>>12995135
>no stealth
>in space

Are you fucking retarded? Anyone who claims that you cannot stealth in space is talking out of his ass. Its only a matter of hiding heat/radiation/ and transmissions

>inb4 a whole bunch of BUT YOU SEE post without logical basis

>>12998330
Hey now! Some girls like smart guys. The ladies I know LOVE IT when I talk science to them. Trashy sluts, not so much. Then again, you are accusing /tg/ of sexual inexperience, which is like telling the ocean it should be ashamed of being wet. It's nothing we haven't heard before, and if it actually upset any of us, we'd all be /r9k/ bitching about bitches. But we're not, because we like talking about science a lot more.

>>12998365
Well, when you put it like that, I'm sure anyone would be able to do it! The complications of design and thermodynamics are as nothing to a man with willpower!
(I think you're a bit late to the thread bro)

>>12998326
Isn't this empty room super big, and doesn't have a floor or roof, in which the thing your finding could be behind and below you, and so far away that he could look like a tiny speck? Oh, and isn't this room filled with tons of shit, that looks like tiny specks as well? Both of you are armed with rifles that can shoot infinitely far, but only have one shot. You've been standing still since the beginning of the fight.

you idiots its easy to hide in space on passive scanners, because it is so big. any ships going to be far away enough that its radiation might not even appear to push sensors above background unless the ship is already close.

there's a lot of space in space. its why it's called space.

you just have to find the right patch to hide in.

Yeah, lightspeed missiles is the way to go. For more inspiration, read "The Variable Man".

http://librivox.org/the-variable-man-by-philip-k-dick/

>>12998311
Idea behind bullets as opposed to missiles is that you don't carry the engine with you. The bullets are fired beyond detection range/behind planetoids.

And yes, with all the other problems visited in this thread, big enough nukes to take out NORAD and most everything including the detection posts in the OORT cloud was implied from the start. Making those defenses will be much much more expensive than making those cooled nuclear bullets.

Incidentally, /tg/ might find this interesting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk

>>12998365
Awesome. Ignore the entire thread.

>>12996316
>>12996392
I don't know if you realize the gravity of the conclusion you (or whoever you are arguing as by proxy) are accepting. Rejection of the law of non-contradiction is a gigantic headache for logical thinking in general. Not saying you should definitely never do it, but the copenhagen interpretation seems to be more controversial than the LNC (and so we should not reject the LNC merely on the basis of it). You would probably be better off saying the cat is neither alive nor dead (rejecting the law of the excluded middle) though I could be wrong, I don't know quantum logic very well.

Also, you are question begging against schroedinger.

>>12996454
Shroedinger's cat has absolutely nothing to do with the vagueness of the concept of death. Even a perfectly specified concept would have the identical problem. Change the poison to a gun, and say "the gun fired or it didn't." That is perfectly specifiable and has the same problem.

>>12996025

>Accidentally occlude a star, the sun or a gas giant.

>Get shredded by a zillion lazor cannons, particle guns and mass drivers.

>cooled bullets

>implying that even the most primitive automated detection grid would not see the resulting "muzzle flash" from actually firing your weapons and instantly pinpoint your location

you know that heat shield thing when you project the heat behind you is somehow convincing... but still I know it's somehow wrong but don't know why. If stealth would be that easy then somebody would tought about it.
So are you SURE that the heat can be only discoverd from certeanly position, or the catch is that you only got away with heat and there is a thousand more sensor types that still can see you?

Well isn't the problem with the whole heat shielding thing was that when the spacecraft stealthed it would heat up and kill its passengers? Couldn't you build the missile for handling high heat, launch it out blind because its stealthed and after certain amount of time passes have the missile unstealth, find its bearings and accelerate as much as it can towards the nearest starship source? I can see stealth missiles made but not stealth starships, at least not any that last for an appreciable amount of time.

>>13001195

It's stated in lot of scientific forums and pages that stealth cannot be achived by any means. Period. So I think this means you can't do real stealth missles.
And a missle will heat up to for two reason. One is the targeting system the other is the sun.

http://www.eclipsephase.com/get-your-stealth-or-how-can-my-firewall-team-sneak-enemy-habitat

There is stealth in space, but it's hard and doesn't work very well.

>>13001215
The key isn't to make a missile that'll survive indefinitely. I'm saying rig a missile to survive just long enough.

>>13001215
You can have stealth "missiles".

I use quotes because tactically they'd be more like land mines. They're out, floating around, indistinguishable from other space-junk (possibly *actually* disguised as asteroids depending on sensor level) until you're within a few tens of thousands of kilometers at which point they drop the disguise and try to blow up the target.

They can be seen at that point, but HOLY SHIT IT'S A TENTH OF A LIGHT SECOND AWAY--

Here is a better example of a stealthship. Its capable of indefinite operation while the radiator shutter is open, and will run off the coolant tanks while sealed for maximum stealth.

If you're already raping physics with FTL, you might as well throw space into the mix.

Have battles in subspace full of RF noise or distort space-time around the ship or be able to phase out to a pocket dimension or something.

>>13001384
Now that's just silly. Stealth or more correctly "low observability" is possible with known physics, so suck on that.

FTL already gives you easy stealth because you arrive before your photons do. So its completely undetectable unless there is some effect that the FTL physics that is detectable. As the nature of FTL is unknown, this cannot be answered. But if you have FTL be as hot an noisy as you want because you're faster than your emissions.

>>13001358
You want stealth?

Shoot a laser from one end of the Milky Way to another ship on the other hand of the Milky Way.

Idiot.

The only way to get stealth in space, is by hiding in the background radiation. Too bad, that distance is so big, your enemy will be in the background radiation too, so you can't shoot them.

>>13001414
>>13001414
If you have FTL, it's easier to grab a cargo ship and start flinging relavistic kinetic killer rocks around targeted at your enemy...

Cheaper than developing a stealth warship which weapons can't even stop a relavistic kinetic kill device.

>>13001358 Here is a better example of a stealthship

I assume that's supposed to be troll physics based, yes?

>>13001462
I hope this is a trollpost. Lasers are only effective out to a few light-minutes. Further if the target is unable to maneuver.

>>13001510
Shit works, bro.

Maybe the key to not being caught by the enemy in space is not stealth, but jamming and decoys? Just drop some really hot buoys or newly cooked stew or something out into space and that could work? A bit of backwards logic here, but I think the best way to not be caught in space is to be really damn loud- confusingly loud.

>>13001358
You're not getting exactly how big the radiators have to be.

Dumping heat by radiation is extremely inefficient.

Also, how is that thing going to manuever? At the moment, it can only travel in a straight line.

>>13001520
Of course it's a trollpost.

But his point still stands. Only stealth is hiding in the background radiation.

Except that automatically means your enemy is the background radiation too, so you both can't see each other.

There's no stealth in space so long as you're someone who's never looked at space through a IR telescope. "space" is cold, the background on the other hand is hot.

Someone who just slaps radiators all over the ship so that it's easy to detect from every possible angle will be found days/months/years before someone who makes sure the ship can be detected /easily/ from a very narrow angle.

>>13001534
The size of the radiator depends upon the heat that you need to dump and how hot the radiator is. If you make the radiator a little hotter you can make the radiator a lot smaller.

So, make the reactor radiator hot, you lose some power efficiency, but you make the radiator a lot smaller. Use separate, cooler radiators for the heat shield and other parts of the ship to make your active cooling system work more efficiently. The radiator is smaller because you don't have to dump as much heat.

Seriously, just do the math. Radiators don't need to be 90% of a ships mass.

>>13000261
>>13000340
Read the fucking thread, retards.

>>12995135
I'm pretty much convinced that no stealth in space may be debunked as hard as Heavier than Air aircraft will never exist or Men's internal organs will liquefy when going over 50mph

I guess it doesn't look THAT bad. Certainly not a Star Destroyer, though.

Well...You can shoot the thing out of a railcannon. Depending on how much omph you gave it, you could zip a solid slug up to murderous speed. Because it's nothing more than a piece of metal, the enemy isn't going to pick up emissions.

There are a few caveats, though.

First, you need to chill the round down as much as possible.A quick burst of CO2 would chill it to unnoticable levels.

Second, you need to keep the high voltage from heating up the round. A Sabot would do.

Third, Assume the ship is moving unpredictably, A Slid slug can't mount a guidance system.Therefore, I recommend turning this rail cannon into a rail Shot cannon. This sweeps a large volume of space with high velocity projectiles the enemy has trouble seeing to begin with. In order to disperse the shot, use a burst of gas, it won't add heat to the shot.

>>13001595
>Sabot

Which will exit the barrel with the round, at the exact same speed. How does this help?

>>13001552
Where are your scientific papers?

Because I think you're talking bullshit.

>>13001532
The problem is making a decoy that is convincing. If it doesn't move right, isn't the right size or produces the wrong spread of frequencies in it's emissions then weapons can be programmed to ignore them.

>>13001610
Clearly you do not know how sabots work.

>>13001621
Exactly.

If you want decoys to work, you need multiple versions of the same ship, preferably filled with clone versions of the original crew.

For all you jokers saying you can't accelerate with a ship with cooled engines, the solution is obvious. Find two heavenly bodies that aren't being monitored with enough mass to slingshot around repeatedly to build up your speed, then head off towards your target at a decent fraction of lightspeed while still remaining cool. Ensure there's a suitable object to slingshot round if you want to go back home after.

>>13001586
Not bad, I've doodled on your picture and have a few comments.

You don't gain much if you have two radiators facing each other, they'll end up radiating on each other. You could rotate the radiators or use a different setup. With your design you're going to end up with less than a hemisphere of protection, but while you're far away that will be enough.

>>12995339
oh I think Mass Effect Feilds are a bit more realistic than ripping a hole into hell

>>13001617
Where are your scientific papers saying that stealth is impossible?

Please note that trying to detect an object the size of the space shuttle (37m x 18m x 20m) at a distance of mars (230million km) requires a sensor which resolves at 6.3x10^-93 degrees. To detect "instantly" would require sorting through 4 x10^8,931 bits of data. Which would require 520 trillion Tianhe-1A systems, the current most powerful computer on earth.

DETECTION IS NOT A TRIVIAL PROBLEM FROM AN ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVE, STOP THINKING THAT IT IS.

>>13001621
Shine your radiator on missile as it gets close with the force of a thousand suns. Drop flare, turn heat shield to target to go dark and thrust out of the way. Ion thrusters and mass drivers have no detectable exhaust plume.

>>13001629
Then you should explain it to me. I'm eager to learn.

>>13001636
The crew will die of old age before the war finishes.

>>13001641
Thanks for the input. What do you think would be the best armament for a vessel like this?

>>13001632
No, you just need to have smaller ships that can make their engines less efficient. Yesh, It's like thruster tech is some sort of holy lost tech that nobody dares to mess with. If the thruster runs so hot that you can't mimic it, then perhaps your choice of propulsion is unwise and you should scale back the output.

>>13001610
Pack the Sabot with a container of highly pressurized gas. After launch, pop the container and the expanding gas will both cool and scatter the shot.

>>13001667
Not when they're travelling RELATAVISTICALLY!

But seriously, while they're in the boost phase they can be towed or something. As long as you do the majority of the acceleration outside the sensor net you're fine. The planetary bodies being there to fuck up long range sensor activity on their side as well is just a bonus to offset the hotness of your craft while it's accelerating.

>>13001667
>crew

>>13001621
>>13001632
Decoys don't have to be convincing. They just have to force the detector to spend more resources processing data, separating viable targets from the background noise, then there is available.

>>13001661
If the technique you described worked the next generation of missiles would use active radar or lidar for terminal guidance.

>>13001667
>>13001681
>>13001684
Good point. A missile bus would be easier to do.

>>13001672
Doesn't really matter. If you launch missiles try to make sure they're cool and don't have them thrust until they drift a ways from your ship.

As always an unmanned drone is a good weapon. Launch missile drone with own stealth system, it gets closer than you go, then launches missiles with nuclear pumped lasers or worse.

>>13001684
...I am going to laugh so hard when you meet an opponent that is more EW savy then you are

>>13001692
Dispersing radar is trivially easy. And what happens if I throw up a huge aluminum coated mylar sheet in front of your missile? You can't see my ship by any means now.

>>13001969

you mean appart that i can SEE it?

>>13002021
Yes, you know the target is in a cloud of chaff. However, unless you know exactly where he is in the chaff, you can only saturate the cloud with fire and hope that you're actually hitting him.

>>13001585
No. Aerodynamics wasn't understood well back then so of course they had trouble with planes. We have at least 50 years of space experience, and an entire Cold war that looked toward space to weaponize..

We know how space works.

>>13001656
They're both equally dumb technobabble.

At least they barely try and justify warp travel by saying "Warp Magic" Mass Effect fields was just a dumb attempt at justification.

>>12995202

As far as weapons, just defeat it with shit moving at relativistic velocities, where by the time you detect it, it's already punching through your hull.

>>13002160
>We have at least 50 years of space experience, and an entire Cold war that looked toward space to weaponize.

Cold war doesn't apply at all, silly.

Cold war was different from our scenario where the weapon launch happens beyond detection range/behind planetoids.

With Earth launches there is no way to hide the launch to orbit and cooling down the launched payload in orbit doesn't help anything as the position can be calculated accurately with mathematics even if you didn't detect the payload and any trajectory changes would again be detectable.

Also, stealth geometries didn't exist 50 years ago.

>>12995782
Missles have a nigh infinite amount of gas and also track your last known position due to inertia. You vent heat, missle picks up detection, you are dead.


Interplanetary missle systems, most likely kinetic/thermonuclear are whats actually going to happen.

>>12995932

The minute differences in your heat and the nukes will be easily detectable. Also, thats uneffcient as fuck. Also, IR/Radar tracking. Also, heat of thermonuclear dissipates instantaneously due to nigh-vacum and absolute zero, thus making it remotely viable for about 3 seconds. Which, in a battle spanning millions of miles away, is about .3 milliseconds in "real time"