Re: Slow Stealth

On Feb 23, 7:41 pm, IsaacKuo <mech...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 23, 4:59 pm, "dwight.thi...@xxxxxxxxx"

<dwight.thi...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Feb 23, 3:42 pm, Luke Campbell <lwc...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Now the bit about keeping the radiators edge on to your observer is
clever, but as others have noted it is not particularly effective
assuming a civilization with an extensive presence in space. And if
they don't have an extensive presence in space while you are capable
of moving asteroids, you probably out-class them so badly that there
is no need to be stealthy.
I imagine this is a game where people try to keep tabs on everyone
else's sensors. They themselves radiate, after all, more-so if they
have maneuvering capability. If not, keep track of the ships that
might place them in strategic orbits.

Knowing where the sensors are doesn't automatically give you
the magical ability to have them conveniently all lined up in a
plane so you can "hide" a radiator edge on with all of them
simultaneously.

You can design a radiator to radiate into a cone a bit narrower
than an entire hemisphere, but it is HARD to get a radiator to
radiate into a small cone. The basic design would be a large
actively cooled polished parabolic mirror reflecting light from
a small hot blackbody radiator. Unfortunately, some light
will be absorbed by the mirror, which is why it must be actively
cooled. You're going to be consuming a lot of energy pumping
heat from this large 3K mirror into the small hot radiator.
And that energy consumed adds to the waste heat generated.

What is this HARD you speak of? Some numbers, please? In fact, an
arrangement that covers 1% of the sky or less should be assumed to be
doable. Assume the mirror is 99.99% reflective. You seem to want to
imply that in doing this calculation the sums converge slowly, but I
don't see you showing your reasoning as to why this is so.

Also, no matter how far-flung
your net is, it can easily be foiled by maneuvering outside the convex
hull formed by the individual units.

This depends on how patient you are. It could take decades to
get outside the network if you use a highly visible drive to get
outside the net quickly (and thus it's something suspicious to
the enemy). Or if you lob the thing slowly with something like
a planetary mass driver, it could take centuries to get outside
the network.

Again, you're assuming stuff without using any numbers. But so what?
Why shouldn't these sorts of manuveurings take decades?

This assumes it's even possible to get outside the sensor
net at all. The easiest way to launch the sensor drones is
to just send them out with just enough fuel to accelerate
outward. No deceleration burn when reaching a particular
desired radius from the Sun. Thus, the sensor network just
continuously gets bigger and bigger. Instead of wasting
resources on deceleration burns, you simply periodically
launch more sensor drones to "replace" the ones that get
too far out to be particularly useful.

But, uh, if you're doing that, aren't you kinda showing where those
sensors are? The rules are most definitely, 'assume sensors can
always be perfectly stealthed and never found, while spaceships have
to obey the laws of physics.'

Essentially, the older less sophisticated sensor drones
naturally retire themselves by cruising off into interstellar
space. As an incidental side benefit, they can scan around
interstellar space, which may be interesting on a scientific
level even if there's no significant military threat out there.
The Oort cloud is huge and retired sensor drones could
usefully do good science with a flyby. There may even
be huge Earth sized ice worlds out there in interstellar
space:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7249884.stm

Isaac Kuo

Perhaps. But it doesn't detract from the fact that the paradigm is
that stealth is an active campaign, for _all_ components. Assuming
otherwise, or assuming more passivity is simply not realistic.

.