SPACE #2

That was so cool in Turn A

Uhh. Space is yuuge. You don't even need to be actively hiding. There's so much space to cover that you can rely on probability to remain undetected. I mean, they still can't find the MH370.

Build a traditional spaceship with fully retractable radiators and massive heat sinks. Encase it in a second hull with a few microns of vacuum between them to prevent heat bleed into the outer hull. You need retractable panels in the outer hull for quickly switching between heat bleed and stealth.

The outer hull is also made of a material able to emulate the starfield on the other side of the ship. It constantly shifts to project the image of the starfield which it's blocking, lowering (but not completely preventing) detection by occlusion.

This addresses the need to hide your heat signature and physical presence, but that leaves your engine, and it's basically impossible to disguise the energy from your engines. When the first shuttle took off the energy of its engines in low earth orbit could be detected by the Voyager probe, which means it's basically impossible to hide your theoretically more powerful engines from theoretically more sensitive detectors. My only thought: Barrel into the system at full speed, bleeding all the heat you can, lit up like a beacon, then retract the radiators, close and encase the stealth hull, and use some kind of 0 kelvin gas thrusters to randomize your trajectory while you cruise on inertia. The enemy will know you're in the system, but they won't know where, and their predictive software will be useless. However, a network of observation satellites will eventually pick you out due to the tiny errors in the occlusion hull when viewed from multiple directions simultaneously.

It only takes a few hours to completely sweep a sphere around you with passive sensors, which will reasonably easily pick up a thermal signature several hundred K above the near zero K background.

A few hours is not enough time for any meaningful warship action in space-travel context.

You're going to need more than one vacuum hull to hide the energy signature of a spaceship, especially one that has life support. If you had a probe with extremely energy efficient systems you could probably get away with one or two vacuum hulls. In addition, eventually your heat will escape and your outermost hull will heat up past the background to be detected. If you were to go full "silent running", even with a probe, you'd basically have to shut down every system and only provide power to a timer that says when to turn the ship back on again.

Go to Project Rho.

Shutting off the engine combined with sensor absorbing or scattering materials and shape..

If you're using that method you'd do better with a drectional heat shield. Hiding your emissions in a single arc is a lot easier.

Might work on Earth, be obvious af in the cold vacuum of space.
Fair point. A series of vacuum hulls, then. There's a limitation to the time which you can 'run silent run deep' but it's no different from submarines in the modern day in that one regard. If you have powerful engines which allow you to gain enough delta-v before you go dark you might be able to complete your objective before you're detected, but it'd be a hell of an uncomfortable ride, and one prone to end violently at any second.

I suggest we all read this:

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php

Before we start brainstorming reasons why they're wrong and unusually pessimistic

Since Misty stealth satellites are a thing and the Canae drive/EM drive/whateve-its-name-is keeps refusing to fail all tests it's subjected to, behold my over 9000 hours in Photoshop concept of a stealth space battleship.

Directional heat shielding is absolutely useless, to be honest family member. For the cost of building one spaceship you could flood your system with cheap detection satellites and cover every possible angle into which you'd bleed heat.

i did forget about UV gamma and Xray lasers in my post those are probs the best options for the future

> We hit more than 80% efficiency before 2010 and one can wonder what's in test labs these days

post link... I WANT TO BELIEVE.

>For an ultraviolet laser, you probably can give a try at a few light-seconds range as long as you have the power to shoot the laser long enough/often enough to saturate the target area to an acceptable probability.

Trying to hit something with a few seconds of light lag would be near impossible... even if you were sucking off leprechauns snorting fairy dust and have the computer power needed to do it within a few milliseconds... it would be a fluke, and you still need a lot of power to make it work like that... and oh boy that comes with a price tag would it be actually worth it?

> You could make nuclear pump gamma-ray lasers with an effective range before loosing coherency of half the solar system

yeah that's true actually but that's not a ship based weapon, that is a bomb pumped laser.. a missile of sorts.. look up project Excalibur that's where the original idea came from.

> you're sure as shit to have infinitely superior problems with saturating the area with solid ammunition.

At long distances yeah they would, they suffer at range because its kinda easy to dodge but they could be used as area denial weapons. Even then you could have a nuclear missile act as a flying space shot gun which would be pretty awesome. Or a missile version of project casaba howitzer ( nuclear shaped charge or self forging projectile )
would have speeds up to 4% of c

I think its project Prometheus that uses a plate that fractures into tiny bits travelling 100km/s ( but it was orginally designed as a defense against vast missile salvos )
also not ship based weapons...

i think ship to ship would be a lot like chess.. as in no one will go into range and shoot until there's a good chance of actually winning the fight

>implying I didn't pour over that website before posting
Look, there are ways of achieving 'stealth in space' but they're so flipping demanding that, for the cost of doing so, you might as well just build fifty normal spaceships and play the numbers game.

But practicality wasn't in OP's brief.

I'll try to find the source for my 80% claim, but until then i swear to all the space gods I did read a perfectly credible paper for that. If i remember properly DARPA seemed to have placed the program under a heavy lid after that.

Where would we most likely build it?

proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=1297336

Not exactly how I remembered it, but
>We present progress towards the 80% power conversion efficiency goal of the DARPA Super High Efficiency Diode Sources (SHEDS) program. Currently using JDSU SHEDS technology, laser bars and stacks respectively achieve as high as 76% and 73% total power conversion efficiency at room temperature.

In a document from 2007. We're 10 years later. Still, the old chemical lasers with 30% efficiency at the very best are most certainly irrelevant when it comes to nearish-future space weapons.

Off the top of my head? Pacific Ocean or the central Eurasian steppe

Somewhere tectonic and ecologically stable like western Australia I imagine.

good stuff, thanks user, I was of the understanding that solid states were outdated by Free Electron Lasers?

I'm going to have a look into this

You could run it across the Nullabor, I suppose. You wouldn't want to put it anywhere near a cyclone.

Those satellites have to be positioned far from the main enemy fleet for that to work, which means you can locate and destroy them while staying outside the enemy's weapon range.

So I'm just taking a shot in the dark here, and I know there are probably vastly superior ideas, but mine is a bit outside-the-box perhaps:
What if you made your ship appear to be an asteroid?
Like, take all of the good ideas in this thread, like trying to hide heat, and disguise it all in a package that looks like an asteroid. Hell, you could actually use real asteroid materials to thoroughly coat your ship, potentially adding ablative armor and other benefits I can't think of at the moment. Put in some retractable panels so that your windows/antenna/thrusters etc can be exposed when need be, but otherwise stay in rock formation, especially when you know the enemy is looking for you. Sure you'd lose some maneuverability, but when your enemy is looking for a needle in a haystack, isn't it better to disguise yourself as a piece of hay?

Seriously you only need to deploy a few dozen an AU or two either side of the system plane and they'll pick up any heat bleed days before you can get at even one of them. And while you're jigging about the system trying to catch them all, your opponent will close and destroy you.

Seems like it would work for the first few times, then people would know to look for them.

-A thin coating of "asteroid-looking paintjob" over a normal spaceship would be utterly useless,, we're not talking giving a look at a close range asteroids, the only thing that would pretty much matter is visual albedo matching IR emission and possibly Radar reflection. I'd very much rather have full spectrum Vantablack-like material or at least as large as possible spectrum stealth features and deployable radiator panels. No matter how useless stealth is said to be in space, some kind of features will likely be implemented because every little bit of delay in proper identification or efficient targetting needed for an actual weapon solution will help.

-Asteroids have very predictible orbits, large asteroids are either already known on predictible orbits or coming for the first time from deep solar system, which doesn't leave a lot of innocent-looking trajectories

A good idea, except most asteroids are dead fucking cold. If you aren't radiating heat, you're cooking your crew by bottling it up, or your crew are all dead since the life support is off.

Oh, i forgot, no matter how much heat sink mass you have, you're just delaying the innnevitable and you will radiate sooner or later.

At that distance their data is at least fifteen minutes out of date by the time anyone looks at it. They can say you're somewhere over there but 'over there' doesn't aim a laser cannon.

I'm going to stretch the scenario a bit here, but a hard science setting I've been on and off brainstorming is a Jovian system with an immense ring system. Only in a planetary ring system like that would you see asteroids as densely packed as the field in Empire Strikes Back (or even more dense), so I think it would potentially be viable to have smuggler ships darting around and behind the sheer amount of cover there. The lower delta-V requirements to get about between the Jovian moons (where major settlements are largely based) make this somewhat more economically as well as physically viable, too.

Really, Jovian systems solve so many of the problems that hard sci fi raises that I'm surprised they aren't used more often. This isn't a full solution to stealth in space, but it's better than pretty much anything else I've come across.

Why not put your heat emitter in a very deep well, so only a faint amount of heat gets shot out into space where it's only detected if you're in a 5 degree radius in the aft of the ship?

It's inefficient as fuck and you'd need to cool the lip of the well so that that's not picked up, but you'd be able to vent SOME heat without being noticed.

>with no limit to how much this method can effect the ships performance or tactical usefulness
That would be being abscent then

btw, anyone knows if the glorious motherfucker behind this ever came back with a more complete version? Or a compendium of all the awesome alien races in his setting his players met?

I ran a years long hardish-SF campaign, highly inspired from revelatioin Space, and used a super jovian in the goldilocks zone of its sun with tens of moons and hundreds of habitats in orbit as the focus of some arcs, sure comes handy.

It could work as long as your active cooling of the parts toward the ennemy doesn't add more heat that what you can radiate in the directions you allow it, and I don't know if thermodynamics allow you or not that sort of efficiency. I'm tempted to say yes, within limits, but someone smarter than both of us might come and crush our dream, here.

One potential problem is that as space isn't empty, the heat will hit the various bits of hydrogen in space and heat it up. Over a certain amount of energy dispersed and the hydrogen will show up on scans.

Not so much of a problem for things with large surfaces to radiate heat off, but this is firing like a laser here, so it's going to heat up things disproportionately.

>as long as your active cooling of the parts toward the ennemy doesn't add more heat that what you can radiate in the directions you allow it

It probably would, as the damn things are so inefficient, but it's better than having to keep ALL your heat building up. The best way is to aim it at the nearest planetoid or whatnot so it stops as soon as possible.

He did a neat storytime a couple months ago that I screencapped, but my usual computer is at the repair shop.

The two main ones were the beetles that accidentally evolved into a self-propagating analogue computer intelligence distributed over an entire moon, and the Eaters of Cold Photons, who were crazy giant rings in space sustaining cold fusion in the centre, and tried to wipe out humanity with an RKV to prevent the nascent spacefaring civilization becoming a threat.

Because on a spacecraft EVERYTHING is a heat emitter. Anything with a temperature will be spotted. If your spacecraft obeys the laws of physics it has a temperature. The only way you can fool sensors is to get your temperatures low enough that your ship gets mistaken for background noise.

Just because your engines light up your signature like a Christmas light doesn't also means that just existing doesn't make you noticeable as well.

Imagine you're in a crowd of people, all of them wearing black hoodies, and the only clothing options available to you are completely transparent. You want to get through the crowd and to your destination without anyone knowing you're wearing transparent clothes. You can put on as many layers of transparent clothes you like, to try and cover yourself, but eventually you'll get weighed down in the many layers of clothing that you'll collapse before getting to your destination.

This is stealth in space.

Ah, then the Eater of Cold Protons went to new shenanigans since last time I heard of the thing. I need to lurk Veeky Forums space threads more.

>So few pictures
What's wrong with you, guys?

SPAACEEEE

We literally just had a spaceship pictures thread, this one is more discussioncore.

spaace...

I've been wondering if you can make like a separate screen mounted off the ship's hull and kept cool. If course this would only work towards the direction the screen is facing and for example ship exhaust would still get detection. For for carefully planned missions of, say, fly by spying where the probably location enemy sensors is known, maybe? Like there's a planet you want to spy, you send on of these and try to keep the screen always pointing at the enemy, only making small corrections to your angle and gathering as much data as you can as you zip past them or make a quick orbit around them.

Unless you're in a hostile "shoot everything that moves" war, the enemy probably isn't actively looking for you and even if small bits do get detected, they might not mean they know exactly what they're looking at, and if you get fully detected, well, it's not like most nations just fire missiles at anything violating their space... space the moment it's detected, so you likely have time to fire up your engines and get out of there.

So, what weapons would an average battle ship carry? If we don't go full hard sci fi but not space opera either. Something plausible.

This is very relevant to you, user.

fas.org/spp/military/program/track/stealth.pdf

You literally have to do it the Yamato way. A spaceship that can lurk in a higher dimension.

youtu.be/46Q17tTswnE

In a setting with FTL you can also lurk near hotspots to cover your trail until you activate your rockets if you want to ambush people warping in.

An important question though is: Why stealth? It won't make space any more interesting. Now space goes from "a very empty place with some ships" to "a very empty place where you can't see anything". It gets less exciting.

>submarine vs. destroyer
>uninteresting

How can a person on the internet have such shit taste?

Just make something like a sideways tie fighter that can dissipate all heat in one direction, away from enemy positions.

Lasers, assuming efficiency is good enough to be shooty, which seems to be a very plausible case Since an exhaust plume would be visible as all hell, the further away a missile is launched, the more time lasers have to soft-kill "cook", or even hard-kill it when it comes closer, to the point of the missile cannot carry enough reaction mass to maintain evasive maneuvers and course correction for the whole flight and will always be eventualy defeated, either being cooked, zapped or neutralized by lack of fuel. Ence laser armed ships actually have the superior range over missiles armed ones. Even with a theoretical soft kill range of let's say 1 light seconds and hard kill range of 1/3 light seconds, it leaves you contless time to engage incoming projectiles at much lower speed and turn your attention to their carrier. The bigger the range, the bigger the ship and its power generation, the more lasers make sense.

However at close-ish range, swarms of missiles with ablative protection might be able to close the gap and hurt a whole lot. But once shot it's expended. It would be the weapon of surprise attacks, ships of smaller size, underdogs and orbital combat. Besides, i'd say always practical missiles with directed energy warheads are easier to make than the high grade necessary free electron or solid state lasers.

Railguns and other kinetic weapons are not as interesting because there is no practical way at that point to have them without a whole lot of waste heat.

Btw I should have added a big ass disclaimer saying that someone could write something that would seem just as reasonable and say exactly the opposite. Nobody fucking knows, really.

see my earlier post >Besides, i'd say always practical missiles with directed energy warheads are easier to make than the high grade necessary free electron or solid state lasers.
I agree buuuuuttt it really depends on the cost of these missiles per unit.. a laser that performs the way you are describing here
> Even with a theoretical soft kill range of let's say 1 light seconds and hard kill range of 1/3 light seconds
this sounds more like the main laser weapon of a big ship ( expensive as hell ) rather than point defense.. point defense would only need a range of 1000-2000 kms to be effective (if the missiles are slow and soft heat killing is rather easy) heavy armored fast moving orion based kinetic missiles or KKVs that detonate outside your "kill zones" will seriously ruin your day, there will be too much shit to shoot... and your big lasers will over heat. use of small drones that operate like PD lasers would make it much harder for Kinetics to get through your layered defense.

i do agree with this
> The bigger the range, the bigger the ship and its power generation, the more lasers make sense.

railguns definitely have their place though, such as short range point defense or small ship killing ( drones, planet based fighters etc ) or just area denial. Plus kinetic damage is much more effective at fucking things up.

>the titan long shlong class BB

larger one mate. Source is ergrassa on deviantart, though he didn't do anything noteworthy in a couple of years.

i think i have heaps of his stuff saved somewhere

>2900mm railgun
that recoil tho

its a poor mans reverse gear

cmon senpai step it up

probs just as small

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SPAAACEE

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That image screams Homeworld.

Unless you have ridiculous magic-handwave drives a fifteen minute won't affect targeting significantly since a reaction-drive ship cannot afford to continuously maneuver, and can't maneuver significantly at all and still maintain stealth. Exhaust plumes are hot, large and obvious.

Could always just deploy heated chaff as a smokescreen.

Or like... hang out next to a star in a heat-shielded ship.

Too close to the star, and you occlude it and they detect you as a black-body.
Too far, and you're a glowing dot yourself.
There's probably a narrow band where it could work.

Chaff is useless because of the rocket equation. It's been useless in atmospheric combat since the 1990s, when imaging sensors and early computers were first put together.

Screens are worth a shot, but they have to match acceleration with the ship, and since most powered, human-bearing spacecraft will be accelerating for long periods, and have to accelerate for course changes etc...they need to be attached to or controlled by the ship.

They also need to be large enough to not only screen the ship, but to cover it's drive plume.

Moties go home

>Why not put your heat emitter in a very deep well

The narrower the cone in which you radiate heat, the larger radiator you need. A 60 degree cone of radiation is roughly 10% as efficient, and it only gets worse and worse the tighter of a cone you have.

So you'd wind up with a ship that is essentially pancake-shaped, with the rear surface being taken up by radiators?

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SPAAAACEEE

I do not believe you could build this for 10 billion in any currency.

But you can pump heat; Peltier devices are literal heat pumps.

A spinal mounted raillgun, lasers for point defense, and a ton of missiles and drones which can be launched either through VLS cells, or with the raillgun.

SSTO Scramjet planes

How much of a missile does it take to destroy one of these satellites? You (or your tender) could fire these during the initial phase of the operation to take out the sensor network.

On the other hand, how much does it take to take out an anti-sensor satellite missile? I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a the attacker and the defender chucking missiles and anti-missiles at each other's assets until one side gains a decisive advantage.

If your idea of stealth involves shooting them first, then you don't really need stealth.

That's like saying that once the first shot of a battle is fired, the dudes might as well switch their camos into bright orange ones.

I think it is more like the barrage to soften up a trench before you try to rush in. I'm not entirely certain what kind of advantage the ability to close some of the range before you are detected would give you, but the original question did not ask for any.

I'd go with aggressive smart dust. Hard to detect as its dust, and easy to deploy with something as stealthy as a cold-gas gun or mechanical launcher. Functions as a warship by contact transmuting and infiltrating enemy ships or installations. Basically a Grey Dust weapon, larger per bot than grey goo. Stays cool by remaining inert for most of its flight time, and not catching a lot of rays by being small. Still noticeable, but its just a tiny bit of dust.

It's pretty hard to be as cold as space, especially in a solar system where you'll heat from sun local sunlight. Maybe some kind of fancy metamaterials which hide you from most of the light? This really depends on what kind of sensors you need to beat.

That would disperse very quickly, so you'd need a shitload of it for it to be useful in space.

Lasers are promising, as they can apparently be pretty efficient. Big phased arrays make them less vulnerable as well. That's probably a defensive weapon most of the time. A big rail or coil gun would be useful. You could shoot dumb projectiles or smart dust really fast, or accelerate less acceleration tolerant payloads (like missiles) slower giving them a kick. The primary offensive weapon is likely some kind of weapon bus. A big missile-like thing which carries some kind of weapon, like its own cannon, sensors, or a bomb pumped laser or something. Basically disposable weapon drones. Particle beams are generally inferior to lasers.

>But you can pump heat; Peltier devices are literal heat pumps.

also rankine cycle coolers. also stirling engines running in reverse. what i thing that anonymous meant though is that you can't just pump heat to NOWHERE; you're limited as to how fast you can radiate it away into space. your radiator panels have an upper temperature limit before they physically melt. you can add MORE radiator surface area, but then you're adding more mass and more surface area overall to get hit by enemy lasers and shit and pick up even more heat. Probably the sanest thing to do with waste heat that you need to get rid of in a hurry is dump it into a tank of hydrogen and then vent that as propellant (you can actually get some mad decent specific impulse that way, like 1000+ seconds).

Hmm how would space traders works in a say, a wormhole based FTL? A few dozens of systems and not a united humanity, aliens not necesary but they are cool to spice it up. What things for trade apart of metals and that stuff, tariffs, and all that.

>those dinky little radiators

at least they tried

Natural or artificial holes? I mean, if artificial, surely whoever made it will find a way to tax you for using their holes. If natural, tax goods going through them.

As for goods, just like in real life, whatever everyone happens to need. Colonies surely need goods and materials they can't make. More industrial planets resources. Planets with low quantities of X (or it's too expensive to excavate) and a need for it would buy it. Planets with excess of X will sell it.

>football

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Stealth in space is impossible with conventional physics. Heat has to go somewhere. Reaction mass has to go somewhere. Cameras and computers are cheap. The only way not to be seen is to be somewhere people aren't looking.

If you have unconventional physics, you can stick most of the mass and heat of a ship "elsewhere" and have a tiny toaster-sized anchor in realspace. Of course, the anchor will be non-stealthed, so you launch a few hundred "dummy" anchors at a time, programmed to blink on and off and use solar reflection and internal gyros in really annoying ways, to keep the cameras busy. If you and all your buddies seed the inner solar system with those, you've got security through obscurity. You can still be tracked provided someone never loses sight of "your" toaster, but if they blink, you're probably home free.

Hey, that's me!

No, I never really wrote a more complex version. This version worked just fine (with a few on-the-fly tweaks, as required).

And I did post a storytime of the game a few months ago. It might be on suptg somewhere. The PCs only encountered 2 alien races: the "Bugs" (a fractal, mind-raping gestalt computer made of Penrose tile insects) and the "Eaters of Cold Protons" (giant, sentient, murderous, antimatter-spitting cyclotrons).

First contact went reasonably well... for a while.

Fucking ants have a space program now?