Is Hard SF space stealth worth it? Sounds like it'll be hard

Is Hard SF space stealth worth it? Sounds like it'll be hard.

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It's actually more or less impossible from a practical stand point.

It's less hiding yourself and more blinding your enemies.

>worth it

wut?

youtube.com/watch?v=xvs_f5MwT04

The best way is not stealth, but concealment. Disguise your ship as something else. This is better done in places where there's a large concentrations of spaceships and space stations, like on the orbit of planets. Most piracy is likely to be orbital. Things gets messy when there are a lot of humans interacting, travelling, fighting, or trading.

It's more or less impossible.

Is that an accent or speech impediment?

Speech impediment.

The latter. Most episodes he even suggests turning on CC if your are new to his channel.

>space piracy
>in hard sci-fi

Deep Space piracy is probably impossible, but I can see it in orbit. Still, it is likely to be called terrorism.

There’s no hiding in space just hoping your sensors spot the enemy before they spot you

Stealth in space is doable, but you'd need something no larger than a cubesat with an advanced way to manage its heating and an energy efficient (not reaction mass efficient, energy efficient) form of electric drive and/or an electrodynamic tether.

Pretty much .
The first thing giving you away in space is your heat signature - that means anything warmer than roughly 3K/-270°C - and electronic emissions. You need to sink all that somewhere.

Mass Effect had plot device physics-breaking McGuffins, but in real?

All I could imagine working is a directional stealth device, like propping up an umbrella made of those two-sided rescue blankets between you and your target. Dark side to them, reflective side to you, so your target-ward emissions will be reflected back behind your ship and thus never reach the target's sensors.

Reducing your emissions in the first place and some stealth geometry as known of current fighters will also help a lot.

Will the geometry of a craft really matter, as far as EM detectors are concerned?

Not for passive detectors, but that's what the umbrella is for.

Against active radar, hull geometry will help a lot.
The umbella might not even show up on screens, either because it's too thin or pyramid shaped and coated right to deflect radar waves away from the detectors.

What's the reach on radar?

Its not about 'stealth'. That term is a misnomer. Much like current stealth fighters it's all about reducing the size of detectable emissions as much as possible. Remember space is fuckhuge, if you knew where your target was, you could have a set of directional heat radiators that face away from them. Unless the target has ridiculous sensors and you have a decent beam weapon, they will be dead, literally before they know whats happening.

Short of OP sci fi bullshit, space warfare will be much like submarine warfare.

That kind of poses the question of how you knew where your target was, to begin with.

Any kind of reaction drive will generate a big IM RIGHT FUCKING HERE signal to anyone watching. Of course you would have to be coasting on inertia or lying in wait, otherwise they will see you too.

Hard to say. In space, where there's little junk to disperse your signal, you can send it out at pretty much unlimited ranges - registering the return signal is the problem. Unless the target is a perfect radar mirror pointed back at you, the return signal will only be a fraction of what you sent out, and it might drown in background radiation.

Another matter is the timing. Down here on Earth, we use two types of radar in conjunction - search radar and tracking radar.

Search radar are those little spinning antennas, and deliver picures like you know them from aircraft disaster movies or subarine movies where they stand in for the sonar screen - they sweep 360° in 3-6 seconds and show you everything around. The fact that radar emitter and receiver spin, though, means that a target too far away might reflect your signal, but your antenna will already look another way when it returns and hence miss it. Doesn't matter on short-range Earth, but in space... half a light-second effective range sounds about realistic for a slow-spinning search radar.

Tracking/targting radars come into play once something has been found, or you can predict/calculate its location. They work like a spotlight - emitter and antenna are pointed at the target and may only move to keep it firmly aquired. Greater range and gap-less tracking, but once we're talking light-units as distance again, they'll develop lag. Good to keep an eye on something you know is there for light-seconds or even minutes, but don't trust it guiding missiles past an ls max.

Beaming your location out for all and sundry to see in return for half a light second radar range sounds pretty shitty desu. In fact any kind of active sensors in space warfare sounds pretty shit, unless shit is going down and you need accurate information for point defense weapons.

Totally agree on that. Unless you're a beast of military vessel out to show strength, then some boasting is in order.

Most detection would depend on passive sensors looking out for heat and EM signatures, maybe with periodical search radar sweeps to make sure you don't miss space debris.

>space warfare will be much like submarine warfare.

So Anechoic tiles, hiding under thermoclines and using lots of stealth and passive sensors?

It would almost be "lets hide in this nebula" Original Star Trek-tier if it was just like submarine warfare.

That being said, landing on a small moon or asteroid and shutting down everything would be a pretty good way to hide - kind of like resting a sub on the sea floor.

Just use passive sensors, and if a target comes in range fire all the Anti-Ship missiles / torpedoes / etc.

Any good books to learn about this stuff ?

What of it, fagtron?

The Expanse makes use of stealth tactics and technology at what seems to be believable levels.

Just play Children of a Dead Earth.

IIRC that one is just shunting heat off to one side and presenting the cool side towards the target you want to hide from

The Expanse also has rockets that run on magic so I wouldn't automatically trust the science literacy in it.

Yeah. I suggested something similar in Neither do I, hence "seems to be believable." I'm in no position to reality test their stuff though.

Expanse is interesting in that it was originally an MMO design so of course you want some sort of stealth ships. But while the writers go for a hard SF _feel_, they also very deliberately toss that shit out when it gets in the way, and they don't try to retcon when hey fuck up.

It's retarded and you're retarded if you think it's feasible.

The Expanse is basically space opera in disguise. I would take it with a grain of salt.

Not an argument, sorry kid.

>I would take it with a grain of salt.
I'd rather take it wih a bag of chips and look at certain aspects in isolation later. Salt is a good flavor, though.

>It's retarded and you're retarded if you think it's feasible.
Within the orbital shell around a single planet, most probably. Once settlements get more spread out, and ships get into private hands? It goes from unthinkable to all-but-inevitable. People *will* want to loot-and-pillage, and without sufficient enforcement assets to prevent it....

Stealth is always worth it. If it is actually possible really depends on your definition. "Can't see me, I'm invisible" stealth is pretty much impossible. Making yourself harder to detect than a vessel of similar size and output, or at least harder to correctly classify as your actual size, is very much possible and pretty useful.

To be fair, space piracy is incredibly feasible.

As long as your target is carrying cargo which won't be damaged by vacuum (say, minerals or mechanical parts), you can damage the hull irreperably, wait for everyone to abandon ship/die, then waltz in and take everything.

It's even easier than traditional maritime piracy, as your loot won't sink.

Ah yes, I can't wait for somalian pirates to just build spaceships and start space piracy.

Maybe but the the cargo ship only has to ping his sos and all the directional radars in the system will be pointed at the pirates, good luck docking in any half civilized station after that

I also love how Somalian pirates are still using ships they crafted themselves with their own technological knowhow.

Just hack their systems and send to cargo to your location.

there's also the potential of "camoflage" controlling the frequencies of the emissions your craft does emit so it looks like background sources of radiation such stars or a more distant planet or colony.

Just like modern Somalian pirates, they don't have to actually build ships to engage in piracy.

You couldn't be implying that pirates have to live away from civilization and off the grid would you? Because that would be silly.

I know right? Hiding a multimillion tons space station in the emptyness of space is so esay, almost as esay has trying to hide from the space fedex mercs thay will patrol whichever already existing space port you might try to dock in
I could see corporation paid "pirates" or even terrorist/false flag groups tho

I'll take "what was Tortuga?" for 500.

Tactics wise, the Expanse mostly seems to be "hide behind that space rock" (or "pretend to be a freighter/cargo" if hiding isn't an option).
Technology wise... ehhh. It's not very hard sci-fi.

An english/french military base for mercs aka bucaneers

Ancap pirates seem more likely. Wait, same shit different color...

Hijackings may be possible I figure. And way back I brainstormed some pirates operating on "oops, would be a shame if we dropped this trash so you have to power up your drives to avoid it, just because you didn't deposit 2500 rand to Honest Abdul's Money Laundry."

That's hilarious. I love the idea.

"Oh, that's a nice, efficient flight path you have there. It'd be a shame if someone scatteted 25 tons of nuts and bolts directly in your way. Have you seen what they can do to a ship's exterior at 3000 metres/second? Terrible stuff. I'm sure that wouldn't happen though."

>ctrl+f hydrogen steamer
>no results
A shameful display.

The question was if stealth was worth it, and it's certainly not with that design.

Better question: why does your story/setting NEED stealth in space?
You can't think of a way of your characters getting away other than turning invisible or something?

I mean, it's perfectly safe, they can get out of the way easy. It's just that it costs 25k to fire up the engine...

Stealth options like in Mass Effect with a time limit have a strategic usefulness that provides tension.

The options in space other than stealth are "be faster" which provides no tension.

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php

Not really when you consider that any residual heat that was already radiated to the outer hull would still be visible for a very long time after the internal heat sink was activated probably longer than you could shunt waste heat into the heat sink before cooking the crew, so it's pretty much worthless.
Also if you're going to use Mass Effect as an example you also have the option of jumping to ftl as an option for escape.

>space
>in hard sci-fi
I hope you're not implying that the world won't be composed entirely of paperclips and/or emulations of Elon Musk's consciousness be 2050.

Singularity soon, fellow meatsacks!

Hard sci fi space is hard.

I kind of remember stealth being achieved in one setting by having the fronts of the ships being radar and to an extent, thermooptically camouflaged - the ship dumped it's heat out the rear along with it's driver, meaning it was relatively hard to spot, with the front of the ship obscuring the heat dump and drive plume.

Plus, a lot of people who say stealth doesn't work make the assumption that sensors are perfect and have absolute coverage.

Besides, in my experience for hard sci-fi to be fun, you need a handful of technologies that are slightly unfeasible today - but just work. Some kind of magical heatsink or thermal neutralising material could just be your settings "it just works" technology.

Anyway those are just my thoughts.

You could line the hull with super-coolant pipes that get deposited in to a shielded central core. After a while the built up heat would cook the crew, hence the time limit.

FTL in ME uses relays, but that's beside the point.

>the ship dumped it's heat out the rear along with it's driver
Wouldn't that only save it from detection from a very specific angle for a very limited amount of time? People underestimate how easy it is to detect heat in space and how far we can do it from.

Regarding heat dissipation: there's been some interesting theoretical work done on informational-level electron to spinon conversion by Dinesh Vidsayagar (second-unit of Rajesh Vidsayagar of Field Equation fame, incidentally)
The upshot is that you could cheat on waste heat through microscale antimatter cracking - the quantum specifications of one positron/antispinon are informationally dense enough to fit a trillion GEV or so of uncompressed high-energy electrons. Of course, you'd still have to "unpack" the specs (at immense computational and energetic cost), but that can be done off-site, presumably at a solar station/statite swarm.

Depends on what you want it for.
It's definitely worthwhile if you want a nuclear sub equivalent.

Gasses from propulsion expand and cool very rapidly. Depends a lot on what you're using for a drive.

>Besides, in my experience for hard sci-fi to be fun, you need a handful of technologies that are slightly unfeasible today - but just work. Some kind of magical heatsink or thermal neutralising material could just be your settings "it just works" technology.
This might be pedantic but if you add magic "technology" that "just works" with out grounding in proven science then it's no longer hard sci-fi. It may not be molten marshmallow sci-fi like 40k but it's last it's hardness.

In that case, don't bother with space battles in hard sci fi. In fact, don't bother with anything that isn't some hellish inhuman wasteland of empty capitalistic agencies furiously trying to compete with one another over nothing.

Stealth might be 'bleh' but deception and subterfuge should be absolutely huge in hard sci-fi. Extra points if you have a medusae weapon to project into the enemy sensors while you are at it.

thanks for the link, user, very informative channel.
as a dirty foreigner, this speech impediment is easier to understand than british or american accents

I'm fully prepared for
>no, you retard
but it sounds a bit like you are suggesting waste heat be stored as information and emailed home for the office to radiate for you.

It's worth it if you can do it.

You just can't do it and still be hard sf.

Feel free to post a link to such a study any time you want

You're essentially correct, although that metaphor misses some key nuances.

>not illegally downloading spaces ships via illegal space torrent

>that metaphor misses some key nuances.
I figured as much, but that's still bananas.
I figure that it's probably still functionally impossible though, what with the unavoidable inefficiencies in machanisms still dumping heat and all.
Still, I can see such a thing as a decent spacemagic artifact left behind by the Founders/Jokers/First Civilisation.

The ranges dealt with are stupid in hard science. You can spot someone from absolutely ages away and then it's a matter of who shoots first. There is little in space to actually hide behind. I read about disposable heat sink. So basically you get a limited number of actions before the heat sinks get too hot and you have to discard them from the ship and once you discard them you become visible on scans.

In the expanse he stealthed up by using gravity to slingshot himself towards his objective. It's possible but it's going to be like hitting a bullseye with a dart from 10 football fields

Portals and/or teleportation > spaceships

Everything of value is probably on a planet/moon/large asteroid, why fly through a shitty uninhabitable boring void for centuries at a time when you can cut out the middle man and fold spacetime

If you just add "we have this great alloy that does X really well" or "an engineered chemical that allows us to do Y much more efficiently" it works fine, though.

Hell, even air conditioning is absolute bullshit technology if you haven't discovered freon. You have to give a little to not be a boring-ass twat.