Ok, I'm having a retarded argument with some nerds in a general about "stealth" in space, so let's discuss...
Would it be possible to conceal a spacecraft in space? What would be require to do so? Forget whether or not it's feasibly possible in the modern day, I want to hear arguments for what could be and the issues involved, if any. Granted no one really knows what the future holds, but the theory is interesting.
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I dont expect it to be all that difficult. Much more difficult to find anything that isnt constantly beaming its location to us
it's really easy to conceal a ship in space when it's several million light years away from the planet
Please elaborate.
Let's talk about in closer proximity, though.
Arguments being brought up;
>ship heat generation
>radiation in space
>distinguishing said radiation(s) from each other
There is no stealth in space. The only way you could is by having no EM emission of any kind beyond what should already be there. The two primary ones being infrared and visible; infrared because your ship has a heat signature much greater than space, and visible light because not only can they just see your ship but the disruptions in light from behind your ship.
Build your ship inside a comet.
Build a trillion plastic copies of your ship and hide amongst them.
paint it black
if nothing else works you can always hide it behind an asteroid
NO. There is no stealth in space!
You can have all your radiators directional. You'd lose efficiency, but you could choose from which direction to appear invisible. From optics, after a certain distance you'd need very large telescopes and you could just make it look like a rock. There is too much space out there to look at it all and unless someone knew where to look, it would look like a rock.
There is also all kinds of research right now on metamaterials that promise to deflect radiation on certain frequencies to make it look invisible. The same kind of research unfortunately that promises to make telescopes much more powerful. In the end, it all boils down to the radiators and how well you can direct them to hide yourself, because after a certain distance, heat is the only thing that will give you away.
Stealth in space is absolutely possible. It takes a very high iq to undstand y, but you see when the singulaity happens it's going to change evrything. By 2040 heat will be obsolete. By 2050 thermodynamics will be gone. By 2060 we will be gods.
The question of stealth in space is irrelevant. The truth is we can't actually understand where ships really are, so hiding them is pointless. This follows from the fact that you can't know nothing. Would you like fries with that?
where do you send the heat where no one can see it? Sensors are getting cheap so we could put them everywhere. Even doing crazy shit like putting them into out of plane orbits.
>> metamaterials for invisibility
Are a meme:
news.utexas.edu
>where do you send the heat where no one can see it?
That's a logistics problem, not an engineering one. Sure, if want to hide your ship from a whole technologically advanced system, you might have some trouble. Now imagine a sphere that the radius r is equal to the distance of the adversary to the outermost sensor. You get your stealth ship from outside that distance, such that the radiators vector is pointing outside, and you send a missile to this sensor and get out. Keep doing this until they find you or they run out of sensors.
Just paint it black ???
There are more than one sensor user. We could put them EVERYWHERE. Even all the way out past Neptune. Fuck we could put a mass driver and sensor factory on Eris and shit out sensors into crazy orbits outside of the ecliptic plane.
You can't put them everywhere. You will run out of atoms to do so.
You can shoot excess energy through a miniscule hole as a concentrated beam into a tiny point in the sky where no sensor exists.
Of course this doesn't work if you are inside a metal sphere that is full of sensors and/or mirrors, but I don't think that's the case here.
Yes and no. Radar works better in space in that there is no atmospheric attenuation, but it is worse in that the area it spreads out over is much larger. The real question is why would you want to try and conceal a spacecraft from radar? You could just look out the window and see it. Plus there are missiles that would work if fired from one spacecraft at another - they rely on fins to guide them to their target after acquiring a radar lock. You could argue about beam weapons maybe, but they don't need 'guidance' like a traditional air-to-air missile, they're just point and shoot.
*there are no missiles that would work if fired from one spacecraft to another
Conceal from what? Because it is really hard find anything in space in general, especially if its not moving periodically. Being concealed is the default.
it would be a giant waste of energy and probably not work that well, but you could use a kugelblitz (mini blackhole) in between spacecraft and observer to absorb light and radar waves.
What is "stealth" ???
Against visual detection? You could prevent occlusion from a single point detection I suppose, with fancy flashing of lights.
A black ship isn't going to be detectable via visual sensors.
It's possible to be more or less invisible on radar today with stealth materials, so thats already done.
Infrared involves having a cooled surface directed towards sensors, easily done
So yes, stealth will be easy in space.
You have never heard of lateral thrusters?
I'm making a space game and I can tell you that black ships cannot be seen by naked eye easily at all even at relatively close distances. And distances in space get real big real fast if you move at all.
It's possible if you're only trying to avoid being observed from one point, but you won't be able to maneuver freely. Just have a wide spectrum radiation absorbent shield(with heavy cooling systems) on one side of your craft, one that would eclipse all of your radiators and any exhaust plumes. You just face it toward what you're trying to hide from. But you aren't going to be able to make any burns other than mostly in the direction of what you're hiding from.
you don't even need extra thrusters, just have a gimballing engine
Spacecraft are kinda stealth by default - it's harder to make them visible than invisible. Any deep space probe that stops transmitting is pretty much just gone.
Even something as large as the fictional Bird of Prey you are imaging, even without the cloak, would be pretty much invisible to any modern technology, even with the lights on, in anything but extremely low orbit.
Every blip in this chart is two miles across or larger - notice how long it takes to detect them with an active search. Not much chance of detecting anything smaller, save by the occasional happy accident.
You can make burns, them seeing a burn doesn't allow them to continually track the vehicle
Not sure how visible a cloud of H2O & CO2 is either
If they watch the burn as it happens they can see your final velocity and direction and thus calculate your new orbit.
It would be difficult to determine the exact direction, and the expanding exhaust plume wouldn't be the easiest thing to see, but obviously we're talking about hiding from advanced future detection systems, I mean today space stealth isn't even a question, we can't see most things that aren't even trying to hide.
>ship heat generation
>radiation in space
>distinguishing said radiation(s) from each other
Well, if we're talking one of those giant clunky black-hole driven starships, while yes, they would put out a buttload of radiation, they'd do so in one direction. As long as your spaceship is aiming towards the potential detection point, it's invisible, despite the ludicrous energy involved in its movement.
If you're talking about being invisible nose-to-nose with another starship, that's another thing. There's not a lot of feasible ways to make yourself invisible to detection at point blank range (like mere meters apart). I mean, there's all sorts of fancy visual cloaking materials, but, not only are they not all that effective close up, even your sheer mass is going to be detectable, if they are looking for it. You'd need some truly magic-tech level shit to negate that, and even at that fantasy level, if it had any logic at all, you'd probably be making yourself much more visible in some other way.
Though, to Star Trek's credit, generally, when some cloaked vessel is managing to ride near piggy-back next to a starship, it's because they aren't actively looking for it. Even modern submarines can snuggle right up next to each other unnoticed, provided neither is actively pinging - and there's been at least one nasty collision as a result of this.
And the old Millennium Falcon trick of blending with trash and getting out of the way of directional radar of a much larger vessel, while a bit silly, isn't entirely unfeasible. There's bound to be blind spots in large craft.
>and thus calculate your new orbit.
Only if they knew your starting velocity/orbit
Gotta imagine that getting an accurate estimate from a exhaust plume is going to be basically impossible too.
>Only if they knew your starting velocity/orbit
that's.. not how it works at all
If they know your speed and direction through a system, they know where you'll end up going.
If you want to make sure your ships are never noticed by another living being, just shape them like me
why did you have the need to post this?
What's really stupid is that you can clearly see windows there on that star destroyer, but apparently nobody glanced out of any of them
hm? Everything is in motion, they are obviously not doing a burn from a stationary position
If a ship is doing a burn launching from Martian orbit towards the outer system, it'll have that initial velocity/direction which you may or may not know
I doubt there's very often any reason to look out any of those windows, but yes, given that they were actively looking for it.
I've also played enough Star Wars games to know that that geodesic above it is the shield generator. One would think they would have some extra saboteur detection apparatus around it - but, well, Star Wars isn't known for it's logic. It's fantasy, just roll with it. The point still applies, I guess, just, maybe a bad example.
>If a ship is doing a burn launching from Martian orbit towards the outer system, it'll have that initial velocity/direction which you may or may not know
Unless you had intel about the initial launch, or the ship is near Death Star sized, I don't think there's any way you could detect a Martian launch from Earth.
Project rho has a whole section on why stealth in space is really hard. Google it.
I can't even argue with you because I can't follow the logic where you think the initial state an object used to have before a burn makes any difference after you already know what direction, position, and heading it has at the end of the burn which you observed.
Been so long since I've seen Empire, I can't recall for sure, but I think they assumed the Falcon hyper-jumped as soon as they lost track of it, and thus were not actively looking for it.
Seeing the exhaust doesn't give position or velocity
If you're actually seeing the light of the burn happening, you can see the object moving through space while it happens.
What do you mean by "light of the burn"
Unless they are looking directly up the ass of the ship, they won't see anything other than the exhaust plume
The original post in this conversation was that you wouldn't be able to burn in a direction that whatever you're hiding from could see.
And you're only going to be able to see an exhaust plume while it's still hot, which means, you're going to be watching the burn happening, you will be seeing the bright rocket plume, and you will see that bright rocket plume moving through space along with the object it's coming out of. And you wouldn't have to be looking right up the ship's ass, rocket plumes are pretty bright by space object standards. You'd be able to see it as long as the ship in front of it wasn't obscuring it, which goes all the way back to the original post, the idea of hiding a ship with a light absorbent shield and hiding all the radiators and rockets behind it.
I'm sure there will be ways of throwing great amounts of uncertainty in the exact trajectory of the space craft.
How would you fool someone observing your rocket burn? They can see you moving through the sky. Assuming we have some kind of sufficiently advanced detection system (since again, in today's world we're lucky if we see things that aren't even trying to hide) that doesn't have any problems with resolution and can track the light produced from a burn and see how much it moves during that burn, you can't create any uncertainty about the trajectory.
And as the creator of children of a dead earth pointed out, any kind of advanced detection would probably take the form of a network distributed throughout the solar system to better triangulate things, eliminating uncertainties about position and heading.
Horse pucky. You assume that whoever is seeking you has perfect ability to search the whole of space for every wavelength of EM radiating and instantly detect any deviations from the normal bg radiation.
Stealth craft in-atmosphere don't do that. You can, for example, see the mufuggin things with your eyes.
You only have to disguise yourself FROM THE tech that the enemy is going to use to seek you, to the limits of their abilities, or at least well enough to make you sufficiently harder to detect that you have a better chance to complete whatever mission you have.
Decoys will be a BIG thing, its essentially impossible to tell a decoy from a real thing from 1000+ miles away
Perhaps firing the engine in all directions to throw a "cloud" around the vehicle, obscuring it
Doing a burn in erratic pulses
Low thrust ion drives that are invisible
dnno predictions about how things will be in 100 years will always be totally wrong.
Perhaps they will do powerful active sensor sweeps before engaging their drive to clear nearby space of enemy sensors
>any kind of advanced detection would probably take the form of a network distributed throughout the solar system to better triangulate things
Which will be countered by networks of autonomous detection/killer satelites
Yeah you're right user, but do you know why there are no all-black spaceships? Because that would be a thermal nightmare. We paint spaceships white because it reflects more energy, and even then they typically perform thermal roll maneuvers to make sure no part overheats.
>>low thrust ion drives are invisible
no:
projectrho.com
>>radiators directional
no:
projectrho.com
>>Which will be countered by networks of autonomous detection/killer satelites
so I launch thousands of pic related all over the solar system. Oh and many civilians of the space country Xeon all have scanning telescopes for watching out for navigational hazards/finding spess scrap. Good luck killing thousands of tiny satellites and civilians
>>instantly detect any deviations from the normal bg radiation.
well your ship is going to be quite a bit warmer than the 3 K background radiation.
it doesn't need to be instantaneous because the transit time is going to be quite long.
>muh blogs though
Since there's no air in space, we could build a space ship that's a weird geometric shape that wouldn't reflect radar straight back like, kinda like how the F-117 nighhawk bombers work.
