dust

Wouldn't dust clouds obscure view and telemetry of missiles? One could fill a system or parts of it with a dust particulate. Like, although to a lesser extent, a wedge the dust should prevent viewing, telemetry links, and slow down anything flying through it. Anything without particle shielding.

Additionally any stealth ships will make ripples in the dust clouds negating, somewhat, the stealth. Now space is big and asteroids are small but even a small asteroid can make a big dust cloud.

Putting a dust cloud in to a whole system would be impractical but a dust cloud cover around particular areas or strategically filling / covering civilian ship lanes preventing a ship or station from being targeted. Like smoke is used in water or land battles.

I once posited the notion of sand casters but was informed the lasers would slice right through but can the lasers aim if they can't 'see' their target? Let alone what happens when a missile hits dust particles going really fast.

Do you have any idea how big space is? You would need a HUGE amount of dust to obscure telemetry. It would not be practical for any significant volume.

Consider how big an area you want to obscure. If a ship were running ballistic, you could concentrate your dust around the ship. That might be practical (though it would obscure the view from the inside looking out just as much). But if it is accelerating, it would rapidly exit a small cloud. You would need a cloud light-minutes across. You would need to chew up multiple planets to do it, not just a few asteroids.

How about a sensor network that detects disturbances in the solarwind?

Let the sun provide the "dust".

namelessfly wrote:How about a sensor network that detects disturbances in the solarwind?

Let the sun provide the "dust".

Hundreds of impeller-drive ships boogie around the system all the time. It would take an incredible lot of computing power to sort one spider drive sneak out from that much background disturbance.

Every ship's "wake" would blow outward, taking weeks just to reach the hyper limit.
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Look, everybody! Weasley's got 'imself a Howler!

Imaginos1892 wrote:

namelessfly wrote:How about a sensor network that detects disturbances in the solarwind?

Let the sun provide the "dust".

Hundreds of impeller-drive ships boogie around the system all the time. It would take an incredible lot of computing power to sort one spider drive sneak out from that much background disturbance.

Every ship's "wake" would blow outward, taking weeks just to reach the hyper limit.
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Look, everybody! Weasley's got 'imself a Howler!

So? You would know they were there. It is not like the ocean with cross chop caused by changing wind direction creating the impossibility of wave analysis. You see this big ol' yellow ball in the sky is at a near constant...

Of course implementing such a sensor network, would be, uh, um, well, erm... Power of plot?

wastedfly wrote:So? You would know they were there. It is not like the ocean with cross chop caused by changing wind direction creating the impossibility of wave analysis. You see this big ol' yellow ball in the sky is at a near constant...

Of course implementing such a sensor network, would be, uh, um, well, erm... Power of plot?

You are assuming that solar wind is constant, which it isn't (Because it's influenced by solar weather). You are also assuming that you have sensors sufficiently accurate to measure both the solar wind as it exits the photosphere and qas it exits the hyper limit, enough computing power to model its behaviour in the wildly chaotic environment of a solar system, and then enough computing power to measure the difference, and build a model that would allow you to account for ships stealthily creeping across your system.

So yeah, it is like an ocean with cross-chop. In any case, the delay inherent in any such detection method renders it unusable for anything except forensic analysis.

wastedfly wrote:So? You would know they were there. It is not like the ocean with cross chop caused by changing wind direction creating the impossibility of wave analysis. You see this big ol' yellow ball in the sky is at a near constant...

Of course implementing such a sensor network, would be, uh, um, well, erm... Power of plot?

The "big ol' yellow ball in the sky" is at a near constant in illumination, but not a true constant. And the magnetic field is far from constant. On the largest scale, the magnetic field of the sun reverses polarity every 22 years! Solar rotation, solar flares, coronal holes, coronal mass ejections, the magnetic fields of the planets, and interaction with the interstellar magnetic field cause a constantly changing and chaotic structure in the solar wind. There are currents and eddies, flows and turbulence. An entire field called space weather has grown up analyzing and tracking the changing magnetic and plasma flux environment in near-Earth space.

Plus you have every Planet, dwarf planet, asteroid, and comet either sweeping up or perturbing the wind. Not to mention those 1000km/2 planes of insanely high gravity that go swinging around the system at all manner of velocities, accelerations and directions.

SWM wrote:..., the magnetic fields of the planets, and interaction with the interstellar magnetic field cause a constantly changing and chaotic structure in the solar wind...

not to mention interaction with small space-born particles - asteroids, meteorites, even small particles of dust can cause tiny ripples which compound as they interact with each other. these same solar winds would make it impossible to maintain a static "cloud" of dust around an orbital facility. the concept is interesting, in traveler one of the weapons you can equip your ship with is a dust cannon which interferes with incoming fire (anti-piracy defense) but in Honorverse, with their level of accel., I don't see it's practical implementation (accept maybe as a defensive aft chase defense for merchies - but even then ???).

Lord Skimper wrote:I once posited the notion of sand casters but was informed the lasers would slice right through but can the lasers aim if they can't 'see' their target? Let alone what happens when a missile hits dust particles going really fast.

Just throwing sand around is completely useless even if ships didn´t maneuver and change velocity all the time in battle.

Only way to do it is if you know EXACTLY when and from where a laser is coming. But you would still need tons of sand to negate even a single hit to make it a useful defense.

So in reality, utterly useless and pointless to even try. Sidewalls are vastly more effective and have none of the limitations.

Lord Skimper wrote:Putting a dust cloud in to a whole system would be impractical but a dust cloud cover around particular areas or strategically filling / covering civilian ship lanes preventing a ship or station from being targeted. Like smoke is used in water or land battles.

Unrealistic outside of everything but objects that either NEVER changes orbit or are completely stationary. And even then it wouldn´t be much good. It´s more effective to go emcon and just sit and try to look like a random hole in space.

Lord Skimper wrote:Additionally any stealth ships will make ripples in the dust clouds negating, somewhat, the stealth. Now space is big and asteroids are small but even a small asteroid can make a big dust cloud.

This is unrealistic to do even outside of buildings if trying to locate people, in space you need ridiculously much dust.

It´s cheaper to cover a system with sensor platforms.

Lord Skimper wrote:Wouldn't dust clouds obscure view and telemetry of missiles?

If they used optical means of "looking" then yes under some circumstances. Otherwise, under most circumstances no or not really.