Of pinnaces, gravity plates and detecting the spider drive.

n7axw wrote:

SharkHunter wrote: ... Now then, the RMN sensors and sensor drones are the best in space, and they have mode, method, and motive to be "conscientious enough" to use data collected the Manticoran home system arrays to eventually eliminate every other ship signature, other than those of the Sharks. Once they do that, don't you think EVERY RD in the Manticoran inventory will be updated to watch for the sig?

Their sensors (the Ghost Rider drones) are presently the most sensitive, most reliable, and stealthiest RD's in space, and they deploy them en-masse under battle circumstances. So now you have an un-battle tested, slow, and short-legged warship against the fiercest, fastest, and longest ranging (MDM missile) warships in space, and so far the only ones with FTL control of said missiles.

What's fascinating me right now are those spider footprints. Is the issue sensor sensitivity? Or is it a matter of, as I hear you suggesting above, a matter of programing the sensor to detect the right thing? Right now the sensors are programed to detect impeller and hyper drives. But how about disturbances in the hyper wall? And the spider does have to be creating such disturbances. It's conceivable that the spider would be bare naked against a properly programed sensor.

Reminds me of The Hunt for Red October. The caterpillar drive is not only very quiet, it sounds very different from a propellor. The sonar tech speculates that, left to itself, the computer processing sounds would categorize it as some geologic phenomenon and filter it out, so the human operator wouldn't get to hear it at all.

My StarTrek enamored older brother (specifically ST:NG) just reminded me about one of the battle sequences in that series, where the Romulan fleet is a) seriously cloaked, and b) known to be getting ready to attack in a specific sector of space. IIRC the tactic that worked was to flood the area with tachyon pulses, and they eventually built that into a defensive strategy. [ see http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tachyon_detection_grid ].
Granted the Honorverse hasn't been in the "tachyon" generating business -- using grav pulses instead, but what of the strategy, aka, if you flood a spatial area with something known, high energy whatever, it sure makes it easier to see where something pretending to be nothing is hiding, right? Doable with PD 1922 tech or no?

SharkHunter wrote:My StarTrek enamored older brother (specifically ST:NG) just reminded me about one of the battle sequences in that series, where the Romulan fleet is a) seriously cloaked, and b) known to be getting ready to attack in a specific sector of space. IIRC the tactic that worked was to flood the area with tachyon pulses, and they eventually built that into a defensive strategy. [ see http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tachyon_detection_grid ].
Granted the Honorverse hasn't been in the "tachyon" generating business -- using grav pulses instead, but what of the strategy, aka, if you flood a spatial area with something known, high energy whatever, it sure makes it easier to see where something pretending to be nothing is hiding, right? Doable with PD 1922 tech or no?

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams

If you have never tried the Planet Walk, give it a whirl. Even if you think you 'know' how big space is, like I thought I did, try it out.

The reason recon shells work against normal warships, is that the wedge is readily detectable, all bet harder when hiding under stealth. Evidently, according to the the MAN officers, the spider drive has a very low signature and is very hard to detect, unlike a wedge. Now, the idea of using the hyper wall to detect it, if it can be detected that way, is good because the hyper wall already fills the space and you don't have to distribute it. (Only RFC knows if it can be detected that way at range.) It is the distribution of the detector in Star Trek that is the problem. RADAR and LIDAR all spread out over distance which is why the range of detection by the ship using the RADAR/LIDAR is lower than the range that the other ship can detect the active sensor. A similar system using some other type of energy has the same problem. If you have to spread a physical object, then it only gets worse as you have to cart it around and spread it somehow. This can probably work in areas where you have a datum that the ship is there somewhere in a small area of space, which is still a huge volume BTW. But probably will not work at all except by luck to search large areas of a system to try and find LDs before they do something to reveal themselves.

re: the "flood space idea", thinking aloud.

With the known caveat that "which globe of size X" is the tricky and nearly impossible part in terms of outright lucky detection, but if there were LD ships in say a 3-5 diameter globe of space, but you're not really sure that they're there....

Send out a medium size drone shell first, then a set of missiles to blow up in boomer mode, the 50-100 Megatonners or whatever, mid space, 1 per light second within the sphere (that's 500 missiles, roughly).

Seems likely that the "energy shadow" behind an 8MM kiloton ship where the supercharged particles from the explosions aren't flowing naturally would be quite a bit easier to detect than the ships themselves, but the existence of those shadows where nothing should be would still provide a mighty fine reason to look in a much tinier space. Perhaps with a nastilysized Mark-23E led follow up?

Yes/no?

SharkHunter wrote:re: the "flood space idea", thinking aloud.

With the known caveat that "which globe of size X" is the tricky and nearly impossible part in terms of outright lucky detection, but if there were LD ships in say a 3-5 diameter globe of space, but you're not really sure that they're there....

Send out a medium size drone shell first, then a set of missiles to blow up in boomer mode, the 50-100 Megatonners or whatever, mid space, 1 per light second within the sphere (that's 500 missiles, roughly).

Seems likely that the "energy shadow" behind an 8MM kiloton ship where the supercharged particles from the explosions aren't flowing naturally would be quite a bit easier to detect than the ships themselves, but the existence of those shadows where nothing should be would still provide a mighty fine reason to look in a much tinier space. Perhaps with a nastilysized Mark-23E led follow up?

Yes/no?

The smart skin on the Oyster Bay ships - and presumably the Leonard Detweilers too - project incoming radiation out the other side on the same vector. Assuming they can keep up the timing and the intensity adequately (which is a significant assumption and could be wrong under practical circumstances), there won't be a detectable shadow. Particles fall on one side - particles get sent back out on the other.

JeffEngel wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:re: the "flood space idea", thinking aloud.

With the known caveat that "which globe of size X" is the tricky and nearly impossible part in terms of outright lucky detection, but if there were LD ships in say a 3-5 diameter globe of space, but you're not really sure that they're there....

Send out a medium size drone shell first, then a set of missiles to blow up in boomer mode, the 50-100 Megatonners or whatever, mid space, 1 per light second within the sphere (that's 500 missiles, roughly).

Seems likely that the "energy shadow" behind an 8MM kiloton ship where the supercharged particles from the explosions aren't flowing naturally would be quite a bit easier to detect than the ships themselves, but the existence of those shadows where nothing should be would still provide a mighty fine reason to look in a much tinier space. Perhaps with a nastilysized Mark-23E led follow up?

Yes/no?

The smart skin on the Oyster Bay ships - and presumably the Leonard Detweilers too - project incoming radiation out the other side on the same vector. Assuming they can keep up the timing and the intensity adequately (which is a significant assumption and could be wrong under practical circumstances), there won't be a detectable shadow. Particles fall on one side - particles get sent back out on the other.

The ships yes, if the stealthy screens don't get overloaded. But I was thinking more about the tractors that are reaching out towards the hyper wall wouldn't be "skin of the ship". Would look an awful lot like a bunch of spiders, yes? Sorta like all ya need to do to hit the center of a WW2 era imperial Japanese flag is know the direction of one of the stripes in the overall pattern.

SharkHunter wrote:

JeffEngel wrote:The smart skin on the Oyster Bay ships - and presumably the Leonard Detweilers too - project incoming radiation out the other side on the same vector. Assuming they can keep up the timing and the intensity adequately (which is a significant assumption and could be wrong under practical circumstances), there won't be a detectable shadow. Particles fall on one side - particles get sent back out on the other.

The ships yes, if the stealthy screens don't get overloaded. But I was thinking more about the tractors that are reaching out towards the hyper wall wouldn't be "skin of the ship". Would look an awful lot like a bunch of spiders, yes? Sorta like all ya need to do to hit the center of a WW2 era imperial Japanese flag is know the direction of one of the stripes in the overall pattern.

Ah. That would depend on how well a tractor beam absorbs, reflects, and/or deforms particles going through it - about which I have no clue at all. Anyone?

SharkHunter wrote:re: the "flood space idea", thinking aloud.

With the known caveat that "which globe of size X" is the tricky and nearly impossible part in terms of outright lucky detection, but if there were LD ships in say a 3-5 diameter globe of space, but you're not really sure that they're there....

Send out a medium size drone shell first, then a set of missiles to blow up in boomer mode, the 50-100 Megatonners or whatever, mid space, 1 per light second within the sphere (that's 500 missiles, roughly).

Seems likely that the "energy shadow" behind an 8MM kiloton ship where the supercharged particles from the explosions aren't flowing naturally would be quite a bit easier to detect than the ships themselves, but the existence of those shadows where nothing should be would still provide a mighty fine reason to look in a much tinier space. Perhaps with a nastilysized Mark-23E led follow up?

Yes/no?

A 3-5 what diameter? Do you mean 3-5 light-seconds? 3-5 light-minutes?

If you have already isolated the target ship to a 3-5 light-second diameter, you are doing incredibly well. The bigger trick is to isolate the target ship to tens of light-minutes.

But let's assume you've done a good job of isolating the ship. Let's take a closer look at what you are describing. Basically, you suggest setting off multiple bombs and looking for the shadow projected by ship(s).

Let us assume that you set off a bomb 1 light-second from the ship. Let us assume the ship is 1 kilometer in diameter, for convenience. The shadow produced by that bomb is a truncated cone with a full divergence angle of 0.0000033 radians. The ratio of the area of this shadow to the surface area of the sphere is 7e-13. In other words, you would need 1.4 trillion detectors to be certain of detecting that shadow. Setting off 500 bombs only divides that number by 500.

As was stated before, space is big. Brute force detecting of a stealthed ship by methods like this simply don't work without astronomical numbers of detectors.

--snipping--

SWM wrote:But let's assume you've done a good job of isolating the ship. Let's take a closer look at what you are describing. Basically, you suggest setting off multiple bombs and looking for the shadow projected by ship(s).
...
As was stated before, space is big. Brute force detecting of a stealthed ship by methods like this simply don't work without astronomical numbers of detectors.

Again no and no, and yes, I meant if you already had the ships localized to a globe 3-5 light seconds in radius.

I'm talking about the ability to detect particles being affected by "stealthed spider ships under power and in motion", using tractor beams that then have to reach through heavily charged particles. Keep in mind, here from planet earth we are currently detecting planets at thousands of light years range by the deflection of light particles, using "pre-diaspora" technology supposedly 4000 years older than the Honorverse.

I'd imagine that you could probably pick up a spider drive's effect on a maybe a km or larger diameter or so section of space filled with aurora borealis bright particles, even with decent size naked-eye telescope with a couple light seconds of the moon by comparison, through atmosphere and everything.

SharkHunter wrote:--snipping--

SWM wrote:But let's assume you've done a good job of isolating the ship. Let's take a closer look at what you are describing. Basically, you suggest setting off multiple bombs and looking for the shadow projected by ship(s).
...
As was stated before, space is big. Brute force detecting of a stealthed ship by methods like this simply don't work without astronomical numbers of detectors.

Again no and no, and yes, I meant if you already had the ships localized to a globe 3-5 light seconds in radius.

I'm talking about the ability to detect particles being affected by "stealthed spider ships under power and in motion", using tractor beams that then have to reach through heavily charged particles. Keep in mind, here from planet earth we are currently detecting planets at thousands of light years range by the deflection of light particles, using "pre-diaspora" technology supposedly 4000 years older than the Honorverse.

I'd imagine that you could probably pick up a spider drive's effect on a maybe a km or larger diameter or so section of space filled with aurora borealis bright particles, even with decent size naked-eye telescope with a couple light seconds of the moon by comparison, through atmosphere and everything.

[astronomer hat]
I am an planetary scientist. My specialty was occultation studies, which is basically studying the shadow produced by a planet passing in front of a star.

Your counter-example of the detection of planets at thousands of light-years is irrelevant. Those observations required literally years of data. Your bombs will create a glowing plasma cloud for mere fractions of a second. The cloud will not be able to expand very far in that amount of time. Secondly, the surface brightness of the star is enormously greater than the effective surface brightness of the cloud you are positing. And those observations required actually being in the shadow cast by that planet, while you are positing detection without actually being in the shadow. I already said that you could detect it if you were in the shadow, but it would require trillions of detectors to be make sure you would be in the shadow.

How exactly do you think these tractor beams will detect these heavily charged particles? The tractors don't have any way of determining how many particles are in the beam, or how far away they are. There is no way for the tractor to detect any kind of wake or disturbance in the propogation of the particles. The only way to detect it is to actually have a detector in the shadow. In addition, you would only want to explode a single bomb at a time if you are trying to detect particles. Multiple explosions will mess everything up. Like 500 lights illuminating a room from different directions, there won't be any shadows.

The glowing cloud produced by a bomb will be nowhere near as big as you seem to think. For one thing, the particles will radiate away their energy extremely fast. The particles will stop glowing within a small fraction of a second. (A couple other people on the board have shown the numbers in previous discussions of nuclear explosions in space.)

I hate to reiterate, but space is really big. It is nearly impossible to truly comprehend how big the volumes are that we are talking about. A radius of 5 light-seconds is enough to put 13,000,000 Earths. If you are blowing up 500 bombs, do you really think that each bomb can fill a volume equal to 25,000 Earths with a glowing aurora?