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Aircraft Carriers In Space
An anonymous reader writes "Real-world military conventions have had obvious effects on many sci-fi books, movies, and TV shows. But how does their fictional representation stack up against the evolving rules of high-tech warfare? In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, a naval analyst discusses some of the technological assumptions involved in transposing sea combat to space combat, and his amusement with the trope of 'aircraft carriers in space.' He says, 'Star Wars is probably the worst. There is no explanation for why X-Wings [fighters] do what they do, other than the source material is really Zeroes [Japanese fighter planes] from World War II. Lucas quite consciously copied World War II fighter combat. He basically has said they analyzed World War II movies and gun camera footage and recreated those shots. Battlestar Galactica has other issues. One thing I have never understood is why the humans didn't lose halfway through the first episode. If information moves at the speed of light, and one side has a tactically useful FTL [faster-than-light] drive to make very small jumps, then there is no reason why the Cylons couldn't jump close enough and go, "Oh, there the Colonials are three light minutes away, I can see where they are, but they won't see me for three minutes?"'"
I always liked how space combat was portrayed in Babylon 5. It mostly adhered to proper physics of spaceflight, and the battles always seemed to be more realistic to me. I know that is subjective, but it seems it was the best of anything on TV or in the theater. Don't even get me started on Star Trek. It makes Star Wars look realistic and that's hard to do.
Can you imagine what those shows would have been like had they tried to apply science as we know it?
If you'd like a try, there is a series of books about "Black Jack" Geary that has FTL combat. It's actually quite a good read from a naval combat in space perspective with light speed weaponry + kinetic weaponry + trying to shoot at things that are moving up to 0.1c and what not. But, if you're not into that kind of thing it's got to be a horrid thing to read.
But they do address the few minutes away FTL issue, but it's because you can only enter/exit a system at certain points so unless you're going to turn around and leave you can't micro jump at them.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
FTL is expensive, that's why.
We have to differentiate between "made for the screen" and books: Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars were made to look pretty. Everyone can cite their fave SciFi books, but I'll just go with Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat, who eloquently asserted that interstellar war was a complete waste of effort, then goes on to write one book where (wait for it) a bunch of folks decide to wage interstellar war.
Yes, it's all well and good that visual identification is at the speed of light, but Dradis signals move at the speed of narrative causality.
Three light minutes is a long way away, and the Cylons weren't infinitely advanced. They were only somewhat more advanced than the humans, who, aside from their jump drives, aren't much more advanced than us. Could you examine 360x180 degrees of sky for a kilometer long object at 54 million miles away within three minutes? I don't think so. Further, there is a reason they kept jumping away. They would make a few quick jumps and the Cylons would need a trillion times as much manpower to find them.
A fighter accelerating at 9g would still take months to approach the speed of light. Even with current supersonic fighters, it takes a long time and a huge turn radius to change direction when moving supersonic. At mach 20 your minimum turning radius before blacking out would be the size of Europe.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php
Space is 3 dimensional.
Space is FUCKING HUGE!
There is no stealth in space.
There are no quick course changes in space.
Modest props to David Weber, who introduced carriers (for fairly good reasons, mostly having to do with life support and cost) to his Honorverse.
And then, as he spent more time working out the actual dynamics of combat in his universe, rapidly reduced their combat utility, shifted their mission roles, and generally de-emphasized them from their projected value.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I think the only reason to have carriers in the future is to have fighters that can go into the atmosphere where huge carriers obviously cannot...
As usual, when it comes to nitpicking science fiction, assumptions as bogus as those in the fiction get applied.
In BSG - for instance - every time we see observation of enemy ship positions, the sensors used (DRADIS) appear to be active sensors, not passive. A cylon basestar jumping 3 light minutes away from Galactica wouldn't observe its presence for six minutes. At least in that show, such vast distances weren't particularly useful.
That's where the inevitable "well, they should've" speculation comes in. Kinetic kill weapons should be used, right? Passive projectiles from far away with massive velocity just smash into where a target is/was/will be. Okay, well, the counter-speculation kicks in with "if anyone used that tactic, it would be SOP to have all ships injecting a random factor into their movement".
Blah, blah, blah. All of this misses the fundamental truth: this is all about entertainment. Accuracy isn't necessarily entertaining, and in the case of space battles, very likely wouldn't be entertaining at all if it were utterly realistic.
"Oh no... he found the
Star Wars was a cheesy low-budget 1970s movie, not a documentary. Can't you nerds tell the difference? All this slobbering over a dumb old movie and dressing up in plastic costumes 35 years later is really pathetic.
Maybe they could explain why fighters always have to fly nose-first, like an F-22 or something. And don't get me started about banking while turning...
Don't get me started on how transporters are not used properly in Star Trek...
a submarine is a vessel designed to hide under the water, which obscures your vision and forces you to use capricious sensors like sonar. Space, on the other hand, is wide open, and any ship putting out enough heat to keep its crew alive stands out from the background, if you have enough time to look.
In space the issue is not being hidden but being far away. Stuff shows up here at Earth all the time that we weren't expecting, and a whole lot of us have nothing better to do than to watch the skies. Warships would likely be actively trying to hide; they'd actively mask any forward emissions, they'd be painted the truest black that could be had, and that black would also be radar-masking.
in space, you don't need that doorway between the sea and the sky, because your "fighter" is operating in the same medium as the mothership. You don't need a flight deck. You just need a hatch, or maybe just a clamp that attaches the fighter to the hull if you don't mind leaving it outside. You don't need the big engines or the big elevated flight deck. And hence it doesn't make nearly so much sense to put all of your eggs in one basket
It doesn't make sense to keep your X-Wings inside of a carrier because they have their own hyperdrives and shields. But it does make sense to keep TIE fighters inside of one because they don't.
If you do a fairly simple extrapolation of current technology, what you end up with is space combat as sort of ponderous ballet with shots fired at long distance at fairly fragile targets where you have to predict where the target is going to be.
If you do a fairly simple extrapolation of current technology then you're probably writing speculative fiction. There's lots of other kinds. He's upset because all science fiction doesn't boringly extrapolate from current technology?
Babylon 5 was closer in that it understood that there is no air in space and you don't bank. But even on that show, the ships would be under thrust, and then they decide to go back the way they come, they would spin around and almost immediately start going in the opposite direction.
Right, because they weren't going as fast relative to their surroundings as they possibly could be, because it would only cause them problems later when they chose to change course. Sometimes they would presumably make trips at high V, but mostly they used hyperspace. The ships you mostly saw make turns were White stars, which are special alien technology doodads, and star furies, which were never really going all that fast to begin with, and which are fighters and thus have very high thrust-to-mass ratios.
one thing that drives me crazy is that on Star Trek, you're either on watch or off duty, when a real naval officer has a whole other job, such as being a department or division head. So he's constantly doing paperwork. Most shows don't get that right at all.
Yes, this is Roddenberry's vision of the future, where we've moved past a military mentality and people who have jobs in what is currently a military context are also permitted to have lives not centered around service.
FP: So a universe of faster-than-light travel favors surprise attacks?
CW: It really, really does. You can go and mug somebody and they never see it coming. Of course, not all faster-than-light drives in fiction work the same way, but the Cylon drives certainly had that attribute.
It also matters whether you have FTL communications, and whether FTL is fold or warp technology.
Most science fiction does not cover the whole model; at best it might cover Fleet Missions and Fleet Design in detail, with most other areas only vaguely defined.
Yes, no shit. Most science fiction is not a war novel. A war is usually a back story for science fiction.
This idea that Captain Kirk leaves on
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes but in this case his objections have less to do with 'inaccuracy' than with him in his judgement thinking some things about something he's never actually done and knows next to nothing about. The FTL issue he's wrong about. The use of large efficient base ships and deployment of smaller/faster/less efficient fighters is also not necessarily a bad idea, the arguments for it are just as good as the arguments against, and it's not like we have empirical data to rely on.
It's difficult to engage an enemy when they're 50,000km away (and the only part of the "ship" that's visible is small amount of IR from its power source that isn't even pointed in your direction). When the amount of fuel needed to change course is huge: either because of massive vehicles, or high velocities, the whole idea becomes impossible.
At best you might just be able to make some sort of directed energy weapon work effectively (if you can aim to hit an unknown sized target from halfway to the Moon), or possibly some sort of shotgun type projectiles. But at the sort of distances involved, your target for any sort of physical contact weapon would have so much warning that their usefulness would be small.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Considering that the f22/f35 is likely the last generation of manned fighter jets in America, I find it very unlikely that space combat will use piloted crafts.
Ian Douglas' Star Carrier series does a reasonable treatment of this. All of his battle scenes involve dealing with speed of light restrictions. The characters have FTL drive but it is only useful for travel between stars. Three book series is a good read.
It's tangentially relevant, but this is "news for nerds": there was a contest for building realistic space fighters. The winners were clearly function over form, which was nice to see. (Space Volvos?)
but the next evolution of warfare should not be to explore new operating environments, but to deprecate it entirely.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Sure there's stealth in space.
See 'Space is FUCKING HUGE' - being far away is stealthy.
Being in an unexpected location too.
In addition, there is passive stealth.
Point a conical mirror at your opponent (taking care not to get glints from the sun or other local stellar object), and you are basically invisible.
(this is more annoying near planets), disguise.
Then there are active stealth systems, from jamming to cooling the surface of your craft to near absolute zero to avoid IR signatures, decoys, degrading your opponents sensors by various means, in addition to more conventional systems for shortrange combat such as radar absorbant paint.
Note that in space - radar is _short_ range only.
Yes, technically things many millions of miles away have been detected by radar, but if your opponent is using planetary sized objects as ships, you're basically screwed anyway.
RADAR and LIDAR are useful perhaps for point defense type applications, and similar.
RADAR (and LIDAR) can be boosted modestly by increasing the transmit power or recieve sensitivity.
But they rapidly run into the fact that the returned signal decays depending on the fourth power of distance.
So, if you want to take an earth-based radar, and increase the range a hundred times, you need a transmitter a hundred million times more powerful.
The article falls into the common error of thinking there is no stealth in space. Yes, your ship will radiate heat and propellants, but you do have the choice of direction in which to radiate them. Your space ship's bow could be at ambient temperature and projecting active camouflage starfield while directing all radiation out the back. Because there is no atmosphere and thus no scattering, this ship would not be visible if you are looking at its bow. All the emissions are directed away from you and can not be detected by you. Active camouflage takes care of most starfield occlusion tests, and the sheer size of space makes radar impractical, making the ship almost completely invisible.
The best visual depiction of space combat I've seen was in the 1980s comic book Albedo: Anthropomorphics.
Their ships -- which invariably looked like big time-release pills -- could only safely do ftl jumps far, far away from anything, and would then travel conventionally toward a planet or other destination. Combat could take weeks as the ships' computers jockeyed for advantageous positions relative to each other while conserving as much reaction mass as would be needed for their mission, and fired torpedoes (basically small drone stl ships that were guided high speed kinetic weapons). But in the end it would wrap up in seconds, with the crew wearing armored spacesuits to protect them against shrapnel from hits that at late date they knew they probably would suffer. Seemed pretty solid as well as nerve wracking.
But there's not a lot of fun action, and it would be suicidal to not let the computer all but the highest level decisions, so I doubt anything like it will show up on tv.
The only thing that made sense in Battlestar Galactica was the nuclear missiles. The idea of human-occupied fighters is completely 20th-century. If war is ever conducted in space, it will be all kinetic-kill weapons, nuclear bombs and maybe nuclear mines. It will never make sense to put a human (or a similarly-sized Cylon) on board a fighter with a heavy life support system and limit the acceleration to 9-gravity peaks. Dispense with the biological elements and you'll only be limited by how much thrust the engines can produce. Humans, if present at all, will be aboard missile-laden motherships only, directing the battle strategy which will be carried out by automation.
It's not a good site for extrapolating web design theories though.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
...illustrates how military pilots recruited for the US space program thought they could pilot spacecrafts the same way they did with military airplanes, and utterly failed at it. Some of the fools even insisted initially on having direct mechanical control over the RCS thrusters, the way they did it with P-51 Mustangs, before they had to admit that there are too many DOFs for any sort of manual control, and gave in to feedback control systems providing such things as automatic rotation kill and a vast array of semi-manual modes to alleviate the brain from doing having to do rigid body dynamics calculations. A great read, and a vindication to all the control systems geeks out there. BTW, Armstrong, seeing a he is a hot topic these days, mastered the guidance computer and loved it, as far as I can recall.
Ezekiel 23:20
You could have battles that last for generations. Each side would need 10-20 years per maneuver. They would have to instruct their children what they were attempting to do. It could make for some interesting reading.
Are you saying that it wasn't realistic when they re-built the Yamato using Starsha's plans for a Wave Motion Engine so they could get to Iscandar to pick of the Cosmo DNA to save Earth from Gamilon?
In BSG - for instance - every time we see observation of enemy ship positions, the sensors used (DRADIS) appear to be active sensors, not passive. A cylon basestar jumping 3 light minutes away from Galactica wouldn't observe its presence for six minutes. At least in that show, such vast distances weren't particularly useful.
Also it's "dradis". Which isn't explained, but does appear to be effectively instantaneous. When they start a scan they get an image from millions of miles away in seconds. In BSG they have FTL travel, so FTL "radar" isn't out of the question.
Anyway, the incredulity came with the robot Cylon fighters not being able to hit the side of a barn, despite being designed to be killing machines and having faster ships; while the human piloted fighters could take out Cylons pretty easily. And neither side seemed to have guided missiles. It was a lot more gritty than Star Wars, but not really a lot more logical. (Especially at the fucking stupid end, but that's a longer rant for another time.)
Not content with messing up our own planet we are now talking about doing the same with space.
Blow something up down here and most of the bits fall back to the ground quite quickly. Up in space they continue whizzing round in orbit for years making it dangerous for anything else up there. Most of it is bits of space craft that have fallen off (and the occasional tool box), but not all. It was bad enough when the Chinese blew up an old comms satellite a few years ago to show how macho they were but then the USA did the same thing just to show that they were as big dicks as the Chinese.
We don't need these things up there, however: I expect that the military will get the budget to boldly pollute where no one has dropped trash before.
And that's why the Star Wars prequels were forced to introduce swarms of drones.
It's a common problem with sci-fi prequels -- keeping the science (and the societal norms) more advanced than the present day but less advanced than what was shown in the original episodes.
So? That's not it's function.
"Gee, Bob! This apple tastes pretty damn good, but how was it supposed to teach me go program again?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
A space-station might have vested interest in destroying all life on this planet. That's why militarizing space is a really, really, really bad idea. It might mean the end of humanity in the long run.
This Battlestar Galactica argument had been made about the Battle of Britain. If the NAZIs had more jet-powered aircraft, then they would move faster than Britain's RADAR systems could detect.
Whatever you do, don't point out what George Lucas got wrong! He doesn't need a new excuse to change them damn things yet again.
But I also enjoy reading pure Mathematics texts.
The Black Jack books are the first ones I've ever read since the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series where I felt the need to keep a pen and paper nearby. Half the time it seems that Black Jack wins his engagements because he knows how to use a protractor and his opponents don't...
As far as I know, the Cylons let the human ship escape willingly with spies aboard. Didn't the OP watch any episodes before writing this?
I liked the Stars at War series by Steve White and David Weber which had Carriers and Battleships in the fleets, and some alien races that made good use of fighters (most notably the "Tabbies" which were kind of a cross between Kzinti and Klingoms.)
Of course you have to have some way of protecting the crews of all space combat vessels from the acceleration needed to have a battle take place in a reasonable time,and of course the FTL capablity to get your ships there before everybody dies of boredom and old age.
But really the most unrealistic thing about space combat is that of having 2 or more species/civilization at close enough levels of technology at the same time so that there can be any possibilty of a balanced conflict.when it would be the more advanced race wiping out the less advanced people in very short time.
Before the reboot of Battlestar, there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_and_Beyond.
On all aspect of warfare in a space age, they had a pretty good vision of how everything would be done, from space dogfight between light fighters to land assault and extraction.
Regarding FTL advantage in BSG, I always just assumed that DRADIS operated on an FTL medium. After all, DRADIS always appeared to detected ships instantaneously so it must have been either an instantaneous sensor or one that operated at many times the speed of light. There are numerous examples of FTL "radar" in scifi to draw from.
There is no stealth. You need to dump your heat somewhere, else you cook. Sure you can arrange to dump it facing away from the other guy, but that doesn't work once he has a few observation points. As soon as you do anything other than drift your engines are seen instantly. Decoys don't work since they need to have the same mass as the actual ships/missiles/etc you are trying to hide since otherwise the other guy can tell them apart by how their acceleration is different under the same engine exhaust profiles.
Once you are at a tech level of such long range that you don't have multiple angles on the other guy you have also mapped out every object and hence you see everything new. As soon as something is hotter than it should be - because it's running life support or a computer or it makes a course change that isn't just falling under gravity you know. By the time something is anywhere close to being a threat you have multiple angles on it so the heat is visible.
Passive detection is all you need.
Actual combat ends up being whomever runs out of heat capacity loses. As soon as you need to extend the radiators or cook you have to surrender - or else have said radiators blown off and thus cook.
Why wouldn't the Colonials have had fail safe reinforcements waiting in deep space?
The back door kill switch worked quite well, but Pegasus figured out pretty quickly what was going on. As seen in the miniseries the Colonials had comms for hours into the attack. They would have simply told the deeps space reserve to shutdown their networks and counter attack using manual control.
As shown n in Ressurection Ship and Exodus Pt 2 one on one the baseships really were no match for a battlestar.
Also... why ONLY battlestars? Battleship carrier hybrids... but no frigates, no cruisers, no destroyers.
As soon as you do anything other than drift your engines are seen instantly
Since when is anything in space instant?
Light from the sun takes a full 8 minutes to get to Earth. If I am halfway between the Sun and the Earth than anything that I do will take 4 minutes to reach Earth.
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle. However, the information and light is not moving at FTL at all. When you come into a system at FTL and commence your run on the Death Thingie it won't even know you are there for a few minutes, and even then needs to calculate your trajectory to determine you are coming at.
You would need some impressive FTL sensors that gather information at a distance without such limitations before you can start treating space battles as anything close to dog fights around carriers in the ocean where information is being transmitted between units in very small fractions of second instead of minutes.
So much of western sci-fi have pilots of fighters in a style that looks more WW1 than anything else because is good for storytelling. And most "sci-fi" is optimized for that.
Not all of it, you have some anime series where you have something probably more realisitic, like hordes of ships with computers doing the firing, mostly lasers.
Popular science-fiction is sorta "pop culture", and is for the most part very "pulp".
-Woof woof woof!
The MMO EVE online is all about space combat and other than sound in space it does pretty well.
The reason for a carrier type ship with a complement of small fighters is because a large ship cannot combat may small ones, they are too small and too fast for the larger weapons systems to have any effect. EVE has drones for this purpose and it makes a significant impact on game play..
They kinda taste like tasty wheat . . . . kinda . . .
Well, whatever range you happen to put on it, RADAR will make it well easier to others detecting you than for you detecting them.
Rethinking email
D00d, you wrote a 2000+ word essay -- on a Slashdot Blog! -- complaining about how the practical applications of Transporter Beams weren't effectively realized on Star Trek (Which is fictional, by the way. FYI)
You're, like, The Uber-Geek. The ur-Nerd.
I got the same weird mixed feelings of respect and mockery reading that essay that is usually reserved for when I see pictures of some Steampunk Cosplay Guy who's built a working jetpack. Over nights and weekends for the past three years.
Well done, Sir! I think...
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect.php#nostealth
The problem is that most people get their "information" from TV shows and movies that have a limited special effects budget. And a need to be exciting enough to keep the audience interested.
Any form of energy that you put out will be detectable by your opponents at ranges that give them minutes or hours or days or years of reaction time. There's no surprise there.
If you attempt to screen your energy output then you need perfect knowledge of the exact location of ALL of the the enemy sensors.
So you send out decoys. But that means that you're really building additional drives exactly like your drive. And the enemy will detect them with minutes or hours or days or years to prepare. So why not just put weapons on them and use them as part of your fleet?
Most space SF assumes the availability of a really, really powerful power source. Something far beyond a nuclear reactor, or even a fusion plant as currently envisioned. Without that, most craft will be on ballistic trajectories most of the time.
Except for Weber, most SF assumes that battles will be conducted with low relative velocities. In reality, unless both sides work hard to get their relative velocities down, ships that can even get near each other are going to pass at very high speed, and may get a single shot off before having to start a long turnaround.
If the ship you are searching for has been in one spot for more than three minutes when you jump in, then it can be seen immediately. More precisely, for whatever time t it has been sitting, it can be seen at distance d = ct, where c is the speed of light, because light from it has filled a sphere that large. Meanwhile the ship that jumped in starts emitting infrared and reflecting starlight to create the lightsphere in which it is visible.
So the cylons could jump to three light minutes out, shoot beam weapons for 2:59 and then jump away before the Colonials even know they've arrived.
So here's another thing: if the dradis works ftl, then there ought to be a way to use that same technology to create a tight, high-powered beam of "dradis radiation" that works at the same speed as dradis. Then the same equation applies but in which c is the speed of dradis.
People should not fear their government. Governments should fear their people.
...the booming roar of a TIE Fighter looming for the kill. Its always amazed me that a space craft could be so LOUD IN THE VACUUM OF SPACE, where no sound can actually travel. But then Star Wars would have lost much of its grandeur.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Take a look at this:
http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2010/03/while_doing_some_poking_around.php
Decoys, you mean like flares? Which work right now? Which modern missiles have a hardtime telling apart despite one heat source being a gigantic fighter plane and the other a small flame at the end of a small parachute.
You better get off to the military of some country and give them your amazing idea for telling a decoy from the real thing and be rich!
Other option, sit in your mothers basement and spout useless nonsense.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So? That's not it's function.
"Gee, Bob! This apple tastes pretty damn good, but how was it supposed to teach me go program again?
It's from the tree of the knowledge.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
One thing about Battlestar Galatica is that it seemed to emulate naval combat more then air combat, in fact one of my favorite aspects of the show was how the inside of the Galatica, especially the CIC, was portrayed like a submarine; it gave it a very genuine feeling in my mind.
On a separate note; for some reason I was expecting an article about low-orbit aircraft carriers that drop aircraft right into the middle of enemy air space. Now how terrifyingly cool would that be?
...and other science facts. Just repeat to yourself "It's just a show"...
It has a couple of episodes with realistic combat between small space fighters. The whole series is pretty good, if you liked Planetes you'll like Moonlight Mile.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato
How do the Cylons know how many light-minutes they jumped ahead of time?
I think at 3 light minutes away, even a Battlestar would be appear very very tiny.
Plus it was established it took more than 30 minutes to calculate a jump...
But yeah, it very obviously was based on prior earthbound combat.
Next article: Did you ever notice that all these far away alien races speak near perfect English?
I'm always amazed at how noisy space warfare is.
Aircraft Carriers In Space
I imagine, "Spacecraft Carriers in Space" would be more accurate, unless I misunderstand the bit about space lacking air.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
We are hitting small reflector barely 1 meter wide IIRC on the moon and catching the damn photon back. Not many of them, but enough. So that's 1 meter about 600 0000 000 meter away. Your 50.000 km away are peanuts compared.
Heck we are routinely targeting object which are much further away with precision (sure they take a long time to go there but look where we landed curiosity). The only big problem would be to observe the sky in every direction, in real time, and get enough photon back for a reflection. Tactic to send all photon away like on furtive plane would be extremly effective. imagine we put on the moon a non reflective surface instead of a mirror...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
So the cylons could jump to three light minutes out, shoot beam weapons for 2:59 and then jump away before the Colonials even know they've arrived.
They could have... if either side had beam or other light-speed weapons. The Cylons had missiles on basestars and on a few raiders (usually nuclear missiles for the latter). Their raiders' main weapons were energy-based but were not light-speed, nor were they very powerful--no better in fact than the solid cannon rounds used by the human Vipers.
I can still see a use for carriers, although the different dynamics of space would lead to a different kind of carriers.
A carrier would have longer-term life support, maybe better FTL travel or any at all depending on the setup, better protection for fighters not in use (that's all I can think of right now)
Putting that stuff on a fighter might hinder combat capability and/or cost more.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
How else could I have been flying from the TCS Tigers Claw all these years ?
Not sure if anyone has covered this yet, as there are almost 200 comments and I simply don't have the time to go through *all* of them, but there's one little problem in the original question:
"One thing I have never understood is why the humans didn't lose halfway through the first episode. If information moves at the speed of light, and one side has a tactically useful FTL [faster-than-light] drive to make very small jumps, then there is no reason why the Cylons couldn't jump close enough and go, "Oh, there the Colonials are three light minutes away, I can see where they are, but they won't see me for three minutes?"'"
This scenario would never happen, provided the show follows all the other rules of physics associated with light (beyond the FTL thing, of course). The reason being that radiant light (that is non-directional light -- a flashlight pointed into space vs. a lighted city seen from space) does not move in one direction. In other words, if the Cylons could say "they are 3 light minutes away," so too could the Colonials, since the light from both fleets would have reached one another at exactly the same time.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.
And even if you ever do make to the end, the rebel mothership is just gonna kill you anyway......oh wait, that's the video game Faster Than Light.
One thing I have never understood is why the humans didn't lose halfway through the first episode. If information moves at the speed of light, and one side has a tactically useful FTL [faster-than-light] drive to make very small jumps, then there is no reason why the Cylons couldn't jump close enough and go, "Oh, there the Colonials are three light minutes away, I can see where they are, but they won't see me for three minutes?
1) Because three light minutes is fracking 53,962,642.4 kilometers (33,530,831.5 miles) away.
2) Because you do not have any surprise attack weapons for that range.
3) Because you do not have any missiles with build-in FTL drives.
4) So you would get exactly NO advantage what so ever, compared to just jump in within normal combat range, as seen in the movie/series.
Irregular movement.
If you FTL into the system three light-minutes away from me, I won't see you until 3 minutes later.
But by the time you get to where I was, I would be 3 minutes away from there.
Of course, you could argue that irregular movement in space is hard, but, well, so are FTLs.
paintball
The moon is only about 1 light second away from the earth, and yet our most powerful terrestrial and orbiting telescopes are not powerful enough to resolve the spacecraft we've landed on the moon. Without dramatically improved technology, or technology working on completely different principles, it's hard believe you'd be able to detect and track a space vessel that's more than a few light-seconds distant, even with an incredibly massive array. Especially if it was designed to be hard to detect. So I don't buy the idea that you can't hide in space, and if you want to launch a surprise attack in space, you'd still realistically need advanced knowledge of your targets location. Though it's true that you'd be on them before they ever saw it coming. There are stealth aircraft that can achieve this result today.
One thing that often seems wrong is the pace of space combat. Lasers move at the speed of light, and if you have FTL, there's no way you'd resist putting it on a missile. Those factors come together to mean a space battle would be over before the loosing side even realized it had begun.
It's true that ships need to be refit at regular intervals, but spacecraft seem to have more longevity. There are space probes which have been in operation continuously for 35 years with no maintenance whatsoever. Nevertheless, with the exception of Battlestar Galactica (which ends with the ship breaking it's back), most Sci-Fi shows do seem to show spaceships being refit from time to time. So it's not like they are showing that logistics don't exist or aren't an issue, as much as they don't want to boor people to death with meaningless imagined details.
That said, he's probably right there's a huge disincentive to building vary large spacecraft. If you had a large number of smaller ones, it'd provide you with better capabilities, and you could keep them spread out so they wouldn't be as vulnerable to attack.
>>>Also it's "dradis". Which isn't explained, but does appear to be effectively instantaneous.
I figured Dradis was the name of the guy who invented the scanner, and it appears to be similar to our passive RADAR (shows blips of whatever EM targets it receives).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
IMHO, battles in space between necessarily huge craft would be very boring to watch, missiles, energy weapons, rail guns etc, at HUGE distances!
It will all boil down to who gets off the first crippling hit and of course who has the most massive armor.
Space battle; Enemy detected, fire control computer launches attack, bright flash, battle over.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
There is no stealth. You need to dump your heat somewhere, else you cook. Sure you can arrange to dump it facing away from the other guy, but that doesn't work once he has a few observation points. As soon as you do anything other than drift your engines are seen instantly. Decoys don't work since they need to have the same mass as the actual ships/missiles/etc you are trying to hide since otherwise the other guy can tell them apart by how their acceleration is different under the same engine exhaust profiles.
Once you are at a tech level of such long range that you don't have multiple angles on the other guy you have also mapped out every object and hence you see everything new. As soon as something is hotter than it should be - because it's running life support or a computer or it makes a course change that isn't just falling under gravity you know. By the time something is anywhere close to being a threat you have multiple angles on it so the heat is visible.
Passive detection is all you need.
Actual combat ends up being whomever runs out of heat capacity loses. As soon as you need to extend the radiators or cook you have to surrender - or else have said radiators blown off and thus cook.
Gotta love people arrogant enough to pontificate on subjects that have never fucking happened.
It's all 100% complete bullshit and it can't ever and will never make any sort of sense about anything.
Yes, with FTL travel, you can jump 3 light-minutes out from your target, fire sufficient light-speed armaments to destroy your target ten times over, and leave before they have the slightest idea you're there.
But only if you already know where your target is *AND* you can scan the entire 'surface' of that 3 light-minute 'bubble' in less than 3 minutes *AND* you can accurately target something that is sitting 3 light-minutes away *AND* your target is sitting still (or at least making absolutely no changes in it's travel vector).
If none of those are true, you end up in a combat scenario, or your target gets away (depending upon which combination of those factors are false).
There is no stealth. You need to dump your heat somewhere, else you cook. Sure you can arrange to dump it facing away from the other guy, but that doesn't work once he has a few observation points
So, you agree, contrary to your first sentence, that there is stealth, just not under all conditions. Sure if the enemy has a few observation points it cancels your stealth. Of course, the exact same thing is true of any stealth measures inside the atmosphere.
Unless you have a perfect optical cloak, you will always disrupt the pattern of stars behind you. So, I'd imagine military spacecraft would quickly sweep the 'sky' with several telescopes, making detection a probabilistic function given distance.
I thought Stross presented an interesting concept of space combat in Singularity Sky. The element he didn't really use was drones, and I think that would be important and need to be factored in.
Assuming that war doesn't break out while opposing fleets happen to be parked next to each other, they're going to have to approach each other from extreme range. At long range information travels at the speed of light, as do energy weapons. To destroy a an enemy ship you need to direct enough energy at its position. As ships get closer they have more information about the location of their enemies, since there is less light delay. That means that the volume of space they could occupy is lower, and therefore there is less volume of space to direct weapon fire into. When the volume of space the enemy could be within becomes less than the volume of space the ship can target with lethal energy flux then the enemy ship is destroyed. You can of course take shots from farther away and then things become a matter of probabilities, but on large scales luck cancels out and you still have effective ranges.
There are a number of strategies you can use to gain an advantage:
1. If you can expend more energy with your weapons then your effective range increases, since you don't need to narrow the enemy's position down as much.
2. If you can maneuver to a greater extent, then you deny the enemy information about your position. Your position is a somewhat-conical shape centered around your velocity vector, and the size of that volume is a function of your ability to change velocity and your distance from the enemy's sensors. So, increased maneuverability basically makes your range from the enemy effectively farther from the perspective of their trying to target you.
Sensor capabilities would be important on the strategic scale, but not the tactical scale, as long as you can detect enemies beyond your effective weapons range.
I would think that the pace of space battle would be like a submarine engagement today - it could take quite a bit of time to stalk a target until suddenly somebody gets within range and it is over. You might even see an enemy coming for hours or days but be unable to do anything about it if they are sufficiently able to maneuver.
Now, if ships aren't able to maneuver (which is the case with modern technology) then stealth is about all you have. Effective ranges would be MUCH longer since you could direct laser fire at an enemy halfway across the solar system.
In Babylon 5 the Minbari have a stealth device which basically makes their ships invisible to radar. Infrared isn't as much of a problem because they use gravimetric propulsion i.e. reactionless drive so sorry but there are no large IR signatures like in chemical propulsion. Of course such propulsion systems only belong in the realm of science fiction.
They won't see you for three minutes. It will take you three hours to get to them.
Unless you not only have FTL jump capability but also an ability to accelerate to close to light speed in a few seconds or attack them with lasers 'they' still have an opportunity to observe you before you reach them.
Seriously.
Are the ships at rest compared to stars nearby when they finished their jump? At rest compared to the stars nearby when they started their jump? Neither?
A ship that has just finished a FTL jump has an observational jump regardless.
Unless the problem of the amazing amount of debris is solved. When the Chinese tested a satellite killer a few years back, the international response was scathing. It was because the debris makes for more junk to track, and that particular plane is now not very good one to place a satellite into
Now just imagine some serious warfare in orbit, with a lot of tonnage of destroyed ships, satellites and the remnants of the ordnance.
Then after that, imagine trying to get future satellites or ships through that debris field.
This is not like the oceans, where a ship sinks and is out of harms way. This is a place where the results of the battles will be there for a long, long time. Eventually orbital decay will fix that, but eventually can be a long time. What's more, deorbiting of the largest chunks will be a bit distressful. With contaminated big chunks landing in random places.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Well, whatever range you happen to put on it, RADAR will make it well easier to others detecting you than for you detecting them.
Depends on where you put the emitter.
IMHO, battles in space between necessarily huge craft would be very boring to watch, missiles, energy weapons, rail guns etc, at HUGE distances! It will all boil down to who gets off the first crippling hit and of course who has the most massive armor.
Space battle; Enemy detected, fire control computer launches attack, bright flash, battle over.
Even simpler: Space battle: launch lots of moderately smart projectiles at some goodly fraction of C at immobile (planetary, asteroid, space station, whatever) targets.
Done.
Both are still fun, especially if you like the style of older fiction.
There is no stealth. You need to dump your heat somewhere, else you cook.
There is plenty of Steath. 'Stealth' is just trying to give off less information for your opponent to collect. Perhaps you have a ship that will radiate heat from engines or life support. You minimize engine heat by getting going in a direction, and then killing the engines and coasting. A carrier with unmanned drones will be able to send out 'fighters' that have no energy required for life support, and coast through space only emitting heat generated by their computers operating at minimum levels. While you might be able to look at a star with a radar telescope and measure temperatures of stars thousands of light years away, doing so from a moving (inhabited) platform with time constraints and looking for hostile objects that put out relatively no heat (compared to a star) will be challenging. We have many telescopes on earth and we are still routinely surprised by asteroids that end up doing close passes.
I suspect that there will be considerable attempts at stealth, such that it look like submarine space carrier combat. A 'carrier' will be operating in a mode rather akin to a silent running, where the captain will try to generate very little waste heat and other EM noise, running along a course and only using engines to alter speed and heading when needed. A screen of drones will collect info and conduct weapon firing. Kinetic rounds will be launched like torpedoes, running quietly until they are forced to go active. You still can try to approach a foe with a star to your back to mask your heat signature. You might even run cold drones to 'optically' occlude your heat signature. The distances will greatly increase, but there will still be a need for stealth.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Well, that is barring some supertech stuff like say portable wormholes or teleporters that you can use to dump your heat to the other end of the galaxy.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
There are all these assumptions that we would have FTL, and be able to move at considerable fractions of FTL during battle.
BSG suggested that FTL drives needed considerable time to spin up (30+ mins), so their use in battle might similarly be limited depending on how they functionally work. ST:NG had the 'Piccard Maneuver', where short warp drive jumps were made. Numerous SF works have described torpedoes that have warp drives on them to hit an opponent at light speed. (The Berserker series, springs to mind with c+ weaponry).
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Yes instantly meaning the instant the light reaches the sensor, which I thought was obvious.
Yes sure. There is stealth at ranges at which your weapon takes years to reach the target. At distances that actually matter there isn't any.
You seem to be under the impression that "stealth" means "undetectable".
That's not true. Stealth in the past, in the present, and in the future in a military sense just means being so hard to detect that your opponent hat to spend considerable more resources to detect you than you need to detect him.
I'm not familiar with Battlestar, but at least in Star Trek, they have subspace which is FTL communication. Otherwise, you would not be able to communicate with a ship moving away from you at warp speed, which they do frequently. Similarly, if sensor readings were constrained by the speed of light, a ship moving at warp speed would not be able to get sensor readings from an object behind them, which they also do. So the assumption by the OP of information moving at the speed of light may be flawed.
Mirrors:
Defeated with a group of very tiny droid satellites scattered for multiple angles.
Really long away: Can't really hit the enemy, and if you can see the enemy, they likely will see you too.
Lasers: As fast as light soooo -> best weapon to use if target doesn't have reflection ;) When they see it coming, they are already hit.
Getting away: Better be the fastest around, otherwise you are screwed
Getting hit: Your course will change as well, even if hit by laser, tho with laser it is very minimal amount of course change.
Shooting anything with mass or which generates surface heat: Your course will change and you need equivalent opposite force.
Mass drivers OR in other words: Rail gun is going to be super effective as there is practically zero drag except gravitational.
Targeting systems will be of utmost importance too.
Missiles, rockets, space torpedoes: Can be very fast in space, with huge acceleration BUT distances are so long that they need to be guided. Unless you are shooting a scatter of tiny rockets.
Initially as well everything will be very weak, get hit by pretty much anything and you are totally screwed, single hit will often be quite enough until we can get sufficient payloads sufficiently cheap into space to build any sort of armoring apart from reflectors.
Dark paint: I would guess visual cues are only semi important, anything in space will have infrared etc. so you might as well paint your warship bright orange, won't make much difference.
Battles are most likely to be very long and mostly quite boring tactical undertaking due to the vast distances and vast detection ranges.
Kind of playing chess in 3D, where movements are dictated by your engines and position (gravity etc.)
Decisions needs to be quite swift but not fraction of second swift usually, you are likely going to have quite a bit of time to see where it leads.
Probably also will be alot about psychology: Knowing your enemy and knowing how they will react.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Also it's "dradis". Which isn't explained, but does appear to be effectively instantaneous. When they start a scan they get an image from millions of miles away in seconds. In BSG they have FTL travel, so FTL "radar" isn't out of the question.
Also, it's not "dradis". It's DRADIS. http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/DRADIS
Here you go, doing exactly what I was being critical of. Making stuff up. There's NO sign in that show that it is instantaneous. At close range perhaps, which is where most of the engagements happen, but we are almost always SHOWN (for dramatic effect) whatever has just jumped into range. It's visible. Immediately. No light-speed delay. Everything that happens in BSG combat-wise is visibly in the general range of tens of kilometers. DRADIS obviously had fairly limited range on it, with even one raptor micro-jump exceeding it. So even short FTL travel defeated it. Therein lies the evidence that they didn't have FTL detection.
"Oh no... he found the
Also, it's not "dradis". It's DRADIS. http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/DRADIS
Right. Because they speak English on Caprica and use English spelling and rules of grammar. That wiki is just how some fans rationalise things. Anyway, an acronym you speak as a single word rather than spell out (D_R_A_D_I_S) is usually written lower case -- radar, laser, etc.
Here you go, doing exactly what I was being critical of. Making stuff up. There's NO sign in that show that it is instantaneous.
Oh, really? And yet...
It's visible. Immediately. No light-speed delay.
So, aside from you immediately refuting yourself, I can recall them showing ships across a solar system, light hours away.There's never more than a few seconds delay. And that more for the sweeping of whatever it is that they beam out in analogy to microwaves. It was called dradis for a reason, so they could make it do whatever they wanted dramatically. If they had wanted to limit it to real world EM and lightspeed, they would have done that. They had plenty enough antique technology.
You will probably end up having space carriers doing the exact same thing sea carriers do: transport AIRcraft to the vicinity of their target from another medium. Instead of sea to atmosphere, it is space to atmosphere. It won't be important for big naval battles duking it out with the battleships, but instead delivering air support to your invasion forces.
Right. Because they speak English on Caprica and use English spelling and rules of grammar. That wiki is just how some fans rationalise things. Anyway, an acronym you speak as a single word rather than spell out (D_R_A_D_I_S) is usually written lower case -- radar, laser, etc.
Nobody said anything about English. But... the script was written in English and the topic we're discussing was named in the script. You're disputing that, I provided citation. It's now your job to demonstrate my sources as incorrect, preferably without a random ad hominem attack. That wiki states where it got its information. You... just made some stuff up.
RAID. NAS. BIOS. You don't discuss updating the bios on your nas box to ensure there's no corruption on your raid array. While I agree that neither "radar" nor "laser" follow those rules, if you do a bit of research you'll find the origin of your example terms were acronyms. The terms have entered common language as standard nouns.
So, aside from you immediately refuting yourself, I can recall them showing ships across a solar system, light hours away.There's never more than a few seconds delay. And that more for the sweeping of whatever it is that they beam out in analogy to microwaves. It was called dradis for a reason, so they could make it do whatever they wanted dramatically. If they had wanted to limit it to real world EM and lightspeed, they would have done that. They had plenty enough antique technology.
I said visible. As in... can be seen. By the viewer. The object that just jumped in is close enough that there's no notable delay. It's close. It's not far away. It's right there. Rinse, repeat.
You saw things across a solar system. I'll tell you what. Give me an episode name and a time offset and I'll call it evidence.
"Oh no... he found the
C.J. Cherryh did even better in her Merchanter novels --- _Downbelow Station_ won a well-deserved Hugo.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I recommend Glen Cook's novel "Passage at Arms", first published in 1985.
Not so obvious. It seems you implied the moment the heat was released from the engine it could be sensed instantly by remote craft. That is the biggest obstacle to space battles, the speed at which information travels.
IMO, it is often overlooked because in conventional battles light and sound is transmitting fast enough that information is only delayed by fractions of second, if that.
Additionally, one might be overlooking the amount of information. Take a fighter jet involved in a dog fight in Earth's atmosphere. It's onboard sensors only have to monitor a small area compared to space. Take a fighter jet orbiting Saturn. How much information does that fighter jet need to process to detect heat patterns around Mercury?
Having information of what happened 10 minutes ago is not all that tactically valuable for immediate offensive maneuvers. You would need to gather a lot of data and predict where that fighter would be in the future and coordinate your weapons to arrive on target.
Most weapons are not FTL either, not that it would matter. Firing instantly where they were is pointless unless you are operating under the believe they are stationary. Something that would seem to be suicidal in my book. Even with near light speed weapons like lasers, fusion beams, whatever, you still need to hit a target most likely in motion, and from predicted targeting data with lag time measured in minutes.
Space battles will truly be an example of where information is power. Strength will mostly likely be measured in stealth and information processing abilities, not firepower.
The warp jump trick is well documented, known as The Picard Maneuver
Why has no one mentioned this yet? News for Geeks? Where have they gone?
But you painted a scenario where tech could dump heat in a direction away from whoever you're hiding from. The only obstacle to that you pointed out is if the enemy has multiple observation points.
.There's never more than a few seconds delay
In cases like this I like to think of it as if it were a documentary where they filmed much much more than they showed but then slimmed it down for the audience.
There could have been an hours delay but that would have been boring to watch. So the editor removed the waiting around, he also removed the dialogue where they talk about the delay to avoid confusing the audience.
We see evidence of this all the time in TV where they will scramble the fighters and people who were on the bridge one moment are in combat suits and jumping into their fighter seconds later when in fact getting changed and getting to the launch bay could not have taken less than about 20 minutes. No Magic needed, just the editor removing the boring bits for us.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
I wish I had more mod points. You are spot on here, based upon the SSA research I've seen by the USAF.
That the enemy does have multiple observation points is the point. Yes if the enemy isn't looking you have stealth, but that isn't what is being referred to - hiding from an enemy trying to see incoming threats is the goal. I wasn't painting a scenario I was pointing our that a conical mirror doesn't work because the other side isn't stupid enough to not have put sensors scattered through out the solar system - if your conical mirror hides from sensors at opposite sides of an orbit in the Kuiper belt then you are far enough away that you don't matter.
Modern stealth aircraft can be easily spotted with a network of sensing equipment as well. So your argument isn't that there's no such thing as stealth in space, it's that there's no such thing as stealth at all. That doesn't seem like a good argument to me. I think stealth in space would be like stealth on Earth: try to hide the best you can and systematically destroy the enemies sensing equipment to the point that your stealth technology can be effective.
There is stealth on Earth. Submarine warfare being the obvious one - and the one which space stealth tended to be based on in fiction (though the rise of stealth planes in the media might have changed that, I really haven't kept up with sci-fi).
But yes I was trying to refer to vaguely realistic scenarios - which is a joke in itself considering the topic. On earth stealth aircraft work because they reduce the range at which radar can detect them and that is enough to let them path through gaps in what should be overlapping radar coverage (before the range was reduced). And while you could try and build an order or two of magnitude more radar stations it isn't practical.
Whereas in space there's no atmosphere to hide your heat, and you can't help but produce heat (unless you have no people and no electronics). Which means you can be easily detected by cheap passive detection stations which in the practical case will be scattered about the solar system. Making stealth not a viable option. Assuming there's no magitech (I can imagine if there's a cloaking tech of some sort you might be able to transfer your heat into heat sinks which you then eject with their own cloaking tech - but then why are you not just shooting cloaked projectiles from far away rather than trying to stealth your ship?)
There is stealth on Earth. Submarine warfare being the obvious one - and the one which space stealth tended to be based on in fiction (though the rise of stealth planes in the media might have changed that, I really haven't kept up with sci-fi).
But submarine stealth is easily beaten by a network of active and passive sonar stations. In that respect, it's no different than the space stealth scenario we're discussing. If there's sufficient sensing capability there's no stealth, and if there isn't, there is stealth.
But yes I was trying to refer to vaguely realistic scenarios - which is a joke in itself considering the topic.
Well sure, because no military on Earth has any space tech. Except ICBMs, military satellites, the x37b, anti-satellite weapons, etc. It's all near-Earth stuff, of course, but it's not as if the future possibility of military activity deeper in space is all that unrealistic. What's not really known are any of the parameters you need to realistically discuss it. We're discussing this without really knowing anything about ranges, technology levels, propulsion methods, etc., etc., etc.
On earth stealth aircraft work because they reduce the range at which radar can detect them and that is enough to let them path through gaps in what should be overlapping radar coverage (before the range was reduced). And while you could try and build an order or two of magnitude more radar stations it isn't practical.
But for some nations it is practical to build networks that can detect any stealth plane. Activity by stealth planes generally requires careful planning and systematic destruction of radar networks.
Whereas in space there's no atmosphere to hide your heat, and you can't help but produce heat (unless you have no people and no electronics). Which means you can be easily detected by cheap passive detection stations which in the practical case will be scattered about the solar system. Making stealth not a viable option. Assuming there's no magitech (I can imagine if there's a cloaking tech of some sort you might be able to transfer your heat into heat sinks which you then eject with their own cloaking tech - but then why are you not just shooting cloaked projectiles from far away rather than trying to stealth your ship?)
Few things here. First of all, you previously speculated on heat hiding tech that would stream all the heat off in one direction. This is easily within the realm of possibility and some version of it can be implemented with current technology. There's nothing stopping anyone from making a refrigerated shield that pumps heat to a radiator on the opposite side. The big question is how narrow you can make your beam of IR radiation. Depending on that unknown, the network of cheap passive detection stations you need may be relatively small, or unimaginably large. Questions of what the range will be come into it as well. So, we can't really be sure of how easy it will be to detect a stealth spacecraft based on what we know now. Also, as you point out, anything with electronics is going to have a heat signature, so one sides passive detection stations will be detectable by the other sides passive detection stations and each side will presumably seek to destroy the other sides stations.
As far as magical technology for dumping heat goes, it doesn't necessarily need magic. It depends a lot on the time scale you're operating on. You can, for example, have full coverage with a refrigeration shield on the outside of a craft and dump all the heat to a heat sink in the center. The longer you run, the hotter that heat sink will get until it overwhelms the heat pumping technology. In some situations, depending on all kinds of factors we don't know, that may allow militarily useful stealth. Aside from that, you can also sink heat in chemical bonds. This also has limits. It's also conceivable to sink heat in nuclear bonds, say by fusing elements past i
And you hit the real nail on the head. Stationary objects in space are dead. Even non-stationary, but with predictable movements, dead. All I've got to do is accelerate an asteroid at you.
Heat is energy, hopefuly any sufficiently advanced space craft would emit as little energy as possible... with the best case scenario being zero. Stealth and efficiency.
This wasn't an anonymous reader, its from Kotaku. And it's a wildly inaccurate statement made by someone who doesn't even understand what he said or how he literally violated his own logic when saying it didn't apply.
Oh, sure, mod down facts that don't comply with your own agenda. The truth speaks for itself.
How ironic--and hypocritical--for these atheists, who claim to only advocate factual, scientific knowledge, to suppress real, factual evidence.
But it's not surprising. Fundamentalism is dangerous no matter which "side" it's on, because it's about mindlessly submitting to others' agendas. It's not about truth, nor is it about rational thought. Whether it's fundamental Islam, fundamental Christianity, or fundamental atheism, they're all anti-truth and anti-reason. And I say this as a Christian, one who believes that faith and reason are not mutually exclusive--indeed, they are complementary.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."