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[LoSboccacc]

shutting engine down in a debris field or around a gravity well sound like a very bad idea, inertia is an harsh mistress.

by the way it is extremely easy to track an invisible ship: on the assumption you have turned off the engine, your trajectory becomes extremely predictable. you can change it only so much in the time you're off visual.

once you're detected, you're in a even worse position. given that your trajectory can change only by the maximum delta v your ship can express, I can just send probe along the probability cone and keep you in sight all the time. a passive sensor is all it's needed, nothing fancy.

[Sirus]

If you shut down in orbit around a planet, you're in orbit. Turning off your engines wouldn't make you plummet towards the ground. And it's possible that some debris is large enough to hide in/behind. If your ship matches the velocity of the debris, you're in no real danger.

Now, there are ways of maneuvering slightly that don't involve engines. Perhaps you could vent some compressed gas into space, slightly altering your trajectory. I've also read some sci-fi stories that used gyroscopes or something to make fine movements. In space, those tiny changes can create a very large area to keep in eye on, if we're still under the assumption that a stealthed ship is untrackable.

And yes, that's the risk of stealth; if you get caught, you're probably dead. In fact, you were probably dead anyway. Stealth isn't (and shouldn't be) an "I win, lol you fail" button, but a last chance to evade detection.

[LoSboccacc]

gas are hot, very easy to detect. (hot is an extremely relative term in space)

gyroscope change the direction you point to, afaik, you still need thrust to actually move into that direction.


space is quite large by itself, but we can detect right now planets just because of the dimness they make on the star they pass on, with a resolution that allow an educated guess of the atmosphere they have...


here, read all of this: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php

[Sirus]

"Arrgh. You guys suck all the fun out of life! It's a GAME, dammit!"

That's me right now

It's all interesting stuff, but the fact is that a lot of sci-fi will Hand Wave stealth in somehow. The softer the sci-fi, the crazier it will become. We don't know if Notch will include stealth or not, but if he does it will be for fun, not realism, and I personally do not have a problem with that.

[LoSboccacc]

me neither. is when they start adding justifications other than handwavium that irks me 

[Sowelu]

Important thing to remember about stealth:

Remember what era this game's computers are from.  Then have fun writing a sensor that can sweep the entire sky for a relatively-miniscule heat trace.

[Girlinhat]

The thing about stealth is that thermal will see you anywhere.  You can hide from thermal, but at that point you're "military secure".  If you take a computer, unplug it from the internet, disable power, and remove the mouse and keyboard, then no one may access the computer.  But, the computer cannot do anything either.  In stealth, you may retain heat and you may hide - barely - but you can't do anything either.  That includes living.  If you're a life form that enjoys being above absolute zero, then you're going to eventually overheat your ship.  Body heat, and especially life support systems, run very hot compared to empty space.  Even if you can store your heat, you're still generating heat and you'll overheat eventually - and you can't do anything productive in that time either.

Also let's not forget things like radar that may detect a craft anyways.

[sluissa]

There also happen to be all these other points of light at various distances and sizes. Infra red, aka, thermal, is just another form of light. Now, in notch's game, this will obviously be of much less relevance, if he really has it take place after most stars have cooled down. Still, conservation of energy says the heat from all those stars has to go somewhere. Why wouldn't ambient space be much warmer?

I honestly don't know, but it's not as simple as "hey, space is all cold, so it'll be easy to pick out a warm dot against it." Now, warm moving dot, I can see that. Parallax helps a ton.

[Mini]

Why wouldn't ambient space be much warmer?

Because there's (almost) nothing in ambient space to be warm.

[Sowelu]

Why wouldn't ambient space be much warmer?

Because there's (almost) nothing in ambient space to be warm.

Ambient space is warmer than you'd think, actually.  It's just very...not dense.

Still!  Space is really big, and if you look far enough in any direction, there's sure to be something warm out there.

[TheBronzePickle]

If you look out at the night sky, do you see just white?

No? That's because even though there's probably enough stars out there that every inch of the sky would be covered, most of those stars don't project enough light to Earth to be seen by the naked eye when they're being compared with the much brighter-appearing stars.

The same thing holds true with infrared radiation. Look out into the cosmos, and anything that's a lot closer is going to be more bright because more of the emitted radiation is reaching the receptor. Basically, if you're going to try and be stealthy, you're going to want to be close to something else so that your heat signature blends together, or you're going to want to be able to not emit radiation at all, or at least focus its emission into a narrow cone or ray that only the fortunate will be able to detect.

[Girlinhat]

Perhaps the only viable stealth would be orbiting close to a star and ejecting all your emissions towards the star.  Then again we currently have the technology to see relatively tiny specks on the sun, so by the time we can orbit a sun that close we'll probably have the tech to see the cold spots where your ship makes a void.

I always compare things thoughtfully myself.  We can currently use a decades old Hubble Telescope to look out and see starts hundreds of lightyears away wobble on their axis ever-so-slightly and determine that there is a planet, how many planets, the size and density of them, and if they may or may not have things like liquid water or methane seas or other terrain.  When you think about THAT, and think about everything we could do with another hundred years of technology, stealth becomes very hard to imagine.

[sluissa]

Also think, this far in the future, most of the galaxies will have compressed themselves quite a bit. While the space between galaxies will still be just as, if not more empty than ever, galaxies themselves (where nearly all the interesting stuff is) will be more dense than ever. This increased density = more stuff to be hot. If you look at pictures of galaxies, the older ones tend to be the brighter ones, because almost all of the brightness is focused near the center.

[sluissa]

Perhaps the only viable stealth would be orbiting close to a star and ejecting all your emissions towards the star.  Then again we currently have the technology to see relatively tiny specks on the sun, so by the time we can orbit a sun that close we'll probably have the tech to see the cold spots where your ship makes a void.

I always compare things thoughtfully myself.  We can currently use a decades old Hubble Telescope to look out and see starts hundreds of lightyears away wobble on their axis ever-so-slightly and determine that there is a planet, how many planets, the size and density of them, and if they may or may not have things like liquid water or methane seas or other terrain.  When you think about THAT, and think about everything we could do with another hundred years of technology, stealth becomes very hard to imagine.

Stealth also only matters in the short term. Give anyone long enough to find something hidden, and with enough persistence, they'll find it. Stealth works best when either A: They aren't looking for it in the first place. Or B: It only need to be hidden temporarily.

[sambojin]

32 pages of theorizing and counting. I read page 1 and page 32. This is my failing. It is an internet forum afterall. But, now we are onto stealth.

It IS a fact of life the no matter how fine your resolution of scanning is, you still have the actual scales between values in scanning. How can you detect one particular thing if you are trying to detect important things? Big values and small. I could fart beside you, you could feel the warmth, but on a warm day it would be very hard to detect that fart due to ambient temperature and our own infra-red emissions. With the best detectors of today, from a distance, my fart would have made no sound. Or be a normally anomolous signal that is expected in the background, farting or not. To a long-range detector at least. You would have thought a "Shit-Tonne-2000" just went off beside you, but to a long range detector it wouldn't have registered a bleep.

There's no doubt that there could be very specific fart detectors made, even for very specific environments and situations. But normally, I'm happy that whilst they are not so much "Silent but deadly", they probably aren't detectable by infra-red spy satellites.

/sarcasm