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I WANT TO BELIEVE

26 (41.9%)

I WANT OFF PLANET NINE'S WILD RIDE

14 (22.6%)

I WARNED YOU ABOUT PLANET X BRO

22 (35.5%)

Total Members Voted: 62

[miauw62]

"space stealth" is a pretty weird thing to discuss without providing a context of how space warfare would look in the first place

[mainiac]

"space stealth" is a pretty weird thing to discuss without providing a context of how space warfare would look in the first place

Oh no these guys are precognatives and know exactly what engineering tradeoffs will manifest.  It's all right there from physics.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

What if we took a page from aircraft and did the opposite? You'd be hard to spot on a thermal sensor if you sprayed superheated chaff in every direction.

[LoSboccacc]

Pick a random direction. They can't be everywhere, can they?

It's even better then that.  That site is going on the assumption that the unstealthed ships can be spotted immediately.  So you know exactly where they are.  You need to avoid radiating heat in less then a one degree by one degree cross section.  So if you can redirect less then one ten thousandths of your thermal emissions, you win

well, we can do a full scan of the space around us in short time with current technology, that's not an assumption

[mainiac]

Man, I wish they'd do one of those full scans and give me a complete list of objects in orbits similar to earth already.

[Culise]

What if we took a page from aircraft and did the opposite? You'd be hard to spot on a thermal sensor if you sprayed superheated chaff in every direction.

The moment you maneuver, you'll pop out of your cloud as all your chaff keeps obeying Newton; they'll know exactly where you are and how you'll move.  Project Rho actually discusses the idea of decoys.  I don't necessarily accept that a decoy must have a power source comparable to the ship to have the same radiation and heat signatures as the mother ship (as long as your decoy is unpowered - decoys that try to "solve" the maneuver problem quickly run into the issues outlined), but you do need to worry in such a case about your decoys also having endurance. 

Basically, stealth in space is maskirovka - you don't hide yourself completely, but rather as something else.  This has parallels to the real world - a stealth bomber on radar is more of a sparrow rather than an outright hole.  Your fancy warship, by thrusting at lower vectors, looks like it has less engine power than it actually does, perhaps more like a freighter of similar tonnage.  I agree that Project Rho makes multiple assumptions, but these do not seem to be entirely unfounded to my eye.  The reason for stealth being harder for man-made objects compared to natural objects is, as noted, temperature; they note present-day capabilities to detect such man-made objects and make assumptions that these will only improve in the future, while tyranny of the rocket equation will persist (that is, detection will be effectively instantaneous if it takes you hours to identify a ship on a trajectory best measured over weeks or months). 

Man, I wish they'd do one of those full scans and give me a complete list of objects in orbits similar to earth already.

The problem with your little implication is that natural NEOs have had just a wee bit of time to cool off and no internal thermal generation to make them stand out.  By contrast, people like to live at temperatures a bit above that of the interplanetary medium, and even chemical thrusters fire at higher temperatures than that as well.

[mainiac]

The problem with your little implication is that natural NEOs have had just a wee bit of time to cool off and no internal thermal generation to make them stand out.  By contrast, people like to live at temperatures a bit above that of the interplanetary medium, and even chemical thrusters fire at higher temperatures than that as well.

But aren't we going on the assumption that anything other then background radiation shows up like a pink elephant in a tutu?  Those things are a red hot 200 degrees Kelvin.  Why hasn't NASA just documented them all already?

[LoSboccacc]

Not because they cant but because they don't need

[mainiac]

A billion dollar asteroid rendezvous mission isn't need enough?  They aren't going to do the supposedly super easy task of listing the asteroids out there before they send out the mission?  God, those NASA guys really suck at their job.  Someone should teach them what physics totally proves about how easy their job is.

[chaotic skies]

Jesus, I knew this entire forum gets off topic easily, but dang. This is impressive. I think this thread has been threadjacked. I'm going to join in!

One of the problems with cloaking in the "Directed avoidance of radiation" school of thought is to find where the enemy is, you must use sensors, which work similar to a sonar pulse. By doing this, you give away your position to the enemy, nullifying the usefullnes of a cloak. It's fairly pointless, unless you intend to avoid knowing where to block radiation.

This is all theoretical of course.