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[Soulwynd]

I think it's more feasible as a stealth tactic, some how, more by having a spy board the ship way before any battle, which wouldn't be called boarding to begin with, and after the battle to salvage things.

Didn't we have something invented back in the 40's called a radar?
...And fuck aluminum coating, it's the future, dammit!

Yes... and we invented anti-radar stealth... no? ... And yes, I know it has attack angles and more stuff I don't wanna type down.

[Darkone]

There is no stealth in space. Please don't bring it up again :<

Soulwynd, I think the term you meant to use was covert, amirite?

[Soulwynd]

There is no stealth in space. Please don't bring it up again :<

Soulwynd, I think the term you meant to use was covert, amirite?

No stealth in space? Care to explain instead of dismissing it?

And yeah, covert ops are the most likely form of... boarding... I suppose.

[RAM]

If you have an engine, then people can see your exhaust, if you have moving parts, people can see your heat. But, to be fair, that is working on current understanding of physics, in order for such a battle to happen in the first place you almost require some sort of FTL, at which point they may be able to shunt almost all of their emissions into a wormhole or something... Also, passive sensors have a limited response, so you may know that someone is out there, but not precisely where they are. Additionally, if they are travelling at relativistic speeds, you won't have long to detect them, so they can drop missiles and be gone before you know it, and boarders are almost certainly robots, some heavy military, some fast military, and some that can override the ships systems and send it to a pre-designated spot for collection. Even f you don't have a clue what the systems are, it should be possible to disable the ships engines and build some of your own...

You can learn alot from sifting through the wreckage, but if you can capture just one ship in working condition that would be huge...

[Tilla]

Stealth does not necessarily mean totally undetectable, just being able to fool the forms of detection the enemy may have - for instance, perhaps cutting engine and drifting over or some other means - at this point we don't even know how a theoretical ship engine will run so it's all really pointless speculation, especially from someone like me who has a physics knowledge that extends to 'gravity makes things fall'

[Il Palazzo]

For everyone who likes the idea of stealth in space, I recommend the link that RAM posted. It's very sobering, so to speak.

[RAM]

It should be possible to launch enough boarding robots to overwhelm a ship's defences. The trick is to have an encounter where you can field that force effectively, and a reputation that makes it preferable to surrender or be disabled by a robot than it is to destroy the ship. Non-lethal disabling would be a nice feature on some of the robots...

[Yanlin]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StealthInSpace

NEXT!

[Soulwynd]

If you have an engine, then people can see your exhaust, if you have moving parts, people can see your heat. But, to be fair, that is working on current understanding of physics, in order for such a battle to happen in the first place you almost require some sort of FTL, at which point they may be able to shunt almost all of their emissions into a wormhole or something... Also, passive sensors have a limited response, so you may know that someone is out there, but not precisely where they are. Additionally, if they are travelling at relativistic speeds, you won't have long to detect them, so they can drop missiles and be gone before you know it, and boarders are almost certainly robots, some heavy military, some fast military, and some that can override the ships systems and send it to a pre-designated spot for collection. Even f you don't have a clue what the systems are, it should be possible to disable the ships engines and build some of your own...

You can learn alot from sifting through the wreckage, but if you can capture just one ship in working condition that would be huge...

Good read. And the problems I thought about detection were already covered in the page and in the original thread. I was thinking about the heat signature but I also was assuming on crazy physicsbbq technologies.

But I do have to agree that stealth doesn't mean undetectable, altho the drifting bit is also covered in the link posted, the heat from the power source and life support can be detected. I imagine, that using current technologies, and picking a trajectory where you keep a close star behind you, could possibly keep you hidden for a while. I also liked the Dr. Forgothisname own contradiction on the detection size of a pixel, which made me want to run over what formulas he used to get to his numbers, but I'm to sleepy to do so right now.

But I'm not sleepy enough to point out Yanlin is yet again being a sophistical googletool or annoying pointless spam.

[Sean Mirrsen]

It's basing on the current understanding of physics. For example, non-reactive engines operating on a theoretical magnetic distortion principle can be undetectable at range. Ships using an analogue of LDS (or stutter warp, as SotS called it) can move at a significant fraction of c and come to a stop in a microsecond. And the only way to see it coming is to monitor optical occlusion and passive emissions characteristic for ships. Which may come from very unexpected directions, considering that stuff like that never really disappears in space. It's also theoretically possible to hide the ship's heat signature behind a shield - a literal one. Think massive forward plate, cooled and attached to the ship with nothing but coolant pipes. It's not going to help in combat, but will keep any heat you radiate off the sensors of the target you are approaching.

[RAM]

I thought you could have a shielded ship which launches drones, the drones could be anything from gunboats to missiles, but the point is that they are fully capable of engaging and destroying an enemy regardless of whether or not the main ship is destroyed, causing any energy directed at you to be energy that wasn't directed at avoiding a gruesome death. meanwhile you are sitting behind a shield that will trigger explosives at a distance and probably rotate so as to prevent weapons that depend on a stream of energy from hitting the same point for an extended period. It wouldn't do squat about relativistic weapons of course, and it would probably need to be impractically heavy or it would be overwhelmed by any half-decent laser, and it would probably save you from the first nuke, but shrapnel would be a problem, and who uses only one nuke... I wonder if the game would let me do that, it is probably just, choose n of x weapon, choose n of y engine, choose n of z shield, send n of them out in A formation...

[Soulwynd]

It's basing on the current understanding of physics. For example, non-reactive engines operating on a theoretical magnetic distortion principle can be undetectable at range. Ships using an analogue of LDS (or stutter warp, as SotS called it) can move at a significant fraction of c and come to a stop in a microsecond. And the only way to see it coming is to monitor optical occlusion and passive emissions characteristic for ships. Which may come from very unexpected directions, considering that stuff like that never really disappears in space. It's also theoretically possible to hide the ship's heat signature behind a shield - a literal one. Think massive forward plate, cooled and attached to the ship with nothing but coolant pipes. It's not going to help in combat, but will keep any heat you radiate off the sensors of the target you are approaching.

Well, yeah. It is. But the sensor the physicist described has some major issues, but he also assumed you could have more than one as well. The problem I saw it was with the pixel size, and if you assume the sky is full of spaceships that do bursts and emit reactor/life support heat, You have no way of telling who's who or even identifying a ship as such, which is a major problem for any sensor. A sensor that simply says there's something there, but I have no idea what it is except it emits this much heat, is nearly useless and considering several ships, including friendlies, it would become annoying quickly. Not to mention that if the ships were close to c or ftling, an optical sensor would be pretty much useless.

So yeah, the guy assumed current technology vs current technology (theorical and whatnot with the current understandings of physics) which, lets be reasonable, sucks for any sort of long range missions.

[DJ]

OK, so you intercept an enemy convoy carrying ammo, food and other supplies. You take out the escorts, and the freighters are left pretty much defenceless. Why would you *not* board them and take those supplies for yourself? I mean, that's pretty much equivalent to space piracy, and if you're saying that there are no space pirates in your universe then I don't want any of it.

[Yanlin]

Considering you probably don't need whatever they're carrying?

Seriously. Only established empires could realistically wage space battle. A few convoys carrying supplies are not worth the trouble. Besides, if it was that important, they'd have a really hefty guard on them.

Pirates in space, are implausible.

[DJ]

If you have infinite resources, why the hell would you start a war in the first place?

In a total war against a roughly equal opponent you can't afford to use less than 100% of your resources because he will use all of his resources and crush you with superior force. This means that you will burn through resources faster than you can produce them, and whoever runs out first will lose. So every handgun you destroy counts, and if you capture it it counts double because it increases your resources and decreases the enemy's at the same time.

And supply routes have always been high priority targets, especially if the enemy forces are far from their industrial base and thus more susceptible to materiel starvation.