Heat masking:
----------------------
Several methods. I use superconducting wire. I refrigerate my hull. I suck the
excess heat into my ship and every so often drop out an insulated, stealth
coated trashcan which contains (under the stealth coat and insulation) one
freakin pile of heat in a what is essentially a disposable heat sink. You
can't see it (it's encased in an insulated case) and you can't see the ship
(same deal). Eventually, your insulated case will heat and your trashcan will
be visible, but you'll be long gone potentially.
Or maybe in 2183, I suck up all that heat and have a near 100% efficient way
to turn it back into power I can use elsewhere - store the energy from
heat in my beam capacitors for example.
Not sufficient over weeks of operations, but for the times where one goes to
high readiness/alert and high EMCON levels, maybe quite sufficient.
And how easy do we think it is to pick out diffuse radiation of heat from the
background with a passive thermal sensor? How long does it take scanning the
region of the ship to detect it? I'd say a while... and there is a lot of sky
to scan if you don't know where to start.
Drones
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UAVs for FT. I need a system to go active in order to lock on real hard on a
target. But when I spark it up, I say "shoot me" with a neon sign. Solution?
Drones. I launch my scan-drone (passive). When I need a firing solution,
I bring it active (it links to me via either a neutrino comm system or a laser
- neither of which is detectable by emission unless you are in line of
transmission AFAIK) and I get the fire control solution without risking my
ship. You fire, you kill my drone. Oh woe is me. I have twenty or a hundred or
a thousand of them. Okay, if you think sensors are expensive, it might not be
cheap BUT it will be cheaper than losing my BB. And then this data is
(by similar hard to intercept/detect link) spread around the fleet of
passive 'silent' ships.
General
Aren't this kinda like Seaquest DSV's whiskers?
A neat idea I think!
Bill
Thomas Barclay mentioned: << Drones
THESE THESE THESE!
<< Aren't this kinda like Seaquest DSV's whiskers? >>
Bill (ashamed now to admit he teaches ENGLISH)
Earlier Thomas Barclay suggested
> Drones
Solution?
> Drones. I launch my scan-drone (passive). When I need a firing
<Snip>
> And sensor drones would
This sounds very like the scout/sensor drones in games such as 'Star
Cruiser' and 'Brilliant Lances' and is a concept I like a lot. The way I see
to integrate it in to FT is: Build your drones like MT missiles but fit them
with a Fire Control system (based on the assumption that FCs have the
targetting sensors). When a drone gets near a target ship the friendly ship it
is linked with through the ships own FC (another assumption) can now fire on
the target based on the distance between the drone and the target. You can't
of course fire further than your weapons can reach. For example if the target
was 10mu from the
drone and 30mu from the firer, the firer would roll 3 dice for class-3
beams instead of 1 die for that range (30mu), but it would still be out of
range
of smaller classes. Also if it was firing P-torp you would only need a
+3
instead of the normal 6 to hit. I did consider if one drone should allow
multiple ships to use it but I think that would make it too powerful a system.
They would be almost invunerable as they can't be hit by main weaponary being
too small to notice and can only be hit by PDS if they get within 6mu of a
ship carrying an ADFC. The PDS integral search and targetting sensors are
designed to deal with threats to the parent ship so it needs the more powerful
sensor of the ADFC to locate the drone. On the other hand drones do have a
limited operational life Comments?
> Build your drones like MT missiles but fit them with a Fire
When a drone
> gets near a target ship the friendly ship it is linked with
Let's consider the logic of this. You paint a target with your own FC, the
signals come back with a delay for distance, and you shoot based on that. With
the drone, the drone paints the target, receives the signal with a delay for
distance from target to drone, processes it (another delay) and passes the
information on to you (a third delay). Total distance delay will be at least
as much as if you had pinged the target directly and will usually be more,
plus you have the drone's processing time. I don't see that as making a hit
more likely.
What it _will_ do is allow you to get ID information sooner, and
allow your ships time to close or evade as needed. I'd think that would tend
to be part of the campaign scale game, though.
Laserlight
> Let's consider the logic of this. You paint a target with your
It makes it more likely because the drone is supplying the firer with a
constant update of the targets position. The information delay would be
between the drone and the target. If it's 10mu, then the info delay is 20
(double the distance). The info then gets sent to the firer who is 20mu, so
the info delay is 20. Total time 40. As opposed an info delay of 60 between
firer and target 30mu distance. Looking at this, I'm not sure if I'm being
clear, but it is 1:00am
> Laserlight
Tony said
> It makes it more likely because the drone is supplying the
First off, you don't need to worry about the time for the outbound signal. If
the signal reflects off the target at T0 and is received by the FC at T1, all
you're concerned about is how far the target moved between T0 and T1 (we will
ignore the time for weapons fire to arrive since that's not relevant to
whether a drone helps or not).
However, you have to count the total time from target to the
firer. You either have the time for a straight-line distance
from the target to the firer, or you have the time for a
triangle from target to drone to firer. Unless you have FTL
comms--which is specifically not canon--you're not going to be
able to get a faster time going around two sides of a triangle that taking the
direct route.
Where a drone will help is when you: a) happen to have maneuvered it close
enough to a formerly unseen target that the drone can see it when the main
ship can't; b) when you want an expendable platform for active searches (or
active ECM jamming); or c) when you want cheap sensors so you can deploy a
screen to cover a greater area than your ships can.
From: "Laserlight" <laserlight@quixnet.net>
> First off, you don't need to worry about the time for the
What's more, assuming you've made several measurements, you can predict where
the target is most likely to be at time T1.
Consider a "realistic" scenario: Range to target is, say 1 light second,
3x10^8 metres, 300,000 km.
Time for processing is negligible - a few milliseconds at most.
Target is randomly evading, pulling 6g ( g = 10 m/sec rather than
9.8 here) in a direction normal to the direct path from firer to target.
Firer knows where the target _WAS_ 1 second ago. Assuming
a laser that takes 1 sec to slew and get to full power, this means a delay of:
1 sec from reflection 1 sec for weapons prep 1 sec for laser to reach target.
At 6g, 3secs means about a 270 meter displacement from predicted position. If
we assume 2 secs, it's 120 meters.
Assuming a 10 millisecond delay for processing, it will be on the order of 272
metres. Assuming an illuminating drone is a full 3000 km away from the firer,
make that 274.
It's actually harder to do fire control using 127mm main guns in a naval
application at the current time, as flight times of shells are so large. At
10,000 metres, a fast patrol boat has oodles of time to evade between
> Assuming a 10 millisecond delay for processing, it will be on
Once the shell hits, though, the patrol boat has a serious problem. With the
laser you either have to deliver quite a punch all at once to get though the
armor & hull, or you have to
keep hitting--not just the ship, but the same spot on the
ship--while it evades. A little tricky.
Anyone know how much energy it would take to burn a hole through, say, 1cm of
aluminum? And multiply that by a factor of "lots" since the materials science
people will be working out ways to keep you from making ugly holes in their
nice new ships.
Maybe ship hulls will be fiberglass--the cloth matrix woven from
superconductor thread--laminated together with a layer of
ablative material on top.