n7axw wrote:Thank you, SWM for a very informative post. I want to make it clear that I am exploring ideas here, not arguing. That being said, I wonder...
If some sort of pinging might work, obviously not sonar in the vacuum of space. But perhaps with light or radio equiped drones. The thing is, the stealthed target would be made of material that would be heavily absorbant of whatever sort of detection device it was defending against. But it could be that a low freq radio wave would be absorbed differently by the target than it would be in the vacuum the surrounding space around the target which might be detectable.
If to build a bit on my previous post, using large numbers of drones in crisscrosing patterns should put some drones in a position to pick up heat signature of stealthed target. I presume designating a search pattern developed around last known location allowing for time of transmission from drones.
The key, I would think, would be to implement as many of these sorts of ideas as possible both high tech and low tech. The assumption is that the stealth will be defending against common and probable means of detection and could be vulnerable to something unexpected in the same way that someone with a pulse rifle can still be taken out by a rock from a slingshot coming from an unexpected direction. Most ideas will come up dry, but eventually something will strike paydirt.
Don
Yes, one weakness of a holographic stealth system in the real world is that it is impossible to make it work efficiently at all possible wavelengths. It should be possible to find some wavelengths which it fails to work or produces excess radiation. But, you would have to study some examples of the technology to figure out which were the vulnerable frequencies. Without that prior knowledge, you would have to scan as many frequencies as possible yourself, in hopes of coming across it. That drastically reduces the efficiency of your search.
The heat signature will also be extremely hard to find. The text notes that waste heat is collected and radiated from a very small portion of the ship in a narrow beam. It doesn't give details, but the smartest solution would be to beam it as a maser. If the heat is radiated as a maser, you have almost no chance of spotting it unless you have really vast numbers of detector platforms--especially if the target is deliberately aiming the beam to avoid hitting any detectors it notices.
You're ideas on what to try are spot on. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it would be easy, even if you found something that worked somewhat. If the system was done right, it could be really hard to find the vulnerability, and really hard to use that vulnerability, too.
Some other more esoteric ideas that have come up in past discussions include:
* using massively powerful tractor beams to scan for unidentified masses
* developing a kind of FTL comm sonar ping (active scanner)
* developing a detector for the odd interaction of the spider drive with the hyperspace interface (passive scanner)
The latter two are pure speculation about the physics of the Honorverse; there is no way to evaluate them without details known only to RFC. All three share the same basic problems that the other methods have--space is big, and it is hard to detect a tiny signal against the background noise.
