How does the MA stealth work really?

Ok i know that they have this wonderful video cam / video screen tech but that won't help didly versus an active sensor as the screen and cam will both reflect the laser or radar wave just fine and then there is the question of its heat radiators because even if it were to radiate in only a 60 degree cone you would only need a dozen sensor platforms to make any direction unsafe so if you can deploy a large sphere of sensor platforms that are themselves stealthy (somehow) then there is no real way that the MA ship will know which way it is safe to radiate and then if your sensor drone gets into the ships radiator beam you should be easily able to detect the ship even at massive range due to the temp that the radiator would need to be active at.

Now for ships other than the MA how do they deal with the waste heat their system generate because it really is not that hard at all to detect something that has something that is heat intensive like a fusion or fission reactor powering it so how exactly are any of the ships in the honorvers able to hide in stealth when they have to deal with their waste heat or do they really just rely on knowing where every enemy sensor is so they know what direction it is safe to radiate in? because otherwise the best way to find any ship that is in stealth and has life support or a reactor on is to simply make a large dense sphere of sensor platforms that are just infrared sensors and a transmitter and that should easily allow you to detect any ship in the whole series.

or should i just pick up my physics cards and go home because the ships are somehow able to just say i do not care about thermodynamics and they have no need to radiate their waste heat. I ask this seriously as if that is the case which would really be the only reason i can think of that would cause the system i am suggesting not to work i would love to know so i do not bring it up again.

The Alignment stealth system sounds very much like a holographic projection system, with cameras and holographic emitters covering as much of the surface as possible. Radar reflections would be dealt with in exactly the same way that modern aircraft stealth is achieved. As it turns out, the flat surfaces used in modern stealth would be much better for holographic projection surfaces than the curved surfaces on most spaceships.

The waste heat projector would obviously have to have a much narrower beam than the 60 degrees you suggest. In past discusions, I have generally assumed a beam angle of no more than a few degrees.

Ultimately, yes, you do have to throw out your physics book, because with current physics neither of these would be practical. But it is actually less far-fetched than Weber's hyperspace physics and gravitics. The fundamental physics is theoretically possible; it is the efficiency that stretches things.

SWM wrote:The Alignment stealth system sounds very much like a holographic projection system, with cameras and holographic emitters covering as much of the surface as possible. Radar reflections would be dealt with in exactly the same way that modern aircraft stealth is achieved. As it turns out, the flat surfaces used in modern stealth would be much better for holographic projection surfaces than the curved surfaces on most spaceships.

The waste heat projector would obviously have to have a much narrower beam than the 60 degrees you suggest. In past discusions, I have generally assumed a beam angle of no more than a few degrees.

Ultimately, yes, you do have to throw out your physics book, because with current physics neither of these would be practical. But it is actually less far-fetched than Weber's hyperspace physics and gravitics. The fundamental physics is theoretically possible; it is the efficiency that stretches things.

in that case assuming a 3 degree cone you would need 5,894 drones in order to cover the whole sky now these sensors do not need to be that powerful as a 3 degree cone to emit all of the waste heat of a fusion or fission powered space ship or even just a ship with room temp spaces in it might as well be an infrared laser so these sensors would simply need a Radioisotope thermoelectric generator to power a simple computer to process an infrared sensor and a radio transmitter so these could be some really really small things with a power supply good for several years and almost dirt cheap and if you deploy these you would be able to cover all of the sky.

now if you want to use an impeller driven platform that is a bit more impractical due to the shear number needed but i am pretty certain that if you set up a large number of stealth sensor platforms in some sort of orbit they should be able to find the ship no problem.

But if we are talking about only needing to find these ships once they are in system you could probably pretty cheaply deploy a huge number of infrared sensor platforms all around your star system and if they are stealthed you should no longer need to worry about another Oyster Bay style attack launched against your system as you should be able to pick up any MA ship that is in your system or just inside of your sensor sphere

captinjoehenry wrote:in that case assuming a 3 degree cone you would need 5,894 drones in order to cover the whole sky now these sensors do not need to be that powerful as a 3 degree cone to emit all of the waste heat of a fusion or fission powered space ship or even just a ship with room temp spaces in it might as well be an infrared laser so these sensors would simply need a Radioisotope thermoelectric generator to power a simple computer to process an infrared sensor and a radio transmitter so these could be some really really small things with a power supply good for several years and almost dirt cheap and if you deploy these you would be able to cover all of the sky.

now if you want to use an impeller driven platform that is a bit more impractical due to the shear number needed but i am pretty certain that if you set up a large number of stealth sensor platforms in some sort of orbit they should be able to find the ship no problem.

But if we are talking about only needing to find these ships once they are in system you could probably pretty cheaply deploy a huge number of infrared sensor platforms all around your star system and if they are stealthed you should no longer need to worry about another Oyster Bay style attack launched against your system as you should be able to pick up any MA ship that is in your system or just inside of your sensor sphere

You only need 5894 sensors to detect the beam IF all your sensors are arranged in a sphere with the stealth ship in the center. In actual practice, that's not what happens.

What you actually need to do is arrange your sensors in a sphere around your star system, and try to detect the stealth ship before it gets too far into the system--a very different situation than what you were imagining.

Let us suppose, for instance, that you have a star with a hyper limit of 22 light-minutes. We will assume that you can detect the beam from at least 1 light-minute away, and have arranged your sensors at 23 light-minutes, hoping to detect the ship before it gets 1 light-minute closer in (i.e. crossing the hyper limit). If the beam has a dispersion of 3 degrees, you need your sensors no further apart than 3.15 light-seconds. To cover the entire sphere 23 light-minutes in radius, you need at least 770,000 sensors.

SWM wrote:

captinjoehenry wrote:in that case assuming a 3 degree cone you would need 5,894 drones in order to cover the whole sky now these sensors do not need to be that powerful as a 3 degree cone to emit all of the waste heat of a fusion or fission powered space ship or even just a ship with room temp spaces in it might as well be an infrared laser so these sensors would simply need a Radioisotope thermoelectric generator to power a simple computer to process an infrared sensor and a radio transmitter so these could be some really really small things with a power supply good for several years and almost dirt cheap and if you deploy these you would be able to cover all of the sky.

now if you want to use an impeller driven platform that is a bit more impractical due to the shear number needed but i am pretty certain that if you set up a large number of stealth sensor platforms in some sort of orbit they should be able to find the ship no problem.

But if we are talking about only needing to find these ships once they are in system you could probably pretty cheaply deploy a huge number of infrared sensor platforms all around your star system and if they are stealthed you should no longer need to worry about another Oyster Bay style attack launched against your system as you should be able to pick up any MA ship that is in your system or just inside of your sensor sphere

You only need 5894 sensors to detect the beam IF all your sensors are arranged in a sphere with the stealth ship in the center. In actual practice, that's not what happens.

What you actually need to do is arrange your sensors in a sphere around your star system, and try to detect the stealth ship before it gets too far into the system--a very different situation than what you were imagining.

Let us suppose, for instance, that you have a star with a hyper limit of 22 light-minutes. We will assume that you can detect the beam from at least 1 light-minute away, and have arranged your sensors at 23 light-minutes, hoping to detect the ship before it gets 1 light-minute closer in (i.e. crossing the hyper limit). If the beam has a dispersion of 3 degrees, you need your sensors no further apart than 3.15 light-seconds. To cover the entire sphere 23 light-minutes in radius, you need at least 770,000 sensors.

ok that may be true what you are saying but you could heavily reduce the number of sensors you need by having the be in orbit around the star. also if you have all of the waste heat of a whole ship that is powered by fusion being directed in a 3 degree cone you are literally talking about more or less a massive infrared laser which you should be able to detect easily at any range in a star system because a starship that is at 32 degrees internally and is 154m long and a beam of 18m and is radiating in all directions you can detect that at 38,800,000 km or about 129 light seconds now this stealth ship has a fusion power plant which produces a huge amount of waste heat is much larger and has a room temperature living space and is radiating all of that energy in 1/5894th of the same area which i would guess would allow it to be detected at just about any range inside of a star system. here is the website i got this from (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... detect.php) about 3/5 th of the way down.

Well, yes, but we've all tacitly agreed that there must be some near-magical way to deal with most waste heat that doesn't involve radiating it, because otherwise all Honorverse ships would vaporize themselves very rapidly just by turning their drives on.

(At least Weber is aware of the waste heat issue...)

tonyz wrote:Well, yes, but we've all tacitly agreed that there must be some near-magical way to deal with most waste heat that doesn't involve radiating it, because otherwise all Honorverse ships would vaporize themselves very rapidly just by turning their drives on.

(At least Weber is aware of the waste heat issue...)

oh thats great and never mind this whole thread but if you could point me to anything from DW that shows he is aware of this i would appreciate it.

captinjoehenry wrote:ok that may be true what you are saying but you could heavily reduce the number of sensors you need by having the be in orbit around the star.

The orbital period at the hyper limit is decades. Good idea, but orbiting sensors isn't going to help you.

Mission of Honor, chapter 9, from our only major description of Mesan stealth on operation

Current technology could recapture and use an enormous percentage of that heat, but not all of it, and what they couldn't capture still had to go somewhere. And, like other navies' stealth systems, the MAN's dealt with that by radiating that heat away from known enemy sensors.

Not a lot of textev but all I claimed was that he was aware of the issue.

tonyz wrote:Mission of Honor, chapter 9, from our only major description of Mesan stealth on operation

Current technology could recapture and use an enormous percentage of that heat, but not all of it, and what they couldn't capture still had to go somewhere. And, like other navies' stealth systems, the MAN's dealt with that by radiating that heat away from known enemy sensors.

Not a lot of textev but all I claimed was that he was aware of the issue.

Maybe they are using David Brin's reefer (refrigerator laser) from the Uplift Series