Honorverse Sensor Capability

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:IIRC they have said the weak link is the person monitoring the sensors not the sensors themselves. How well trained, experienced,and/or alert are they?

That's a BS plot excuse.

Computers don't get bored or go the the bathroom. All of this would be run by expert systems that know exactly what to look for and have literally hundreds of years of developement.

Daryl wrote:I agree John. The remarkable thing is just how well it still hangs together overall now, not the few exceptions like this. I have noticed subtle changes, like in the earliest books planets risked nuclear bombardment from space, but in the later ones it switched to kinetic projectiles.

kzt wrote:Yes, grav sensors are passive only. Active sectors are impacted by the inverse square law, so to spot a target at 10x range requires 100x emitted power. This becomes absurd fairly fast. However you can detect the emitter at vastly longer range than the emitter can detect returns from its active sensors. David has said that effective active sensors can detect missiles at a few million km.

Basically the way in the real world you spot objects with a power plant at many millions of km is by their thermal emissions. The background temp of the universe is a few degrees above absolute zero, so an object that is warm enough for people is hundreds of degrees above background and a running high energy power source is thousands of degees above background. These are not hard to spot at 10s of million of km range. For reasons of story David says they don't do this.

But this is a decent discussion of the real world:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/r ... detect.php

JohnRoth wrote:It's also one of many, many symptoms that the universe was developed in the early 90s rather than today. Yes, that's true of a modern expert system.

It most certainly isn't true of the technology of 1990.

phillies wrote:Ummh, not quite. The signal fades as 1/r^2 on the way out, and another 1/r^2 on the way back, so that radar fades as 1/r^4. My source is the seminar by Shapiro (iirc, been nearly 50 years), the fellow who did the first radar tracking (earth-based mapping was a bit later) of the planet Venus.

kzt wrote:

phillies wrote:Ummh, not quite. The signal fades as 1/r^2 on the way out, and another 1/r^2 on the way back, so that radar fades as 1/r^4. My source is the seminar by Shapiro (iirc, been nearly 50 years), the fellow who did the first radar tracking (earth-based mapping was a bit later) of the planet Venus.

That's probably right, so 10,000 times the radiated power for a 10x range increase.

Detection range of a radar source would be inverse square.

Louis R wrote:all those numbers depend on how good your beam-forming is.

1/r^2 is only exact for an isotropic radiator or one where the beam diverges as if coming from one. [for the layman, a spherically symmetric source assimilable to a point]

JohnRoth wrote:

kzt wrote:That's a BS plot excuse.

Computers don't get bored or go the the bathroom. All of this would be run by expert systems that know exactly what to look for and have literally hundreds of years of developement.

It's also one of many, many symptoms that the universe was developed in the early 90s rather than today. Yes, that's true of a modern expert system.

It most certainly isn't true of the technology of 1990.

WLBjork wrote:One thing that is still true is that any computer system is only as good as it's programming (as Tesla found out relatively recently).

In fact, I'm now wondering if maybe the lack of some analyses to run automatically is as a way of preventing laziness and accepting "computer says..." at face value.