STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

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White
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STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by White »

I'm guessing most of you think I'm a complete tool at this point, but hear me out.

Note: This is a thought experiment on the technical feasibility of an idea. It is not meant to be an example of logistical genius or practicality.

The loroi are often intercepting attempted Umaki incursions into their territory.

Therefore, If the loroi can predict where the Umaki will be by using their Farseers and can arrive at that location before the Umaki do, then they could plant some radar deflecting super weapon with a black paint job at the battle site ahead of time and catch the Umaki off guard.

Now, let me tell you about my idea of how the Loroi could make ships stealthy.

If we note that the main obstacle to workable stealth ships is that a ship has a high temperature relative to empty space, the obvious answer to making a ship stealthy is having a coolant.

This coolant would need not only to cool the hull of the ship but also store and vent that heat, preferably to another dimension, be light weight and low volume, use little energy, pilot the ship and be great in bed.

Yes, the coolant I'm talking about is a Teidar. More specifically a giant weapons system filled with Teidar wearing heating suits and spamming thermokenisis.

Because only the hull needs to be cooled, I assume Teidar could maintain livable conditions on the crewed portions of the ship.

The ship, or weapons system, probably won't be in the exact position the battle takes place and won't be able to use it's main engines while remaining stealthy, but if you have enough of these ships over a wide enough area and you give them powerful enough weapons, then you could deal great damage and disorient your enemy at a critical moment.

I assume that the ships would need to be powered up and ready ahead of a battle in order to give the Teidar inside enough time to cool the ship. There might be a "cooling rota" of Teidar who keep the ship cold so that it can be ready for battle at a moments notice.

When an attack is impending, there would probably be a separate ship that would accelerate the stealth-ship to the right velocity so that the cooled craft wouldn't need to heat itself up by burning it's engines. This craft would than decelerate the stealth ship once the jump is completed before disconnecting and taking some other role in the fleet.

(If the ship were light enough, perhaps enough Teidar could decelerate it by themselves. This would allow for a stealth ship to be useful even in engagements where your party is the second to arrive as your jump flash would be hidden within the flashes of the rest of the fleet.)

(Using the thermokenisis values given in the insider while assuming that the kilogram of material heated is water, I calculated that it would require a bit over eleven million Teidar with a PK power of 40 to accelerate the tempest at 30 G for sixty seconds. Check my math.)

Let's hope the ship is light.

"The energy required to accelerate Tempest's 1200 kilotonne mass at 30g for 60 seconds is 51.8 terajoules -- roughly the yield of a tactical nuclear weapon." - Arioch

The Teidar would probably be able to change the orientation of the ship using telekinesis in order to asjust its aim.

I imagine that two possible weapon's systems might be a rail gun with super cooled projectiles or a Wave-Loom that is hidden inside a super cooled metal hull that opens up just before the weapon fires.

The question of where the Loroi would find so many Teidar to spare could be answered by the fact that they have been fighting this war for twenty five years if I read the timeline correctly. Considering that a Loroi is war ready by age eight, this should have been enough time to create a substantial clone army.

Of course this argument is dependent on the idea that large weapons systems would be light enough while carrying enough Teidar to make this feasible.

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Razor One »

White wrote:
Therefore, If the loroi can predict where the Umaki will be by using their Farseers and can arrive at that location before the Umaki do, then they could plant some radar deflecting super weapon with a black paint job at the battle site ahead of time and catch the Umaki off guard.
This assumes that Radar is the primary method of detection, when in actual fact there is likely to be multiple means of detection all employed simultaneously precisely to prevent such tactics. LIDAR, Gravimetric sensors, thermal detection, etc. Even a black colour scheme is still vulnerable to being spotted via occlusion of background stars and material.

Now, let me tell you about my idea of how the Loroi could make ships stealthy.

If we note that the main obstacle to workable stealth ships is that a ship has a high temperature relative to empty space, the obvious answer to making a ship stealthy is having a coolant.

This coolant would need not only to cool the hull of the ship but also store and vent that heat, preferably to another dimension, be light weight and low volume, use little energy, pilot the ship and be great in bed.

Yes, the coolant I'm talking about is a Teidar. More specifically a giant weapons system filled with Teidar wearing heating suits and spamming thermokenisis.

Because only the hull needs to be cooled, I assume Teidar could maintain livable conditions on the crewed portions of the ship.
I'm reasonably certain that Teidar do not work that way, would object to being used that way, and have far more useful things to do in society than being used as coolant.

But let's entertain this for a moment.

Insider on Thermokinesis:

Thermokinesis

This is the ability to raise or lower the temperature of an object by exciting or slowing molecular motion within it. The rate at which this is accomplished depends on the mass of the object and the PK power of the user: 1 kg of mass can be heated or cooled by 28 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) each second for each level of PK power.
Each level of Psi Power can cool 1 Kg of mass by 28c in one second.

The wording is a bit odd. It's stated a bit like a rate of change, but appears to be a limitation.

Assuming it's a limitation;

PK1 = -28c per KG
PK2 = -56c per KG
ETC.
PK13 = -364c per KG*

Obviously they can't cool the ship below absolute zero. It maxes out around PK 9 or 10, after which we can assume that the PK can just start cooling down more mass to compensate.

PK13 = 1 x KG @ -273 + 1 x KG @ -91 (Assuming a starting temp of 0 C)

We'll assume a desired temperature of absolute zero. Space is near enough that temperature in general to aim for it, and the thermal emissions from simply being alive in a suit would be enough to raise the temperature slightly above it.

Now. What's the mass of a ship?

Let's start small.

Lancer
"Biriradi"
Class: Heavy Fighter
Length: 44 m
Deadweight Mass: 400 t
Crew: 2
Screens: Class i
Max. Acceleration: 38 G
Armor Rating: 10
Fuel Capacity: 250
ECM Rating: 67

Weapon Mounts
01x2 Laser Autocannon
02x2 Fighter Laser Cannon
06 Weapon Hardpoints

Note: The heavy fighter is a dual-role craft that can perform either in the role of interceptor or attack craft.
At a mass of 400 tons, 400,000 kilograms, a single teidar of PK 9.75 would take 400,000 seconds to cool the entire object down to absolute zero. That's 111 hours or about 4.62 days. They'd need to spend every second of every day spamming Cryokinesis, and would need to continue spamming it, all while running on zero emissions and minimal system functions.

Yes you could accelerate the process with more Teidar, or introduce rest cycles to increase comfort, but this is already looking to be highly impractical and wasteful.

Still, let's go for a larger vessel. Something a bit more familiar.

Vortex Mk.2
"Notel-Z"
Class: Group Command Ship (GCS)
Length: 750 m
Deadweight Mass: 1,200 kt
Crew: 800

Screens: Class III
Max. Acceleration: 30 G
Armor Rating: 112
ECM Rating: 110

Weapon Mounts
01 VAS Wave-Loom Device
02x2 Heavy Blaster
04x2 Pulse Cannon
12x3 Laser Autocannon
01x6 Anti-Missile Launcher
01 Warhead Launcher

Small Craft & Ordnance
08 Interceptors
05 Standard Shuttles
01 Large Shuttle
48 Torpedoes
150 AMM Missiles
Crew = 800
Mass: 1200 Kt = 1,200,000 Tons = 1,200,000,000 Kilograms.

Let's assume the entire crew are PK's at a power level of 9.75. That's 800 Kg cooling per second. How long would it take?

1,200,000,000 / 800 = 1,500,000 seconds = 17.361 Days

Let's try that with PK Level 39. That should be four times as fast.

1,200,000,000 / 3200 = 375,000 seconds = 4.34 Days

Higher level PK's are presumably rarer than lower level PK's, so it's reasonable to presume a lower bound than an upper one in this case.

So, the better part of a month just to cool the Tempest from ambient temperatures to absolute zero, assuming it has no systems running and nothing generating additional heat, such as life support, sensors, weapon systems, etc. etc. If we start adding active systems into the mix, the time taken starts to lengthen considerably.

This is of course a best case scenario, where everyone is a PK and constantly spamming Cryokinesis. You could probably throw more bodies at the problem, but more bodies = more heat since you need to keep them above absolute zero at all times, and actual starting temperatures are likely going to be as a whole higher than the freezing point of water at one atmosphere, so it will likely take longer by default.

In short, unless they have an arbitrarily unlimited supply of powerful TK's on hand and months to prepare in advance of an assault, an ambush like this is highly unlikely if not impossible outright.


I assume that the ships would need to be powered up and ready ahead of a battle in order to give the Teidar inside enough time to cool the ship. There might be a "cooling rota" of Teidar who keep the ship cold so that it can be ready for battle at a moments notice.
Powering up the ship is the opposite of what you want. Regular operation would by default raise the temperature of the ship faster than any number of Teidar could cool it.

(If the ship were light enough, perhaps enough Teidar could decelerate it by themselves. This would allow for a stealth ship to be useful even in engagements where your party is the second to arrive as your jump flash would be hidden within the flashes of the rest of the fleet.)
No, they likely couldn't. Jumps are likely not that accurate without ultratech.

(Using the thermokenisis values given in the insider while assuming that the kilogram of material heated is water, I calculated that it would require a bit over eleven million Teidar with a PK power of 40 to accelerate the tempest at 30 G for sixty seconds. Check my math.)

Let's hope the ship is light.
The ships, as per the above equations, are not light. :P

The question of where the Loroi would find so many Teidar to spare could be answered by the fact that they have been fighting this war for twenty five years if I read the timeline correctly. Considering that a Loroi is war ready by age eight, this should have been enough time to create a substantial clone army.

Of course this argument is dependent on the idea that large weapons systems would be light enough while carrying enough Teidar to make this feasible.
The former presumes the Loroi have no ethical compunctions about mass cloning large numbers of high powered telekinetic Loroi. Considering how many you yourself calced it would take just to accelerate the Tempest, the TK's would vastly outnumber the natural born population, and it would take only one of them to ask themselves why they should be a natural born's glorified weapons enhancement to descend rapidly into civil war.

This of course disregards the enormous logistics of having to clone, feed, educate, care for and train said clone warriors.

Your latter statement is more or less answered above. Weapons systems are entirely too massive and cannot carry enough Teidar to cool them in the manner you describe. It is completely unfeasible.

Dimensional Submarines on the other hand... :P
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

I think it might have been stated in the past that cloning doesn't necessarily produce a loroi of equal telepathic/telekinetic power. I don't recall the exact specifics, but it is my understanding that the Loroi have been trying to produce more numerous and more powerful telepaths/telekinetics, and have not had much success.

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by SVlad »

What about cooling only the outer layer of armor? Of course, the rest of the ship would heat it back, but not instantly.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Razor One »

SVlad wrote:What about cooling only the outer layer of armor? Of course, the rest of the ship would heat it back, but not instantly.
Space has an ambient temperature of -270 C or so. To cool the outer layer of armour and keep it at that temperature, you'd need to eliminate all possible contacts with the internals. Heat can transfer along material via either conduction or convection. Eliminating these makes things more efficient and better, but you can't really eliminate radiation no matter how hard you try. Even then, the radiative emissions will still heat the coolant armour well above the background level.

To put this into perspective, we can detect Voyager 1's radiative emissions from 18 billion kilometers away. Loroi and Umiak technology is significantly better than what we have, ergo, you have to reduce your radiative emissions that much more to avoid detection.

The problem will always be that you're stuffing meatbags that need to maintain a certain temperature and run critical systems to be combat effective. You'd be infinitely better served by combat drones that shut down and only activate when needed with the necessary radiators - or a design that is thermally negative - to keep them at background temperatures to blend in. For obvious and well trodden reasons, drones and AI's are not a significant combat force in the story.

The only practical stealth you can possibly have is when there's a lot of occluding material, a incredibly dense asteroid belt or Proplyd to gum up the sensors, and that's more camouflage than stealth. Even so, if you light up your thrusters, you're going to stand out and be blown away.
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Post by Krulle »

And those sitting ducks have the disadvantage, that the incomers can detect them while their light is still on the way to the "stealthed" targets.
It is well possible that automated systems of the incoming ships send off the first defensive missile and lasers towards any detected "hidden" trap while they haven't even received any information that there is a fleet incoming, as the emissions of the incoming fleet is still on it's way to the hidden ships.

Once you detect them as having come in, you need to start your systems up, and then, while you still go through the check-up, their missile already homed in.
So, to work efficiently the moment the attacking Umiak came in, you'd need a farseer on every Loroi stealthed ship (since the telepathic detection is not limited to the speed of light), which makes the whole equation even more difficult to achieve.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Chekist_Felix »

You know guys, I think you will like this video.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by SVlad »

Razor One wrote: Space has an ambient temperature of -270 C or so. To cool the outer layer of armour and keep it at that temperature, you'd need to eliminate all possible contacts with the internals. Heat can transfer along material via either conduction or convection. Eliminating these makes things more efficient and better, but you can't really eliminate radiation no matter how hard you try. Even then, the radiative emissions will still heat the coolant armour well above the background level.
I know, that the rest of the ship would heat armor back, but I've meant that just keep cooling armor against heat flow could be much easier, than cooling the whole ship.
Let's assume, that in cool 1 Kg of mass by 28c in one second - 1 kg has 1000 J/K of heat energy (greater than most metals, but 4 times lower than water). So, PK1 can dissipate 28 kJ/s = 28 kW. Pk13 can dissipate 364 kW of energy flow.
The whole ISS radiators can dissipate up to 70 kW, so we can assume, that heat flow of an idle ship could be lowered to this scale. And only one Loroi pirokinetic could dissipate all heat from such a small ship and she would have a lot of reserves.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Siber »

The best thing does seem to be having an internal 'radiator' system hooked to a system that cools the skin of the ship, so long as you keep that cool enough the rest of the ship doesn't matter, and trying to cool it all seems just like a needless waste. The math to figure out how many high class thermokinetics for a given size of ship even in a very general sense seems out of reach, especially since endurance of the Loroi seems quite undefined.

I'd bet odds on this, if viable at all, requiring enough specalized effort to make for a very limited number of ships. My gut says too limited to be worth the trouble, unless the Loroi actually do crack cloning people with specific abilities.

An interesting aside from running some numbers: If I did the math right, an enraged amped Fireblade could accelerate herself a bit harder than Loroi combat ships do, if she could manage to do it without killing herself and was't wearing a particularly massive spacesuit.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by White »

This assumes that Radar is the primary method of detection, when in actual fact there is likely to be multiple means of detection all employed simultaneously precisely to prevent such tactics. LIDAR, Gravimetric sensors, thermal detection, etc. Even a black colour scheme is still vulnerable to being spotted via occlusion of background stars and material.

While it is true that there are other methods of detection beyond thermal, I think the purpose of stealth in this case would not be to make an object invisible as much as to make is "unidentifiable as a hostile ship". By removing the thermal element, an Umaki craft facing a barrage of lasers won't look too closely at that asteroid sized dark object that isn't emitting any heat.
I'm reasonably certain that Teidar do not work that way, would object to being used that way, and have far more useful things to do in society than being used as coolant.
Again, this is purely speculation on weather such a thing is possible to do, not necessarily the wisdom of doing it.

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We'll assume a desired temperature of absolute zero. Space is near enough that temperature in general to aim for it, and the thermal emissions from simply being alive in a suit would be enough to raise the temperature slightly above it.
I actually mentioned that in my original post, I think the rate at which teidar can cool an object makes up for their body heat, especially if you put them in insulating suits in order to keep them comfortable in the interior of the ship which I expect to be cold.
At a mass of 400 tons, 400,000 kilograms, a single teidar of PK 9.75 would take 400,000 seconds to cool the entire object down to absolute zero. That's 111 hours or about 4.62 days. They'd need to spend every second of every day spamming Cryokinesis, and would need to continue spamming it, all while running on zero emissions and minimal system functions.

...

Higher level PK's are presumably rarer than lower level PK's, so it's reasonable to presume a lower bound than an upper one in this case.
Considering the loroi will be cloning their Teidar crew, I think it's safe to assume they'd clone the powerful ones.
This is of course a best case scenario, where everyone is a PK and constantly spamming Cryokinesis. You could probably throw more bodies at the problem, but more bodies = more heat since you need to keep them above absolute zero at all times, and actual starting temperatures are likely going to be as a whole higher than the freezing point of water at one atmosphere, so it will likely take longer by default.
Despite more bodies generating heat, each additional Teidar should be a "net loss" to the heat of the ship considering the efficiency with which they can cool objects, especially if you give the Teidar insulating suits.
Also, the preliminary cooling of a ship will be happening at a base with the rest of the fleet. This should allow for many Teidar to cool the ship without being inside or even near it.
In short, unless they have an arbitrarily unlimited supply of powerful TK's on hand and months to prepare in advance of an assault, an ambush like this is highly unlikely if not impossible outright.
I think you underestimate the cloning efforts I envisioned .

In any case, last I checked, the Loroi population was supposed to be between fifty and one hundred billion, there should be around 2.5 billion naturally born Teidar in the loroi population at the lower end. So I think you've got enough Teidar.
Powering up the ship is the opposite of what you want. Regular operation would by default raise the temperature of the ship faster than any number of Teidar could cool it.
Well, I assumed you'd want to cool it when it was at base and you had a large number of Teidar to help you, rathar than warming the weapon up when you're in the middle of a battle and have a limited number of Teidar at hand.
The ships, as per the above equations, are not light.
True, but can one build effective spaceships just for this purpose that are lighter than average. You'd really only need life support systems, and a giant weapon.
This of course disregards the enormous logistics of having to clone, feed, educate, care for and train said clone warriors.
I would argue that the Loroi seem to be able to effectively raise an army consisting of about half their population. I don't think organizing this specialized force should present an insurmountable challenge to the Loroi.
Weapons systems are entirely too massive and cannot carry enough Teidar to cool them in the manner you describe.
I actually don't know how massive the weapons systems I described would be, so I can't really argue that at the moment.

If I remember correctly, however, Auiroch did say at some point that the crewed section of a ship like the tempest was small in comparison to the entire ship itself. I'm wondering if the crewed sections of a ship could be expanded to hold more Teidar.

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by White »

Siber wrote:The best thing does seem to be having an internal 'radiator' system hooked to a system that cools the skin of the ship, so long as you keep that cool enough the rest of the ship doesn't matter, and trying to cool it all seems just like a needless waste. The math to figure out how many high class thermokinetics for a given size of ship even in a very general sense seems out of reach, especially since endurance of the Loroi seems quite undefined.
Yeah, but wouldn't such a system introduce inefficiencies that wouldn't be present with the "space magic" of the Teidar.
I'd bet odds on this, if viable at all, requiring enough specalized effort to make for a very limited number of ships. My gut says too limited to be worth the trouble, unless the Loroi actually do crack cloning people with specific abilities.
Fair.
An interesting aside from running some numbers: If I did the math right, an enraged amped Fireblade could accelerate herself a bit harder than Loroi combat ships do, if she could manage to do it without killing herself and was't wearing a particularly massive spacesuit.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Mr Bojangles »

@White
While it is true that there are other methods of detection beyond thermal, I think the purpose of stealth in this case would not be to make an object invisible as much as to make is "unidentifiable as a hostile ship". By removing the thermal element, an Umaki craft facing a barrage of lasers won't look too closely at that asteroid sized dark object that isn't emitting any heat.
Well, those other sensors will immediately identify the cold object as a ship. And the Umiak, being the paranoid bastards they are, would be quite curious as to why a warship was at a temperature near absolute zero. Well outside the norm = blow it up anyway.
I actually mentioned that in my original post, I think the rate at which teidar can cool an object makes up for their body heat, especially if you put them in insulating suits in order to keep them comfortable in the interior of the ship which I expect to be cold.
Even if they're flat-out thermodynamic violations, those Teidar are all biological. They need to be kept alive (heat-generating life support) and cool. They'll be working up quite a sweat with such heavy cryokinesis (irony) and will be too focused on cooling the ship to try to cool themselves (more irony). They can wear suits, but those suits will have to dump heat somewhere (and back to ship life support), else they'd cook the Teidar.
Despite more bodies generating heat, each additional Teidar should be a "net loss" to the heat of the ship considering the efficiency with which they can cool objects, especially if you give the Teidar insulating suits.
Also, the preliminary cooling of a ship will be happening at a base with the rest of the fleet. This should allow for many Teidar to cool the ship without being inside or even near it.
No, they'd be a net addition; they aren't cooling themselves directly. The sheer number you'd need to cool a ship like the Tempest per @Razor One's calculations would require the ship to have significant life support systems. Those suits can only contain heat for so long before they have to shift it somewhere else. Or you'd need a long chain of Teidar reducing the heat of other Teidar.
I think you underestimate the cloning efforts I envisioned .
So, Umiak-scale industrial cloning for an ability that the Loroi themselves are unable to manipulate? Remember, the Loroi don't know how telepathy or telekinesis work. They have no idea what to select for to get what they want in a clone (e.g., enhanced thermokinesis). All the amplification gear they have are copies of pre-existing tech.
In any case, last I checked, the Loroi population was supposed to be between fifty and one hundred billion, there should be around 2.5 billion naturally born Teidar in the loroi population at the lower end. So I think you've got enough Teidar.
Where'd you get the 2.5 billion from?

...you know, I think most of this can be boiled down thusly: a Loroi or Umiak warship has a power output comparable to a modern-day post-industrial nation. These vessels blast out trillions of watts just moving themselves. When they get into combat, the rates just go higher. If you still want the ship to be an effective combatant, stuffing the entirety of the hull with suited Teidar won't be able to deal with that. The ships simply don't have the volume. And, before you bring up pre-cooling the ships, the instant they kick on the reactors for combat ops, it's going to look like a small star being born to any thermal sensor.

Now, if the Loroi figure out how telekinesis works, then maybe they can replicate it technologically. And, if they can do that, then they can have telekinetic cooling systems which could then do what you've posited.

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Southern Cross »

FYI, telekinetic cooling is called cryokinesis.

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by discord »

Actually guys, I think your math is off, you do not really need to cool down the entire ship, you only need to cool down the outermost layer and enough cooling power to negate low power emissions from the working ship(so as to remove transference of heat from the inner life supported hull to the outer cooled hull.)
i am thinking a three layered approach, outermost a thin almost cloth like layer to catch and spread out the the very little heat coming from inside, inside of that a layer that actively heat pumps to the inside and third layer that is actively cooled(basically heat sinks, nodal points where the heat can be pumped to.) something the size of tempest could probably be done with only a few dozen of the best cryokinetics of the loroi empire.

this is all assuming the ship is not under power and floating dead in space....
so optical sensors, could do a 'where should there be light towards that specific sensor point' and paint the inside of the outermost layer....could work, but the leaves us with several kinds of active sensors to contend with.... the most annoying one being lidar, since the optical sensor mask requires sending out light...

bottom line, doable? a very uncertain maybe, but why? covert insertions on hostile planets? that FTL flash kinda buggers that up, ambush? geometry of space fucks that up, so why?

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Siber »

White wrote:
Siber wrote:The best thing does seem to be having an internal 'radiator' system hooked to a system that cools the skin of the ship, so long as you keep that cool enough the rest of the ship doesn't matter, and trying to cool it all seems just like a needless waste. The math to figure out how many high class thermokinetics for a given size of ship even in a very general sense seems out of reach, especially since endurance of the Loroi seems quite undefined.
Yeah, but wouldn't such a system introduce inefficiencies that wouldn't be present with the "space magic" of the Teidar.
I think you mistake my meaning, I'm not suggesting you not use Teidar, because your plan fundamentally requires them and their defiance of known physics to have any hope of working.

A typical spaceship of any size will need a system that extracts heat from most of the ship, particularly power and engine systems, and moves it external radiators to dump that heat into space. This is why stealth in space is typically impossible, no matter how much you cool the rest of your ship you've still got your radiators spewing heat out there, and the more you try to confine their radiations the harder it is to make the whole thing work. I am proposing that you have just such a system, except the radiators that you are moving all the heat to are not external, they are internal, and cooled by your cryokinetics rather than by radiating into the vacuum. Trying to cool literally the entire ship seems like madness, as discord suggests all you need cold is the exterior. And on top of that any mission that can use these stealth ships is going to probably be at least days in duration, as they should be stealthed before they are visible to the enemy., so you'll need regular crew amenties, not individual spacesuits.

That said, FTL flash doesn't kill this idea entirely. It could be useful, but you need a way to course correct without a drive plume, which does not seem to be technologically possible. That's why I brought up Fireblade's acceleration abilities, which is sort of a nail in the coffin. Fireblade is especially powerful, though I'm not sure if she's the most powerful TK out there, but she only reaches that level if she's enraged and amped. But if we generously assume that she's, say, half the potential ability of a Loroi, and that power could be reached with enough control to not kill the subject, then we still get to a point where the ability to stealthily maneuver doesn't quite cut the mustard. One maximum power telekinetic under those assumptions could move themselves and one other Loroi, who would need to be handling the cooling for stealth, at combat relevant accelerations. The scaling gets a bit better if you have particularly petite tele- and cryo- kinetics, but factor in the need for long endurances just due to the size of the battlefield and you're probably going to need a tempest sized ship mostly packed with Loroi rather than equipment to be able to make this work and still have some mass left over for useful weaponry.

I did some more math based on that kind of system. If you need one chiller for every pusher, you want a peak acceleration of 30 G, your average TK user is twice as powerful as Fireblade, and your average crewwoman in this scenario weighs as much as Beryl, there's no other equipment masses besides crew and weapons, using http://well-of-souls.com/outsider/weapon_profiles.html for weapon masses while assuming the lightest type of ton I'm aware of, and not accounting for potential needs for rotating people on and off duty which will be needed given the very mentally strenuous nature of their duties... Given all that, an armament of a single of the smallest torpedoes available to the Loroi(and torpedo only, no launching system) requires approximately 140 crew to haul. That's as much crew as a frigate, for a completely negligible punch.

Now I imagine with a sufficiently clever cooling system design the number of chillers per kg needed would improve as you scaled the ship up, but that's just a hunch, and I don't think it'd be enough to make it practical before you hit absurdly large ships.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by White »

Well, those other sensors will immediately identify the cold object as a ship. And the Umiak, being the paranoid bastards they are, would be quite curious as to why a warship was at a temperature near absolute zero. Well outside the norm = blow it up anyway.
That's where I disagree. The Umaki wouldn't look at their sensors telling them there is a cool object of mass x and think "that's a spaceship", they would look at their sensors and think "that's an asteroid". This is because they would expect a spaceship to be giving off heat.
Even if they're flat-out thermodynamic violations, those Teidar are all biological. They need to be kept alive (heat-generating life support) and cool. They'll be working up quite a sweat with such heavy cryokinesis (irony) and will be too focused on cooling the ship to try to cool themselves (more irony). They can wear suits, but those suits will have to dump heat somewhere (and back to ship life support), else they'd cook the Teidar.
They wouldn't need to cool themselves at all, they would just cool the hull of the ship more than their body heat could warm it.
No, they'd be a net addition; they aren't cooling themselves directly. The sheer number you'd need to cool a ship like the Tempest per @Razor One's calculations would require the ship to have significant life support systems. Those suits can only contain heat for so long before they have to shift it somewhere else. Or you'd need a long chain of Teidar reducing the heat of other Teidar.
The suits are to keep the Teidar warm in the cold interiors of the ship, the Teidar can cool the ship more than their body heat would heat it.
No, they'd be a net addition
I disagree with this.

Humans are generally warmer than Loroi and release about 100 watts in the form of body heat. That is about 1 joule/second.

A PK 1 Teidar can cool one kilogram of mass (I'm assuming water) by 28 degrees Celcius in one second.

That's 28 kilocalories per second or about 117,152 joules per second.

So a Teidar would increase the energy content of a ship by 1 joule in one second while decreasing it by 117,152 joules in that same second. So each teidar would be a net loss.
Where'd you get the 2.5 billion from?
It's in the Insider.
PK is rare among Loroi, occurring in less than five percent of the population.
It's the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Psychokinesis section.
a Loroi or Umiak warship has a power output comparable to a modern-day post-industrial nation. These vessels blast out trillions of watts just moving themselves. When they get into combat, the rates just go higher.
I actually addressed that in my first post on this page.
When an attack is impending, there would probably be a separate ship that would accelerate the stealth-ship to the right velocity so that the cooled craft wouldn't need to heat itself up by burning it's engines. This craft would than decelerate the stealth ship once the jump is completed before disconnecting and taking some other role in the fleet.


I went into further detail explaining how the ship design would need to be light and centered around a large weapon while maximizing crew capacity. I also acknowledged it limited usability and laid out what it's primary purpose would be on the battlefield. (A one shot surprise attack).

But really, the whole point of this discussion is to answer the question of whether it is possible to do this with a ship. I was hoping someone would come along with the masses of the weapons systems on a ship along with how much "capacity" a hull could have for crew members while carrying a weapon like a Wave loom.

Morever, we would need to know what a "stripped down" space ship with only life support and weaponry along with some peripheral systems would look like.

The most important thing to know however would be how much energy such a ship would create when it doesn't have it's engines firing.

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

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Siber wrote:I think you mistake my meaning, I'm not suggesting you not use Teidar, because your plan fundamentally requires them and their defiance of known physics to have any hope of working.
I know that. I was just thinking that it would be tough to find a cooling medium and system that could instantly cool any portion of the ship to a controlled degree. Not to mention the difficulty of keeping the medium cool while using pumps. (We are talking near absolute zero temperatures here.)
That said, FTL flash doesn't kill this idea entirely. It could be useful, but you need a way to course correct without a drive plume, which does not seem to be technologically possible
Yeah, the original plan was to have another ship, bring the weapons to the battlefield ahead of time and have the stealth ships stay still (maybe having the Teidar change their orientation for better aiming) until they can fire off some large weapons at key moments.
Now I imagine with a sufficiently clever cooling system design the number of chillers per kg needed would improve as you scaled the ship up, but that's just a hunch, and I don't think it'd be enough to make it practical before you hit absurdly large ships.
It might not be practical, but I think it would certainty be pretty cool.

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Siber »

White wrote:
Siber wrote:I think you mistake my meaning, I'm not suggesting you not use Teidar, because your plan fundamentally requires them and their defiance of known physics to have any hope of working.
I know that. I was just thinking that it would be tough to find a cooling medium and system that could instantly cool any portion of the ship to a controlled degree. Not to mention the difficulty of keeping the medium cool while using pumps. (We are talking near absolute zero temperatures here.)
It seems tricky but doable for the technologies involved. You'd need to very well insulate the interior from the exterior, sure. You might even need some of the PKs with precision and range to help chill the outer skin the last little bit from a distance, but depending on how it works on the extremes like this that may actually be a bad idea, needing impractical precision. But chilling the whole interior seems like a waste to me.
White wrote:
That said, FTL flash doesn't kill this idea entirely. It could be useful, but you need a way to course correct without a drive plume, which does not seem to be technologically possible
Yeah, the original plan was to have another ship, bring the weapons to the battlefield ahead of time and have the stealth ships stay still (maybe having the Teidar change their orientation for better aiming) until they can fire off some large weapons at key moments.
Space being as big as it is, making sure the fight happens in just the right spot for your pre-positioned ambush ships to contribute is not very practical, and trying to make it happen there would probably tip off the enemy that you're being tricky. If the ships look like cold asteroids rather than being practically invisible to all other detection too, then any admiral paying attention would steer clear of them in a system the enemy had any chance to set things up in before hand. or more likely, take a few long range pot-shots at the stationary unshielded targets just in case.
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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by Mjolnir »

Something to consider...energy weapons have effective ranges in the range of light seconds, but that's the range at which they can inflict significant damage to an armored ship. What's the range that they can puff a bit of vapor from the stealth coatings, thermally damage them, or just deliver a pulse of heating visible to instruments that reveals a surface which behaves noticeably different from a random rock?

The range at which high powered radar/lidar or just ordinary energy weapons could be used to tell asteroids apart from stealthed craft is probably light minutes at least. Probably more limited by the target being distant enough that they don't care if it's a stealthed ship or chunk of rock. Just giving every sizable apparent rock in their path a tap to check for traps is quick and easy, why not do it?

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Re: STEALTH!!!...IN SPACE!!!

Post by discord »

mjolnir: which is one of many reasons to the 'there is no stealth in space' attitude, even with thermal dynamics defying magical technology, it is still damn near pointless.

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