page 82

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TrashMan
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Re: page 82

Post by TrashMan »

I still say detecting mass driver shots in a battle enviroment, in space..is silly.

If they could detect such small objects, their sensors would be beeping 24/7...cause there all kind of crap in space.

fredgiblet
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Re: page 82

Post by fredgiblet »

TrashMan wrote:I still say detecting mass driver shots in a battle enviroment, in space..is silly.

If they could detect such small objects, their sensors would be beeping 24/7...cause there all kind of crap in space.
In a battle environment it would be slightly more difficult, but only slightly. Space is mostly empty, the VAST majority of space consists of a very small number of hydrogen atoms just sort of chilling. I'd be curious exactly what you think space is filled with.

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Mjolnir
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Re: page 82

Post by Mjolnir »

TrashMan wrote:I still say detecting mass driver shots in a battle enviroment, in space..is silly.

If they could detect such small objects, their sensors would be beeping 24/7...cause there all kind of crap in space.
Like what? You said this before and did not respond in any way to the responses you got, repeating it doesn't make it true.

In reality, space is an extremely cold, quiet, and empty environment, ideal for this task. We can already track tiny bits of debris in earth orbit, and that's randomly moving objects viewed through an active atmosphere, with present day equipment and minimal funding. Even in a tremendously dirty and noisy region of space like the proplyd they're in now, radar returns from mass driver projectiles would be trivial to pull out of the data due to their vastly higher closing speeds. The only solid objects out there moving at such relative velocities would be projectiles and ships...nothing else.

dfacto
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Re: page 82

Post by dfacto »

I'm reminded of the first chapter of Starship Troopers, where the troopers dropping onto a planet from orbit shed huge amounts of chaff into the atmosphere to give ballistic computers a breakdown.

A barrage of ball-bearing sizes chaff with a high radar signature would probably be quite useful at close distances like the ones we're seeing in the comic now, and could effectively mask railgun shots, as well as missiles. Combine this with dummy missiles (an engine stuck to an inflatable missile shaped balloon) and you could turn the battlefield into a complete madhouse. To be honest I'm surprised the Umiak don't already do this since they seem to rely on brute-force methods. Just send out random barrages of fake missiles and watch the Loroi go crazy expending ammunition on them.

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Arioch
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Re: page 82

Post by Arioch »

Welcome to the board, dfacto.

An Outsider torpedo is essentially just an engine and a guidance system; the matter-conversion reactor that powers the engine is also the warhead. So a dummy with a real engine isn't a dummy at all, but a real torpedo. A less expensive chemical engine would probably have a very different signature from a real torpedo, but more the point, it wouldn't be able to keep up with the acceleration of the real torpedoes.

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Mjolnir
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Re: page 82

Post by Mjolnir »

dfacto wrote:A barrage of ball-bearing sizes chaff with a high radar signature would probably be quite useful at close distances like the ones we're seeing in the comic now, and could effectively mask railgun shots, as well as missiles. Combine this with dummy missiles (an engine stuck to an inflatable missile shaped balloon) and you could turn the battlefield into a complete madhouse. To be honest I'm surprised the Umiak don't already do this since they seem to rely on brute-force methods. Just send out random barrages of fake missiles and watch the Loroi go crazy expending ammunition on them.
Chaff really wouldn't be of any use for hiding projectiles (and ball bearings would be a horribly inefficient way to produce it, you want stuff with a large radar/lidar cross section for its mass, like foil strips). If it's not fired at the same velocity as the projectile, the projectile will quickly exit those chaff clouds. If the chaff is fired along with the projectile, it only serves to make it easier to track...it's right there in the middle of that cloud of chaff, which can for all practical purposes be tracked by the computers and evaded as a single object.

If you just cut out all returns that aren't severely shifted to shorter wavelengths, the only thing remaining will be the projectiles heading toward the ship (and any chaff fired along with them for whatever reason). This can be done just by looking at returns in a particular frequency band...computers don't have to individually pick out and discard each return that's not headed toward the ship.

Chaff is even less useful for missiles, because they continue to accelerate...the chaff cloud will be stuck on a ballistic course and be left behind. As for dummy missiles, a smaller engine pushing an empty shell instead of a warhead would probably be rather obvious to the target's sensors, and filling magazines with dummy missiles takes up room that could be dedicated to actual weapons. Plus there's the issue of taking production away from actual missiles/torpedos. About the only thing you could realistically make "dummy" versions of would be mines, which themselves are of rather limited use.

TrashMan
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Re: page 82

Post by TrashMan »

fredgiblet wrote:
TrashMan wrote:I still say detecting mass driver shots in a battle enviroment, in space..is silly.

If they could detect such small objects, their sensors would be beeping 24/7...cause there all kind of crap in space.
In a battle environment it would be slightly more difficult, but only slightly. Space is mostly empty, the VAST majority of space consists of a very small number of hydrogen atoms just sort of chilling. I'd be curious exactly what you think space is filled with.

Depnds on the regions of space. But given all the asteroids and comets, there's plenty of tiny objects. small clumps of rock or ice that broke off....space debris, etc..

As for detecting mass driver shots - it's like detecting bullets. Can we detect bullets in flight with a radar?

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Mjolnir
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Re: page 82

Post by Mjolnir »

TrashMan wrote:Depnds on the regions of space. But given all the asteroids and comets, there's plenty of tiny objects. small clumps of rock or ice that broke off....space debris, etc..
That's not "plenty", as evidenced by the faintness of gegenschein and the fact that we can still see stars. In all but a few unusual systems, such debris will be extremely sparse as it is in ours, where probes and satellites regularly travel tens of thousands of light seconds and operate for decades without a major impact. And it has dramatically different characteristics from mass driver projectiles...it's not on a collision course with your ship at some enormous relative velocity.

TrashMan wrote:As for detecting mass driver shots - it's like detecting bullets. Can we detect bullets in flight with a radar?
Yes. It's a common way of measuring external ballistic characteristics of bullets. The Weibel 1000e for one example.

And I'm repeating myself, but you keep ignoring the fact that we do currently detect and track space debris in the cm size range in Earth orbit, with present-day equipment stuck at the bottom of an active atmosphere built and operated on a rather limited budget.

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bunnyboy
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Re: page 82

Post by bunnyboy »

Mjolnir wrote:And I'm repeating myself, but you keep ignoring the fact that we do currently detect and track space debris in the cm size range in Earth orbit, with present-day equipment stuck at the bottom of an active atmosphere built and operated on a rather limited budget.
Yes. But we don't know every object. It is just that when something is found, then it is searched from catalog. If it is not there, it's trajectory is followed until it is known and added to to catalog.
Couple of years ago they found about 10+ meter object, which is probable part of moon mission rocket from 50-60. It was not found before, because most of time it is somewhere between earth and moon.
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Mjolnir
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Re: page 82

Post by Mjolnir »

bunnyboy wrote:Yes. But we don't know every object. It is just that when something is found, then it is searched from catalog. If it is not there, it's trajectory is followed until it is known and added to to catalog.
We don't know every object because the debris is constantly being perturbed by atmospheric drag, light pressure, and the moon's gravity and constantly being added to by collisions and new launches, and because resources for tracking such things are very limited. The fact is that we can detect and track such objects now...future military spacecraft would better positioned and better equipped to do so.

bunnyboy wrote:Couple of years ago they found about 10+ meter object, which is probable part of moon mission rocket from 50-60. It was not found before, because most of time it is somewhere between earth and moon.
J002E3. It's in solar orbit, most of the time it's nowhere near either Earth or the moon...it was detected when it was briefly in a semi-stable orbit around the Earth-moon system.

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bunnyboy
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Re: page 82

Post by bunnyboy »

I bow in front of your knowledge.
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fredgiblet
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Re: page 82

Post by fredgiblet »

Additionally we don't know every object because it costs money and there's no money to be made in knowing every object. Astronomers can spend their grant money on something fairly pointless that no one cares about, or they can spend their grant money on something interesting that can advance our knowledge and their career.

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