Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
If you can be patient and your target is in a fixed orbit you can design a drone for stealth and launch it from a distance on a space probe-like trajectory.
In specific Spaceships terms you need to avoid the case where your opposition is observing your launching vehicle. That grants automatic detection of any missiles launched by that ship (even that is probably a not entirely realistic assumption for play balance and simplification). If you don't see the launching ship when it launches you need to spot the missiles themselves with their much smaller SM.
Your space probe-like impactor doesn't have to be much more than some tanks of cold gas for maneuevering/course adjustment, a small computer brain with a small battery and a lot of radar absorptive material. It could have a very low thermal signature.
For reasons such as this I tend to think that large stations in fixed orbits are a feature for settings with very low amounts of major conflict or even terrorism. Without superscicnee thay can be extremely hard to defend.
You could make your "stations" not stationary by giving them a propulsion system and making small random changes in their orbits at relatively frequent but allso random intervals. Doing this for rotating stations does get more complicated.
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The further away you launch from, the more time the space station has to discover it before it arrives. Large stations can likely afford to have observing probes scattered throughout the star system in order to avoid blind spots (especially if such attacks is a major concern). So, you would have to launch from very far away indeed, giving an abundance of time for telescopes scanning the sky or probes you fly by to discover you.
Having that much time also means that you can get away with making such random orbit changes very infrequently if that is the solution you go for.