Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

Good point! I added it in. It fits the design extremely well.

As to the stealth discussion, the Spaceships rules work pretty well for realism as far as I can tell. For example, when a ship is just hanging out in the open against a backdrop of normal space, it is extremely easy to detect - an automatic +34 bonus for a sensor to detect your ship, enough to fully cancel out the penalty for being 500 miles away. The basic sensor on a SM10, TL9 ship gives a further +8 bonus, allowing it to fully cancel out any penalties up to 10,000 miles away, and that bonus can be doubled to +16 if you know where to look - giving the ship the ability to almost cancel out the penalty to detect a ship 10 million miles away that is running on minimal power. If that ship was using, say, an external pulsed plasma drive and a fusion reactor, the detecting ship would have a further +16 bonus to detect it - enough to scan out to 75AU with only a -1 penalty to detect the ship, which would be a large enough radius to detect this nuclear pulse, fusion-powered spaceship all the way across an entire solar system.

The only way the Menippe is able to stealth itself is by hiding among asteroids and making sure not to sillouette itself against space. This is likely one of the only ways of stealthing a space ship unless you use super science.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

No, but I get a ^ on the TL when there is FTL.

Safisher is not making, and I am not attempting to rebut, the argument that "superscience could permit stealth in space". In fact it is very much the opposite, since I am arguing that "stealth in space is superscience". Safisher suggests that metamaterials currently in development suggest that we might soon have different and unexpected interactions of matter and radiation going on, and that stealth in space is not out of the question for the actual future.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

No worries man, it's an old discussion that flares up every now and then, usually with somewhat the same participants. Almost up there with armor weights, hiking speeds(pre-HT), etc.

Sorry for polluting your thread with our outraged sense of hard science orthodoxy.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

Just to throw my two cents into the pot on the stealth in space thing....

Since the ship is more or less attached to the asteroid, and the asteroid itself is radiating a certain amount of energy (and entropy, I suppose), doesn't the ship just have to somehow match its radiation signature with that of the asteroid to effectively have stealth? And I imagine that the life support system can handle a bit of extra heat for a short time while in "silent running" mode.

And isn't there a very low amount of background radiation just about anywhere you look in space? So if you could somehow not radiate anything, wouldn't the "hole in space" sort of stand out?

And then again, I am probably talking out my nether regions anyway (my last physics class I had was way back in 1987.... :-)

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

The most easily detectable part of a spaceship is usually in the IR spectrum, due to their requirement to radiate away all their waste heat or cook everything inside. Asteroids usually are about the same temperature as the space around them, which is to say, fricken' cold. A ship will be hotter than an asteroid, unless it is completely powered down(no life support, no computers running, nada.) However, the ship can dump its waste heat into the asteroid, using it as a heat sink. Eventually this will cause the asteroid to be suspiciously warmer than a normal one, but in the short term it would help conceal the craft. So it's not a matter of getting a ship to radiate as much energy as an asteroid, but as little. The life support can indeed handle not radiating away its waste heat, but the length of time that it can do that is probably not very long unless the ship is running on very low power, is very efficient, or has on-board heat sinks of some kind(like fuel tanks full of ice.)

There is pretty much some sort of radiation everywhere in space(you're probably thinking of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation), but so long as the ship wasn't actually absorbing anything, I don't think it would be detectable. However, you would have problems with very sensitive instruments pointed in the right direction, as silhouetting yourself in front of a high noise "source" like a sun/planet/moon would probably be enough to be spotted.

Anywho, I think this is the way things work. I'm sure I'll be corrected if I've misstated anything.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

And I'm not disagreeing with that at all. Space stealth is caret time all the way. I'm disagreeing with what I quoted in the original post:

Namely, that in SF any given applied superscience will or should have logical consequences based on whatever physical laws it circumvents. Very often SF, even quite good SF, blatantly breaks physical laws in a very specific manner without any other noticeable consequences. (Not that if it does so it is bad. In fact, I like that sort of thing.)

That said, it occurs to me your "perpetual motion machine" comment may have been a rhetorical device rather than a manifesto for consistent SF thermodynamics.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

Not really. Anything that breaks the Second Law should allow the creation of perpetual motion machines. Without increasing entropy, you have perpetual motion. And if I'm playing sci-fi, I generally prefer logical consequences. Then again, I tend to fall on the Hard end of the spectrum, so it's probably personal preference. But I get annoyed if the logical consequences of anything(even in fantasy) isn't carried through, unless it is EXPLICITYLY a genre trope, such as super villains monologuing or creating elaborate death traps.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

Yes. If your radiation is large enough it can be as cool as an asteroid, and then if your ship is where an asteroid ought to be it won't be distinguished from the asteroid by an IR scanner.

In other words, you can hide behind, on, and perhaps even near an asteroid.

You can bank heat for a little while by, say, melting ice in an insulated container. But you need a surprising lot of ice to keep your ship's skin as cold as it has to be to hide just the heat of the crew and life support systems and the sunlight falling on your sunward side. Once you light up any sort of spaceship drive all bets are off.

There is. The 3 K microwave background. Which is about 1/100,000,000 times as bright as the thermal radiation of a body at room temperature. The objective in hiding a spaceship from thermal detection would be to keep its radiator and its external skin down near 3 K (-454°F) so that it is the same IR (microwave) colour as the background. The problem is that you radiate very little heat at 3 K, and need a radiator one hundred million times as big as you would need with a 300 K radiator.

Mine was in '83.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

The context of that comment was not superscience. The context was a claim that no-one can predict what technologies may result from future scientific advances in reality, what may be actually possible in the future.

Stop gibbering about superscience. This conversation is not about superscience, it is about TL9 realistic spacecraft.

Re: [Spaceships] TL9 Military Spaceships
 

A sensor array can't be [core] only [hull].