Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
My suspicion is that spaceships sensors are cheap and heavy because it's trying to make putting them on an interesting design decision within a resolution of 5% of ship's mass, and that's not a very likely situation. In general there's two methods for putting sensors on a vehicle: figure out what it needs and fits within your budget for the role of the vehicle (which will generally result in a sensor weight that is negligible relative to the vehicle), or you're just building a sensor carrier, in which case you don't care that your sensor costs ten times as much as the rest of the vehicle put together.
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For what it's worth, the fire control director for the main guns with its optical and radar rangefinders, etc. on a WWII destroyer was about 1% of its mass. All the other fire control gear, radars, and so on would've at least doubled that.
Even on battleships, where there were many more rangefinders yet the total percentage of displacement used by them was miniscule, there was a major concern with topweight from sensors. They were also a problem because of the volume and power consumed by the radars, something that's still an issue today (modern warships are often more volume limited than weight limited).