Just wanted to note that even modern day dogfighting is not limited to forward facing sight pictures and modern aircraft maneuvers are limited by skill and physical limitations of pilots, rather than being limited by limitations of the aircraft. The biggest problem with dogfighting in space is reducing energy quickly and the physical/mental limitations of pilots. REM or otherwise.
Also of note, we took guns off all our jets because 'missiles made them obsolete' and then had to hurriedly put them back on. There is a remarkable habit of human warfare to reach equilibrium between weapon and countermeasure, and it devolves into a proverbial knife fight. I can imagine in the future if defenses got good enough with dealing with long range projectiles, you'd have to close range to overwhelm them again... and in order to do that, you have to slow yourself down enough to have a firing window greater than a few milliseconds, and when you do that, you have to get enough armor to take a hit... and so you end up putting guns back on your jets. Again, I'm arguing less from the science side (because physicists are doing scary and amazing things atm that I'm not sufficiently caught up on) but from the human nature side of things. The arc of history implies certain developments - in this age of drones we still had troops killing insurgents with tomahawks. It seems as much as we advance into railguns and lasers, there will still be an element of blood and guts in holding territory. Probably because the goal is holding territory, not reducing it to ashes/slag. It's not useful to destroy planets, to nuke, throw asteroids, etc... better to take a loss and come back to win another day than go full Armageddon, at least, that is what the implied attitude in setting is, so I could see them designing ships for brawling fights just to focus on area control, rather than raw destructive power.
Nukes do have enough power to do damage without being in contact with the hull, but they need to be very close. The math to show why is on the Atomic Rockets website. Have you read The Cold Equations? Now, there's an obscenely large quantity of things that are wrong with the story (What pilot doesn't preflight his ship? Why is there not a lock on the damn access door? How can you leave so little margin for error or emergencies? etc). But the laws of physics don't give any relief. If you get outside, either you can make the mission or you coast on into the black, to die out in the cold, all alone in the night. Hitting a bunch of kitty litter at Earth-Mars travel speeds will turn your ship into an expanding cloud of gas. Hitting that cloud of gas won't hurt much. Like I said, they're analogous to the rings in Cowboy Bebop, but not FTL. They're possibly just a ginormous interplanetary coilgun array, with coils in useful places to keep the travel times down to an interesting number. The Villar Boosters actually allow for civilian ownership of ships, since any drive powerful enough to get those good travel times are also powerful enough to saw any trailing ships in half. (It's called the Kzinti Lesson.) As I understand it, the process works by observing the polarization of a series of paired particles (photons is the classical example). If you observe the polarization of one, you have determined the polarization of the entangled particle (which is how the spooky action at a distance happens). The problem is that Observing either one of the entangled particles determines the polarization of the other. So what you get is an uncertain signal that you can't tell is correct or not until you get the originator's observed results via conventional comms. I'm probably not explaining it well, there's a big article on Atomic Rockets. Yes, you can do weird things when you only have to manipulate temperatures +/-50degC. Try doing that when you need to get your 'hiding' temps down to -250degC and your hot sections up to 1300degC. Yes, there is a spaceship design that is as thermally stealthy as you can get. It's called a Liquid Hydrogen Steamer, and it is about as fast as a 1970s space probe.
I see someone has read their Larry Niven. I always liked that premises. That in space, the difference between a weapon and an engine, is where it is pointed.
Screwing with temps might just be easier when you have better tech... I mean just look at the tech we already have. Also like I said if your not happy with changing temperatures then maybe they don't, just beat the sensors. My point is that it is within the realm or real science to hide a hot spaceship. If you can hide a hot spaceship then you can make stealth ships.
Fusion drives are considered "torches" for a reason. Even in "the expanse", ships use manoeuvring drives until they can orient away from installations before lighting the torch (main drive) for pretty much the same reasons. Those and the massively overpowered "communications laser arrays" which can probably ALSO burn holes in things at "close" ranges. The Kzinti lesson taught TWO things. Comms lasers CAN be weapons, just as much as a torch drive can be.
Ok, so to put things into the RPG context a bit. A standard "Cruiser" is a Class 4 ship which has Armour 16 and Hull Integrity 48. This means that it will be crippled if it takes 4 Hull Breaches (from 5+ damage in a single hit, or reducing the Hull Integrity to 0, and all hits after Hull Integrity hits 0), it subtracts 16 from all damage dealt before it is applied and it can take 48 points of damage before every hit starts dealing automatic Hull Breaches. The Main Cannon on that same Cruiser is a Mass Driver, Class 4, Range 4, Burst 2, Damage 4+10[CD], Front Arc, Piercing 2, Precise 2, Recoil, Vicious 1. This means that, when lined up correctly, it deals an average of around 19 damage against a target with at least Armour 4 (it will, on average, reduce target Armour by 4 which is the equivalent of 4 more damage). It will also deal 2 Hull Breaches instead of 1 (but only if a Hull Breach is suffered). This means that a Cruiser, with average luck, firing its Main Cannon at another Cruiser will deal 3 points of damage, causing no Hull Breaches and taking 16 rounds of combat before it starts dealing serious damage (Hull Breaches), but then destroying a target Cruiser after 18 rounds of combat. A skilled Gunner (with the right Talents) can increase that damage substantially thanks to their ability to re-roll Combat Dice however, shaving up to 5 rounds off those numbers and potentially killing in only a couple of shots (as you only need 2 more damage to deal 2 Hull Breaches straight up without punching 'through Hull Integrity). While a Cruiser has Broadside Batteries of lower powered railguns, Missiles and Point Defence systems which could be used at point blank range, none of these weapons will penetrate the Armour of another Cruiser and so they make no difference to the actual engagement. They DO make Cruisers terrifying for any lighter ships they go up against 'though (Cruisers are a terror against Frigates or Destroyers and any civilian ship). The comparisons are similar for Dreadnoughts, but lighter ships are comparatively more deadly to one another.
It helps that one of the drives they were using was a photon drive. You need a LOT of megawatts to get any thrust out of one of those (it's 300 megawatts per newton of thrust), so that was probably something on the level of a petawatt laser. Or at least high terawatt. Even if it's 'only' an IR laser, that much beam energy is best described as 'obscene' or 'ravening death-beam'. Though photon droves would be very poorly collimated and therefore spread far more quickly than a weaponised laser. And that's not a 'premise'. That's a law of physics just as hard as gravity or relativity. Thermal superconductors are not prohibited by the laws of physics, and, if engineerable, are going to be de facto starship hull armor. Because unless you get into xray lasers (or at least UV lasers), most lasers are only going to heat up the hull within one lightsecond range. Thermal superconductors are there to prevent overheat and burn-through. If you're close enough to actually hit someone with a laser at "slice you like prosciutto" ranges, you're probably deep inside their point-defense envelope and getting hit with railgun rounds and even 20mm APDS-DU (translation: going to be dead really damn quick). I'm getting a feeling you don't grok just how hot 1600kelvin is for the reactor-heat radiators. That's glowing cherry-red in visible light(!). The thermal camo stuff we have now is a variation of the Peltier-effect electronic cooler, and silicon melts at 1687kelvin. The current maximum temperature of a Peltier-effect system is 200degC, though you could go higher if you used silver solder instead of the usual lead-tin or lead-free (limit is due to the solder melting). Silver solder maxes out at 900degC (~1200K). Which still isn't hot enough to hide your reactor heat. Plus, the best I've seen Peltier coolers do is an 80degC temperature delta with a stack of multiple plates, using each plate as the heat sink for the plate above it. I think the best temperature delta per plate is ~65degC, but what the hell, let's say it's 100degC. And again, you also have to get the cold side of your stealth tech down to ~20kelvin (that's -253degC) if you want to hide your hull shape. Your hull, at least the habitable parts, is going to be close to 300kelvin. OK, so that's probably 3-4 plates stacked. And the inside plate is going to be over 600K (300K because that's how hot the hull is, plus the 300k you're trying to hide, plus whatever the additional heat is from using the Peltier effect). Ouch. Again, TO camo works great at habitable-planet temperatures. Space is a much more extreme environment.
That's classic Quantum Mechanics: the process of seeing the particle alters said particle (think something like needing active sonar to see what is going on, and the waves moving what you just saw). My question is on another side, but what I think you are talking about are Qbits, or Quantum-Entangled "bits". As I read the "Sci-Fi" implementation, you get two particles that are entangled in such a way that when one changes, the other changes too, regardless of distance and with zero lag. The only downside, aside from massive amounts of energy (usually requiring installations close to a sun), is that you need to entangle both particles at the sime time and place, and that once they change the entanglement gets lost, so you get some comms channel that works in binary and is limited, and to replenish it you need a package to be physically delivered to the ship... And of course, each entangled pair of qbits is unique, so you need to have a store per target... I mentioned before about ships trailing cooling cables (kilometers long)... XD In this case, "cable" refers to something that can be coiled/retracted and vents a lot of heat directly behind the ship, helping with heat diffusion. It would be better if you translated it to Infinity wargame jargon... I mostly understood that "Vicious" equates to T2 ammo... XD
It doesn't really make much sense translated into jargon from the wargame, but roughly speaking imagine that each Hull Breach is a Structure Point. So Precise 2 is like situational T2 Ammo (you have to set it up, but it's not terribly hard to set up). The key is to focus on this part: "a Cruiser, with average luck, firing its Main Cannon at another Cruiser will deal 3 points of damage, causing no Hull Breaches and taking 16 rounds of combat before it starts dealing serious damage (Hull Breaches), but then destroying a target Cruiser after 18 rounds of combat. A skilled Gunner (with the right Talents) can increase that damage substantially ... shaving up to 5 rounds off those numbers and potentially killing in only a couple of shots (as you only need 2 more damage to deal 2 Hull Breaches straight up without punching 'through Hull Integrity)." So if you have skilled gunners a Cruiser can destroy another Cruiser with two shots from its Main Cannon (which a PC using an Infinity Point can do in one round of combat), but average gunners with average luck can make that same gunfight drag on for 18 rounds. The other weapons mounted by a Cruiser (Missiles or Laser, Broadside Batteries of Railguns and Point Defense Guns) cannot really damage another Cruiser at all.
I'm quite used to trailing a kilometer or more of wire behind a ship already, that's called a floating wire antenna for VLF comms and a towed array sonar. You'd have to do something weird with said 'cable' to let things cool off, like pump heat down the center to the far end and then have the radiative elements start at the end of the cable and try to cool towards the ship, and you'd need a near-perfect thermal insulator between the inner layer and the radiator. You'd also need thousands of km of cable, since you need a good 1000m^2 radiator area for your reactor cooling and about 10x that for your lifesection heat. You would also be just about unable to maneuver while the cable is deployed, since the drive plume would either radiate into the cable (preventing it from cooling the reactor!) or maybe even outright burn it off. What I was talking about what that you need to get the parts of your hull that are supposed to 'not be there' in IR down to about -250degC. The parts of your hull that are supposed to be impersonating a powered reactor's cooling radiators need to be 1300degC or so. The parts of your hull that are supposed to be impersonating an inhabited section will need to be about 30degC.
Yep, it's a "fast thought" solution for stealth approachs, where most things won't be running. I'd say you are overestimating the amount of energy irradiated by a ship not running its engines, however, since while in vacuum fast venting of heat is really hard, and most of "Life Support" tends to go to keep heat inside the ship long-term (usually running the computers does the trick... because of that old joke about computers being things that turn electricity into heat and have the byproduct of computation XD), with the main source being the reactor (assuming fusion or fision reactors do produce nearly as much heat in the future as they do nowadays). The idea is, essentially, for the "stealth wannabe ship" to coast on its own speed, without really getting acceleration but using some gas projectors for maneuvers, and depending on how long is it predicted to run silent and the ship's size, simply oxygen tanks could suffice, or even if it has oxygen recycling machinery turned off.
Simply preventing the cooling to radiate in the wrong direction would probably work for ambush, and if the sci-fi-esque reaction-mass-free engine is made to work somewhat efficiently I can see that one being used for stealthy trajectory corrections. Basically, you'll be hard to spot as long as you keep your bum pointing away from the observer.
Well, while there are stealth systems available for any kind of vehicle in atmosphere (ranging all the way up to TO systems so effective that you become a traffic hazard) there are no stealth systems for Spaceships in the Infinity RPG. You can "run quiet" and reduce your signature, but you are always detectable by anyone putting effort into doing so.
Well, here's the thing. My sub generated about 8megawatts of electrical energy, plus all the heat generated by the crew themselves (which actually isn't that much, 1/10w per crewman). Modern pressurized water fission reactors are about 33% efficient in turning heat into electricity, so you basically need to get rid of ~10megawatts of heat at 300kelvin and a minimum of another 20 megawatts of heat at 1600kelvin. At 'idle'. Your 300kelvin lifesection radiator will need to be about 24000 square meters, so ~240km long assuming a round cable-radiator 0.10m circumference (loosely speaking, ~30mm in diameter. Larger diameter would be better, but then you get into problems retracting the cable easily). Your 1600kelvin power section radiator will need to be about 60 square meters, call it 600m long. Both of those numbers have zero margin for damage or additional heat, though, so I assume double the required area (effectively, double the length, 600m and 1200m). These also assume very highly emissive surfaces, an emissivity of 0.92 (for comparison, polished copper has an emissivity of 0.04, while oxidized copper has an emissivity of 0.87. Paint has an emissivity of 0.9. The max possible emissivity is 1.0). Assuming that I did all the math correctly. Sure, that's basically how the Liquid Hydrogen Steamer operates. Now, if you scroll down far enough in that link, you get to a design for a stealthy ship that is pretty impressive, even capable of 'decent' acceleration, if you are OK with taking 8.5 months to get from Earth to Mars. But the ATOMSS spaceship can hide a million KM away from a telescope for 20 days and be nearly invisible, even while doing a burn (courtesy of a rocket nozzle that is designed to maximize velocity and basically bring the exhaust pressure to zero. But that's as good as it gets for a 'stealthy' ship.
The only way I can see stealth working is by using another body to disguise yourself. Hiding behind an asteroid, moon, stellar Corona etc. That could potentially work, it just obviously limits your deployment and such. I think the narrative tension in large scale space combat comes from the "blink first politics" of it. Beyond that, you accelerate to do a pass, deploy assets, get rid of as much heat as you can, fire as many weapons as you can, avoid as many projeciles as you can, and hope your tech is better than theirs. Which... is not hugely different from surface combat between two modern warships tbh. It's not like they're going to close for gunnery duels. Besides PC space combat is likely to be gunships and such, fighting in sub-full military engagements, just like non-space combat involving PCs, which occupies the criminal/paramilitary/covert ops/etc space. Yes clashing destroyers is not PC friendly, but neither is being in brigade level open warfare. PCs in their paramilitary gunship will die to proper military vessels just like your black ops squad will die to a TAG squadron.
A quick round of superficial brainstorming on the matter makes me think you guys are missing something important. I'ts not necessary to avoid heat radiation altogether, the heat just needs to go somewhere else than towards the sensors you're trying to hide from. With proper vacuum shielding, UV and Infrared deflection it should be possible to build ships that create a "heatshadow" towards their front arc. It's fine if you're pretty much a torch for anyone behind you as long you're getting the jump on the opposition or can observe anyone in front without their knowledge. That kind of ship would probably need a larger front part to create a "heatshadow" for it's engines in a large enough area to allow basic maneuvers (but as we're talking scifi tech anyway I'll leave that to the imaginary engineers).
That is basically what the Hydrogen Steamer does, it has a large diameter 'sunshade' at the front to keep the entire hull in the shade. The problem is that if your ship can be stealthy, then so can my remote sensor platforms. So you don't know what part of the sky is 'safe' to radiate into.
Well, aside from making a thermo-optic camouflage the size of a space ship, how stealthy do you need to be? How far out do you need the remote sensor platform to be? We were discussing the difference between enabling engagements versus artillery lobbing from the other side of the solar system.
Well, here's what the RPG says on the subject of detection: "Detecting spacecraft is relatively straightforward. Even a relatively inactive vessel generates heat, and against the backdrop of space—which is about 2.6 Kelvin, barely above absolute zero—any warm object appears as a shining infrared light against a black background. Passive infrared sensors and radio antennae sweep for these signs, though the signals they receive can only travel at the speed of light, adding a delay to longer-ranged detection. If a vessel were fifty million kilometres away, its presence could only be detected nearly three minutes later, by which point it may be somewhere else. This means that patrol and reconnaissance vessels are vital for detecting and responding to threats quickly. At closer ranges, vessels use high-resolution RADAR and LIDAR systems to gain more accurate information for identification and targeting. However, these systems require an active pulse, meaning that a vessel using active sensors is itself a more obvious target." The system makes detection very easy for any capable character out to a range depending on the Sensor outfit of the ship, increasingly harder at longer ranges. This means that a ship keeping a long way out from another can be relatively stealthy, but never perfectly so.
