That is uncalled for. Given the opportunity I would like to remind everybody that if you want to complain about things you find offensive then you need to keep yourself in that standard.
Stealth on the ground, or in atmosphere, is relatively simple. Even thermal stealth, since you're usually only talking a few degC difference between source and background. I'm a past practicioner of stealth underwater, which is even simpler. Lots more thermal mass to soak up waste heat, and acoustic stealth is all a matter of vibration damping and minimization. Which is expensive engineering, but simple. Heck, subs are even rather stealthy by radar, due to how little of the ship is actually above water. We had to rig the same kind of radar reflectors that sailboats use to our bridge so that the poor civilians could see us on radar. Stealth in space is nearly impossible. You're talking a 300degC difference between lifesection heat and background. Your power reactor is more like 1600degC hotter than background, it glows cherry-red in the visible spectrum. Your drive plume is so hot it emits freaking x-rays. Re-entry plasma is so hot that you can see it in IR from halfway across the Solar System. It's also so radio-reflective that truck drivers use the plasma sheath around re-entering dust to bounce signals back to their home base. I've found exactly ONE real-world stealth spaceship design, which basically coasts in using solar-heated hydrogen for reaction mass. This is the kind of ship that would take a decade to get from Earth to Jupiter. Any other stealth spaceship proposals require doing unspeakable things to the laws of thermodynamics. Note that I'm talking about strategic stealth, like the stealth bomber or a missile submarine that you can't see coming here. There's a lot you can do for tactical stealth that makes it much harder for sensors to lock onto you to put warheads on your forehead. So, you'd need to approach Dawn in a ship that is slow by 1970s space probe standards, re-enter on the far side of any known monitoring systems** (or in the middle of a meteor storm), and fly across one of the more heavily defended aerial frontiers repeatedly to set up this base without someone noticing. Once, if you're stupidly lucky, and I mean kuge lucky, might work. The more often you fly there, the more likely you are to be found. Even if you had troops walk in, you're still dropping multiple aircraft within 100km of the base. ** Too bad that the thermal sensors most likely to detect you are passive telescopes, so you will never be able to be certain there aren't any where you're working.
If we assume that reaction-mass free drives have been perfected sufficiently that you can make viable adjustments to orbits, then space-stealth gets closer. Still theoretically impossible to use such an engine to slow down sufficiently for re-entry, of course.
Why would you hide your orbital insertion? You just piggyback airborne stealth assets onto legitimate traffic. This isn't hard, it's rocket science.
The only real way to enter "undetected" may be copying the submarine maneuver of hiding under the shadow of a big ship... or in this case, get inside the planet latched to a big cargo ship, and detach your VERY stealth shuttle before arriving to the spaceport. Else it would be easier to just filter around the spaceport spy-style... well, the big gear should require HALO drops outside of where they can be seen -.- And about stealth capabilities, I would assume that whatever advance made there is quickly matched by upgraded detection capabilities soon, thus its not a good idea to assume that you will always have superiority on any of those two fields...
There seems to have been a lot of 'stealth tech' at play in Uprising, with Japanese preparations for rebellion, vast underground defensive works, etc all escaping detection. But I don't think that sort of thing is really required for the PanO base to exist and Mat' to be unable to do anything about it. Based on the map I saw from Uprising, the base is smack dab in the middle of Noviy Cimmeria, a large island northwest of the main Ariadna/Home supercontinent. In the RPG it gets described as little explored and possibly rich in Teseum (including the myth of s Silver Vale full of boulders of the stuff), along with "Early Rodinan surveys revealed the lay of the land; early Rodinan scientists resigned themselves to the fact that they would likely never set foot on most of it". The closest Ariadnan populated area is Tartary on Ariadna, with the Tartary mountains and an expanse of uninhabited land to be crossed as one heads northwest. Rodina may have sent expeditions, but it is a region that seems beyond their reach for exerting sovereign power. Now, Uprising tells us that Kurage Station is located on Noviy Cimmeria, and the Japanese secession carves a chunk of territory on the island that eats about the middle third, with Yu Jing holding the remainder on either side. This seems to indicate that Yu Jing has held the whole island up until the secession, with the Ariadnans probably objecting loudly but no more able to stop it than they are the rebuilding of the PanO base once war breaks out. The power we need to question over how PanO was able to do all of this is the one which had de facto control: Yu Jing. The slightly positive bit here is that up until now in the fluff I can't find any indication at all that Yu Jing had control of Noviy Cimmeria, just the Snark Lands which is a not-much -smaller island located just to the south. This represents a triumph for Yu Jing, because those two islands represent a significant chunk of Dawn, and Cimmeria is particularly noted for vast wealth of Teseum. It is a little frustrating that we only learn of this when it is suddenly taken away, and what remains in Yu Jing hands is likely to be lost with the global campaign as all the powers of the Sphere descend to grab a slice of the pie, of course, but that sort of development is a wonderful thing if like me you're grasping at straws to try and make Uprising make some sort of sense. If Yu Jing holds the Teseum-rich lands of Noviy Cimmeria, that is a major advantage, the other powers of the Sphere have reason to want that control shattered. I'm not sure if its enough to justify what they did during Uprising on its own, but if it came along with some other StateEmpire gains, we're starting to make a case for why the rest of the Sphere needs Yu Jing taken down a peg The fact PanO deploys both air forces and TAG regiments to the fighting on Cimmeria, but seems to have stayed off the ground elsewhere, definitely points to where their priorities were. As for the Roving Star Spaceport in Mat', I don't actually think its the only spaceport on Dawn, but rather the only spaceport in the Ariadnan Federation, giving Rodina a monopoly on interstellar trade conducted by member states.
I agree with Section9 that stealthy orbital insertion is an impossibility with known physics. However so is faster than light travel, and Thermoptic Camo suits bend the laws of physics to the near, and possibly past the shattering point. However scaling up Thermoptic camo design to spaceship level is a ridiculous leap in difficulty. It is possible there is some 'space tech' that makes it possible, but being as we have never even heard of such a technology before now, it would be poor form for it to show up, right when we need it. Now if there was some big fighting going on, say between Yu Jing and JSA, that might cause enough of a distraction to mask an orbital insertion, but it is more likely, that such fighting would have the Ariadnians on higher alert, looking for just such insertions. Now being aware of such incursions, and having the manpower and technology to do anything about it, are two different things. Hopefully this situation will be addressed in future material. It could lay the groundwork for a decent multi-faction squabble for control.
Well, to be truthful, Infinity has no FTL "travel" per se, but a way to use wormholes through Black Holes... "foldings on the space" so to speak. TO camo can be smart color materials and IFF spoofing so you are barely a shimmer of an unconfirmed contact. As for visuals, a ship with an albedo dark enough is invisible in space, the problem is its size (can't be too big) and propulsion (you can go nearly supersonic in space without much active propulsion since there is no resistance that bleeds your speed), the problem is that, at scale, your supersonic speed is kinda like walking speed, and a slow one to boot, intending to go from Japan to Madrid... and that's talking about inside solar systems, between planets...
Unless I am mistaken Dark Clouds were created to disrupt radio and radar transmissions/receptions. Pan-O coming in to the Dawn system would not be a surprise, or secret, but with, (again, unless I am mistaken), no space force, there would be very little Ariadna could do about it until they had landed. Once they were within the atmosphere why Pan-O would be unable to then mask their landing zone, or simply land very obviously somewhere Ariadna forces are not and redeploy to another area thousands of kilometers away in stealth.
Heck you can coast at obscene speeds in space. That's not the problem, though. Your albedo (reflectivity) matters a little, but what really matters is your thermal signature. You basically need a sunshade cooled by liquid hydrogen (to below -252degC, less than 20degC above absolute zero!) to be effectively undetectable to IR. At that point, you are less than 15degC above cosmic background, which isn't detectable at solar system distances. It is detectable within a couple hundred KM, but you gotta get there first. And in space, a couple hundred KM is "right on top of them". Said sunshade needs to be minimally reflective to radio, IR, visible light, and UV, which really increases how much energy it absorbs from the local star, which makes it harder to keep cool, which makes you use more heat to keep the hydrogen liquid, which increases your likelihood of being detected from a sensor outside your sunshade's shadow. Even Ariadna has a few spaceships bought from the Nomads for asteroid mining and Skywatch (looking for asteroids on collision course with the planet). It can be done, though. The problem is that you're going to take a decade to get from the equivalent of Earth to Saturn (which is about the distance to the wormholes). According to the RPG timeline, Ariadna has only been re-discovered for 10-15 years (pdf is on my dead computer). Fine, lemme dig through the old books. Where'd I bury my copy of N1? Coulda sworn the Russians controlled the only access to space, though.
They control the only Ariadnan spaceport. That's a VERY different thing to controlling who comes and goes from orbit.
Well, it's almost impossible to control who leaves orbit outbound anyway. But if you have radar coverage (not hard, and probably required for Air Traffic Control purposes anyway), you can track everyone reentering and where they're likely to land. If someone doesn't land at Matr Spaceport, they're obviously up to no good. Track them all the way down, send a team out to see what's up, send another team to deliver a protest to the Embassy of whoever that shuttle says it belongs to. Have you ever tried to fly the Space Shuttle landing sim? I'm not a bad pilot in the flight sims, but frankly it's terrifying. I'd say the Shuttle GLFR, glides like a fucking rock, but that's an insult to the aerodynamics of a rock. The shuttle descends at 10,000 feet per minute (3000m/min). At roughly 1 minute to touchdown, the Shuttle is 7.5miles/12km away at an altitude of 10,000ft/3000m, and a speed of 425mph/680kph. An airliner 1 minute from touchdown would be about 1 mile/1.6km away from the runway and an altitude of about 1000ft/300m. It's an ugly assumption, but I'm assuming that most dropships come in at roughly the Space Shuttle trajectory. It's roughly the fastest drop in that a human can survive, though the actual descent profile was intended to minimize heat buildup on the orbiter. I think the only option PanO would have is to have a stealthy ship riding another vehicle for reentry, but you'd have to cut the stealthy ship loose as soon as you were slow enough for it to survive. Assuming that said stealthy ship is subsonic-only like the F117 or B2, you'd be jumping off the reentry ship about 3 minutes before it landed. That's at 90,000ft and a speed of just under Mach 1. You'd also be about 25 miles/36km away from the Matr Spaceport, which is close to the radar detection range of the B2.
I think we can safely assume stealth tech in Infinity is slightly better than what we have now. In fact, the RPG confirms that TO Camo (working exactly as the individual system works) exists for vehicles and even imposes a penalty in traffic due to the increased risk of collision due to the fact that other vehicles can't detect you. That basically ends the discussion. The tech to supply a base in secret absolutely exists, and PanOceania has every reason to use it.
