sudo-EatPant

I'm using tilt controls!

am 27 | furry & retro tech | very bi | operator of @UCVRCG



NireBryce
@NireBryce

"there's no stealth in space everyone has sensors" YouTube men i need you to understand that as distance increases your search space goes up by like, at least √(∆distance² + ∆radius²) for longer distance sensors you'd need to have narrowbeam to get useful signals from.

visual observation is the same, even with image recognition. but much worse, because video readouts of sensors can't really be doing long exposures.

u have no idea how frustrating it is to even find a star, somewhere we actually know is in the sky, without knowing either most of the named star landmarks, or having a computer point at known coordinates. a "sensor sweep" is more like a spherical raster scan at the resolutions you'd need, because there's so much noise if you are doing like, sector search.

NASA knows where all the space stuff is mostly because they know enough math and get enough data points that they can track known objects.

but they're already having a hard time with the number of satellites, and that's like, the width of a human hair compared to interplanetary distances, not even inter-star distances.

the way we track a lot of asteroids these days is... people guess and then look in the general area of where they think it will cross a star. and if the star gets darker yeah your guess was right. but are you really going to notice a much, much smaller ship that's, sure like half the distance but still


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

Iirc there was some older sci-fi that leaned into this, where the old space empire had lost badly because their armadas of giant ships couldn't detect their enemies well-coordinated waves of small attack craft until it was too late.

insulated shield + directional radiators can help a lot, and putting a star or planet between you and the most enemy sensors you can will get you fairly far --- imagine the sunshield for james webb, just in the other direction

you can also probably do peltier stuff as long as you're radiating all your waste heat in the cone behind the shield