Space Combat

[Coalition]

part one is that, while low on immediate thrust, an engine that gets it's thrust from a proton steam will, I think, produce a trail that does not emit a thermal signature, nor would it be detectable to telescopes or radar because of the inability of a single proton to absorb a photon.

Your ship will be detected off its own heat. Running the engine will put a trail of high-energy protons. That will be detected. The high energy will cause them to emit heat. Even if the trail is somehow invisible, you have a multi MegaWatt or GigaWatt reactor that will heat up the ship. That will be detected as well.

part two is that while all aspect stealth is impossible, a large dish in front of a ship, one side a reflector and the other creating the image of a black body radiator at the appropriate temperature (or something more sophisticated). This frontal dish would also likely have requirments vs more active sensors. The sides of the ship could also have reflector/black body radiator sets making them hard to see via thermal detectors. The reason why all this doesn't break a law of thermodynamics is that all this reflected light is allowed to freely radiate out the rear of the craft. Making them quite visible to that direction.

You have to keep the reflector from heating up as well from conduction. If it is connected to your ship, it will heat up. If it is not connected, you will have to drift in at the same rate as the shield, making your approach time take years.

Part three is that whatever the cost of the sea of sensors, the requirement that they have to detect the sides of something from part 1 and that they communicate with the home planet means that at the least they should be more expensive than the cost of the coil gun slug that takes them out. Since the fleets would be in battle already if they were in range and the sensors velocity woud likely be constant, shooting at them is simple and convenient.

Sensor range in space is obscene. Your ships will be detected past Pluto by sensors in Earth orbit. The sensors in Earth can maneuver once a couple of months, and can dodge shots sent at them (unless the maneuvering pattern is stolen). If a satellite is doing basic sky scans, you have four hours to kill it, before it spots you. Now imagine a culture that can launch several of those satellites as a routine operation. Plus, the fact that the sensor satellites just stopped transmitting 'I am alive' signals is considered a hint. Your method to deal with this would be a coordinated system sweep, trying to take out all the satellites at once. If you did that beyond my sensor range, then you would take several years to arrive. Plenty of time for m to build cheap replacement sensors, toughened replacement sensors, and starships that cannot be killed by a coilgun round.

As I understand it, the website you directed us to during the earlier radiator discussion is of the opinion that a near deal breaking problem for laser based weapons is that most types of radiators cannot be armored and thus will be "shot off" in battle.

My point was that, especially in regards to missile based opponents, this seems to presume that the rest of the ship can soak up impacts. If the ship cannot, the relative vulnerability of the radiators is a relative non issue.

They had not brought up accleration. However without atmosphere to push against it's simply a matter of the radiator being able to handle the stresses from its own probalby fairly low inertia. This may well create some practical limits even if you use tension cables. Though there are also limits to how fast the ship itself can turn or accelerate due to its own structural intergrity and engine capability.

Your better stunt for radiators is the droplet radiator. Litle more than a focused spray nozzle with a catcher grid at the end. Those are armored, and any hits on the droplets cause minor problems.

For missile impacts, there are ways to dissipate the hit, but if all missiles are on-shots, then you might as well keep the radiators extended, to give your engine more power options.

[sunnyside]

Running the engine will put a trail of high-energy protons. That will be detected.

Alright. I'm was fairly sure about that, but I figured I'd try and find a source. It isn't something that texts tend to cover outright, but I found.

"Of course, the atom could have absorbed another photon with just the right energy to jump up another energy level, or even two or three or more. Likewise, after each of these possible excitations of the atom, the electron could jump back down one or more steps, emitting photons as it went. If a photon with a sufficiently large energy gets absorbed, it can even cause an electron to become unbound from its nucleus, a process that is called ionization. Our crippled hydrogen atom could then no longer absorb or emit light until it manages to capture a free electron back into a bound energy level."

From
http://fuse.pha.jhu.edu/~wpb/spectroscopy/basics.html

Of course as you noted there are ways a proton alone can emit a photon, however they require something else to be present like a magnetic field that splits the spin quantum level energies, or something to oscilate with or somesuch. So long as they are reasonably isolated, however, they are invisible.

You have to keep the reflector from heating up as well from conduction. If it is connected to your ship, it will heat up. If it is not connected, you will have to drift in at the same rate as the shield, making your approach time take years.

Oh come on! Cooling one component of the ship is trivial and you know it, especially since the side facing the ship is reflective, and, while I presume connections, they should be well insulated.

If you did that beyond my sensor range, then you would take several years to arrive. Plenty of time for m to build cheap replacement sensors, toughened replacement sensors, and starships that cannot be killed by a coilgun round.

Ok. Here is where I think you may be having problems. You're falling into personal pronoun space. Which usually leads to shutting off the part of the brain that says "but cooling a single reflective component of a ship is trivial". Try thinking from the side of the stealth ships for a moment trying to attack something give the above. If you fail in your attack than explain why you fail.

[Captain Seafort]

Ok. Here is where I think you may be having problems. You're falling into personal pronoun space. Which usually leads to shutting off the part of the brain that says "but cooling a single reflective component of a ship is trivial". Try thinking from the side of the stealth ships for a moment trying to attack something give the above. If you fail in your attack than explain why you fail.

In space there is no such thing as stealth. That is what people having been trying to get across. You might be able to reduce the temperature of this disk of yours considerably, but you're not going to be able to reduce it by two orders of magnitude, which is what would be required to produce a stealth ship. Even if you could, your ship would only be stealthy from one aspect, and would be incapable of firing its engines without revealing itself. This would render it useless as a warship.