Aha, I did ponder, but I didn't realise that drive engines had that much of a heat signature. Makes sense though, but would the same problems occur for mines? :hmmm:

The problem with stealth ships in space is waste heat and propulsion. If you have humans living on this ship, you are going to generate tons of waste heat, the only way to dispose of which is to radiate it outside the ship, which could be easily detected by anyone casually looking. Then you have the problem that, even if you shut down your engines while trying to be stealthy, you are going to have to burn them in order to actually get anywhere, which would of course be seen by everyone in the system. TLAM Strike's Project Rho link has a nice detailed explanation of the problems with stealth in space.

Stealth mines might work. I can see something like disguising inactive missiles as space junk in orbit, waiting to be activated when an enemy ship wanders too close as a workable tactic. But without a way around these problems "small, heavily armed stealth ships" would not work.

EDIT: Damn ninjas!

Forget radar, think simple IR telescopes. If the crew compartment is habitable, then it's a reasonable IR source. If the ship makes sci fi amounts of power (powerful drives, or directed energy weapons), then it's a bright IR source.

How well does IR and radar work against an object that is light years away and moving very fast? Would any data they produce arrive in time to do any good?

Also within a solar system, where the speeds and distance are relatively less, there are plenty of planets, moons, asteroids and other stuff to hide the biggest of ships behind.

Unless the ship was travelling faster than the speed of light then IR and Radar, and other means of electromagnetic detection would provide weeks or months worth of warning.

The element of surprise would probably only work if the system was outside of the detection range of the vessel you intend to attack, or if you were able to approach the vessel keeping a planet between you and it at all times, which would be difficult and easily countered by the enemy having more than one unit with sensors, for example a capital ship with smaller scouting vessels around it, arranged in a manner that their radar and IR systems cover a maximum range would mean that even if the capital ship doesn't detect the vessel entering the system, the scouts would and relay that message to the capital ship, thus eliminating the element of surprise.

Hiding near objects that emit electromagnetic interference and product a larger amount of heat than your vessel might work...or might just get you killed. Stars perhaps, but again, you'd be detected moving into position.


EDIT: Also, I didn't see TLAMs post at #35 (hence my blunder on IR detector a few posts later) but yes, a Galaxy class is a good all rounder vessel for long range space exploration/flag planting/diplomacy. Although in TNG, it's rare that they actually go out of communications range of Starfleet Command, so the element of the captain of the vessel being a joint military/diplomatic officer/scientist is a bit lost...BUT, it is a core principle of training for Starfleet officers, so it is at least acknowledged in the Trekverse. Kirk on the other hand, had a more primitive comms setup, and when Archer went into the Expanse he was pretty much on his own...but then his Enterprise was, well, mostly outmatched by anything it faced.

Already answered, but if moving fast, their future position is already very predictable. They'd have to thrust constantly to make any significant change, which would be visible. Put a rock in front of them. Boom.

It would arrive before the ship does, usually by a very large margin, and if you know where the ship was, where it was going and how fast it's not terribly difficult to figure out where it actually is by the time the information gets there and how to blow it up.

You could hide a ship behind a planet, but a close enough orbit would expose it to whatever you're hiding from every few hours. You can avoid that by applying thrust, but then your exhaust will be detected and they'll know you're there. That's of course assuming your enemy is only looking at you from a single point, and that your ship was at that location to begin with...

Thanks! Ruined my ideas, but it was really interesting!
Looks like space warfare is going to be a lot different to naval warfare!

The truth is we cant possibly know what we will have available and therefore cant say for certain about ANYTHING

But assuming the Halo series is anywhere near the mark its going to take quite a large engine to propel yourself faster than light through any means, except maybe wormholes assuming they even exist. That means carriers with smaller craft still do make sense. A ship of smaller design is not going to have trans-system capabilities, requiring a larger craft to carry and maintain them.

Also, Stealth is even easier to obtain in space. If you can hide heat and radiation signatures youll be invisible, absolutely. the vastness of space is the ultimate assistance to what would be the submarines of the future.

Also, stealth ships only need be in-system with advanced scanners to gain extremely valuable intel. number of enemy vessels, possible trajectories, all this valuable intelligence. The funniest thing is, Halo's stealth ships, named prowlers, are amazingly similar to submarines. Anyone vigorously scanning has a good chance of detecting the spacecraft. The best mode of movement would be to "run silent" with very minimal engine power. The prowlers of the future might indeed rely on not obtaining total invisibility to scanners but the severe dampening of its ability to be detected, like a stealth fighter. But given the amount of asteroids that are so abundant in our solar system and presumably others, and the immense distances of space, any object below a certain level of activity and/or mass would be nearly impossible to isolate and identify. For all they know its another asteroid or dead object.

And, once more, my idea is possible.
Thank you!

There may, indeed, be ways around the hard physics problems facing us in these questions that we simply haven't discovered yet. In regards to actual space travel, there's the possibility of bending space and making the journey distance smaller, punching through the bends...which is pretty much what wormholes are all about. That would also get past the nasty problem of coming back from a mission and greeting your great-great-great-great-great-great-great granddaughter/son as your only living relation, or coming back and finding nothing at all.
Science is always in motion, so there could be answers out there, or there might not be.

How do you propose to hide the heat signature? There's not a whole lot of things you can do with heat. You can either radiate it into space, or you can keep it in the ship, which means you're going to cook your crew, while slowly radiating the heat to space anyway. Heat is one of the main problems with sci-fi style spacecraft.

Science will find a way!

Wouldn't that depend on your altitude and velocity? Communications satellites in a Clarke belt orbit can maintain a geostationary position over a part of the Earth without having to apply thrust so it's seems to me that if you reverse the direction of travel one could stay on one side of a planet (orbit-stationary?) without that much effort at all.

Depends if you want to keep the mines stationary or not. If you want to keep them stationary you need some kind of low power drive:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_htm...fending_Points

if you want the weapons to just drift you are going to run in to the problem of having to fill space with the damn things because they are all off on their own orbits.

Here's one for the hard science dudes...it's probably easily proven wrong because I'm tired and was just about to get into bed when I thought of this...but couldn't we take a leaf from submarines and use a double hull?

The internal hull would radiate heat from the crew and power source, but the external hull (connected to the internal by non-conductive materials) would have a vacuum buffer between it and the internal hull, and since space is a good insulator, the heat radiated by the internal hull wouldn't reach the external hull which (in theory) would stay the same temperature as the vacuum around it.

Of course, that doesn't get rid of the problem with the heat generated by the drive system, but the radiant hull temperature problem might be solved.

Also, since infrared is an electromagnetic radiation we can also bend that, like we can bend light, with metamaterials, heck, we can even bend gamma radiation now, but whether you'd be able to bend the exhaust radiation enough that it would become undetectable is another matter...

Hard science dudes, over to you, I'm off to bed now I've gotten this out of my head...if I'd have left it till tomorrow morning I'd have forgotten it...really must start leaving a notepad on my bedside table...

Every single watt generated must be radiated to space.

the problem in space is cooling, not heating. The whole universe is a thermos, and only radiative transfer is meaningful.

Double hull? Heat radiates to external hull, which then glows white after a while.

Saying "we don't know what they will have" is not a real point, we DO know thermodynamics. Unless you postulate some way to convert waste heat into "hyperspace" or something, your stuck with breaking as little reality as possible (course if you can dump heat, you can likely measure hyperspace "waves" or something, then you have a new detector.

Propellers?
 

Hang on, would a propeller work in space? I mean, sure there's no air or water, but might it still produce propulsion?
If stealth craft used propellers, they would only be detectable visually or by using pinging, as the propeller wouldn't generate any noise, because for sound you need air, and there is no air in space.

Perhaps they could use a nuclear generator for long range travel, and only use the propeller for attack?

Just speculating. Probably wouldn't work anyway.

No. If there's nothing for the propeller to push, it does no good.

And even if it did work, you'd still need to spin the propeller, which would generate heat. There is no stealth in space.

No, for the same reason it makes no sound. The propeller has to push against something to work. No air, no water, no push.