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.