Why aircraft carriers won't make sense in space

[Betonov]

Originally Posted by tater

How could you come to that conclusion? There is no cat and mouse. All are easily visible to passive sensors. No hiding.

The manouvering behind the planets, using every dirty trick in the book to stay hidden...

And the fact August brought forward. Warp drive warps space. If you warp space just right your heat won't leave the bubble, so no signature.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by August

I would hazard to guess that anyone with the ability to travel between the stars will also know how to mask their heat signature.

Not at you; you just made me think of something funny. Of course the idea of the Romulan cloaking device in the original Star Trek episode was to mask the ship against long-range sensors, not to make it invisible to the Mk 1 eyeball. By the time they used it in a movie it made the ship disappear altogether, so the poor schlub jogging in the park conked his head.

What just occured to me is this: The cloaking device makes the ship invisible. Sulu says "Captain! It's gone off the screen! We can't see it!" Kirk walks around the console and up to the big view screen. He then points to a part of the screen and says "Mr Sulu, do see - right here - where the stars appear to be distorted, like...I don't know...like the distortion in the air just above the street where the hot air is rising? It seems to be moving this way, and I'll bet if we aimed our phasers right here...


But you're probably right. Anybody with faster-than-light drives and artificial gravity generators would likely figure that part out as well.

[Betonov]

Steve, it was a Klingon ship in the movie

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by Betonov

Steve, it was a Klingon ship in the movie

Only because they got the cloaking devices from the Romulans And the Klingons flogged them a load of old D7s in response. The Romulans got the raw deal IMHO.

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Betonov

Steve, it was a Klingon ship in the movie

I know. I didn't figure it was worth mentioning.

Originally Posted by Oberon

Only because they got the cloaking devices from the Romulans And the Klingons flogged them a load of old D7s in response. The Romulans got the raw deal IMHO.

Only because the people who made the movie didn't do their homework. The rest was scrambling for an explanation for the egg on their faces.

[Betonov]

Damn, I thougt Romulans wouldn't trade with anyone

[CaptainMattJ.]

Youre forgetting that heat energy doesnt have to be dumped anywhere. it can stay inside the ship indefinitely or at least be trickled out to space in very low quantities. The heat could most certainly be used to power things.

But again, technology limits theories into nothing but speculation as to future technology.

[Raptor1]

Originally Posted by CaptainMattJ.

Youre forgetting that heat energy doesnt have to be dumped anywhere. it can stay inside the ship indefinitely or at least be trickled out to space in very low quantities.

Even if you don't radiate heat into space (an action that will generate even more waste heat), or radiate amounts small enough to be undetected, eventually you are going to accumulate enough that your spacecraft's hull heats up and starts radiating anyway. Either that or the crew dies. Or both.

And that doesn't avoid the whole issue with your engine exhaust being seen from light years away.

Originally Posted by CaptainMattJ.

The heat could most certainly be used to power things.

And how would you go about committing this violation of the second law of thermodynamics, exactly?

[tater]

Originally Posted by CaptainMattJ.

Youre forgetting that heat energy doesnt have to be dumped anywhere. it can stay inside the ship indefinitely or at least be trickled out to space in very low quantities. The heat could most certainly be used to power things.

But again, technology limits theories into nothing but speculation as to future technology.

What?

LOL.

Um, no. The heat has to be constantly dumped, and in fact as fast as possible. The Shuttle had radiators, and deploying them was a first order of business. Failing to do so would mean almost immediate return to earth. That's for a craft using barely any power by "sci fi" standards.

Every single watt of power generated in the craft needs to be radiated to space. Every watt. If you have a warship, then we have to assume large power requirements. The subject is carriers and fighters, so we have to assume some sort of weaponry they'd carry. KE weapons would require mass-drivers or missiles. The latter uses little power. Directed energy weapons need to use megawatts. Any energy not fired off as the actual laser or particle weapon is waste and must be radiated to space or pretty soon the ship is not habitable. With radiators covering less than the whole ship you can expect them to be white hot on a ship making decent amounts of power.

Future technology will not negate thermodynamics.

If you want to postulate somehow putting waste heat into "hyperspace" or something, that's fine, but the ship will be covered with a cooling system that will then have to drive a generator or something to put it in a form that will allow for dumping in hyperspace. In such a universe surface damage would be nasty I guess, cause it will make the cooling stop working...

[razark]

Originally Posted by tater

In such a universe surface damage would be nasty I guess, cause it will make the cooling stop working...

Which means that every space battle will begin with the words:
"Enemy coming into range, sir! Targeting their radiators."

[tater]

The whole ship would be radiators, or absorbers, to then put into hyperspace "radiators." There is of course no reason to suppose that the hyperspace part is "outside," it might be in the center as hyperspace is not in our usual dimensions anyway.

Still, that is massively breaking physics. In general, I like space combat ideas where you pick a few things to break, and try to hold them to those as much as possible (say FTL drives).

In fantasy "SF" like star trek, they can radiate via "subspace" radio, presumably. Of course if you can broadcast in hyperspace/subspace, you can likely receive in that same space. So you stop radiating IR to a point, and replace it with detectable "subspace" radiation---which might be detectable at vastly greater distances, BTW, if it is the space used for FTL. So as a work around, it's a bad one.

Also, even if you collect "excess" radiation for mitigating using some made up tech, the hull is still shirtsleeve temp for the crew. A small ship is easily detectable at the distance of our moon with current, small, IR telescopes that could automatically scan the complete volume of space around the ship in a short time frame.

You cannot cool the hull to be equal to background if people are inside.

[August]

Well if stealth is out there is always brute force. Let the enemy see us coming, they'll only have a few extra hours to contemplate their doom.

[razark]

Originally Posted by August

Well if stealth is out there is always brute force. Let the enemy see us coming, they'll only have a few extra hours to contemplate their doom.

Lack of surprise, overwhelming force, the only defense is deterrence, and the only response is to do the same to them?


Yup, MAD is back.

[tater]

Age of sail.

"Put us at pistol shot, and double-shot the guns!"

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by August

Well if stealth is out there is always brute force. Let the enemy see us coming, they'll only have a few extra hours to contemplate their doom.

Due to the distances involved its possible they would have years to prepare.