Imperial Research Station idea: Temporal Anthropology

[N.I.C.E. Labs]

Hey

This probably isn't the right area to post this as it's also an adventure idea, but I wanted to share as it's a bit of technology I came up with for my players to experience while making a stop at a I.R.S. (providing a little set-up so bear with me )

The players are hired by the station to carry a load of needed materials to their experiment site, which gives them pause as it's in system-free deep space. The crates are marked with things referring to reasearch in Temporal Anthropology. Of course immediate thoughts of Time Travel will fill the player's heads but it's something quite different.

In deep space, free from all the normal objects associated with a planetary system is a large diaphinous structure. A station of some sort, and radiating out from it are thin spokes a thousand kilometers or more. Like a giant spider web the structure is reinforced by cross pieces with ultra-thin sheeting filling the cells.

It is in essence a giant radio telescope. Light from a star many light years away took that many years to reach the point of observation, so looking at the stars is looking back in time. The giant telescope is capitalizing on that. Making it large enough to be sensitive to even minute light, it purpose is not to gain images of the system, but of the inhabitants of the system. Not 'reading license plates' or anything, but studying the large scale movements on a world, perhaps a famous space battle or catastrophe that happened hundreds of years ago (depending on the distance from the world in question to the telescope).

I used this in an adventure where the players had to help deal with a saboteur who's family would be ruined due to a lie about a famous space battle scheduled to be observed. Anyway, my group thought the backdrop to the adventure was a neat idea so I thought I'd share with you if you'd like to experiment with it yourselves.

 

[Icosahedron]

Just a couple of technical points to consider:

You mention radio waves and light in the same paragraph. I could see a radio telescope being constructed on a huge scale (though I'm not sure about thousands of km) but visible light is a whole different ball game - due to the precision needed to resolve wavelengths 10^9 times shorter. How much useful information could you gain about human activity from radio? (I imagine most intership communication during a space battle would use tight-beam lasers rather than radio).

Even in deep space there will be distortions due to instabilities, and the bigger the telescope, the more susceptible it will be. I'd picture your device like an oil slick on a pond; it could have an uncontrollable shimmer merely due to its own temperature, and a single astronaut adding a single bolt by EVA would likely set up minute oscillations in the structure that would take decades to dampen down enough to provide a workable 'image'.

Having said that, I'm not sure just how big a RT would need to be to pick up 'casual' radio traffic from star systems a few light-decades/centuries away - maybe not big enough to have major instability problems. Can anyone else 'throw some light on' that?

 

[tjoneslo]

Just a couple of technical points to consider:

How much information you can gain from monitoring radio traffic depends upon how much of it there is. As you mention, military traffic is probably encrypted tight beam transmissions and very difficult to resolve. There is reason to believe that much of the in-system "radio" traffic would also be relatively tight beam laser traffic, if only to cut down on the power requirements for a communications beam. It's also probable that most of the traffic will be digitally encoded, making it even more difficult to decipher. In a heavily populated system, you can use a system of orbiting repeater satellites which would further cut down on the power requirements, and make it more difficult to spy on further out.

The problems of instability of the telescope is an engineering problem. That is, there isn't any physics reason why you can't compensate for the minute vibrations. We have active mirror control systems today to compensate for atmospheric distortions. The mirrors don't even need to be connected to a solid structure. Use (millions) of small mirrors, each with a Lhyd gas jet controller, and an active control system, there's no limit to the size of the "mirror" you can build.

The fact that you can get the telescope below 4 degrees kelvin means you can track the heat signatures in the system you are looking at. You can follow the battle by spotting the heat of the starships.

This would still be incredibly cool looking though.

 

[N.I.C.E. Labs]

Thanks for pointing these things out to me. I'm guessing what I would be trying to see would be visible light, so it would need to be a gigantic optical telescope. Granted 5,000 years in the future there may be some advances in the understanding of light that would allow optical images shunted from different wavelengths, but assuming there aren't (and forgiving my trying to remember my physics classes from twenty years ago), would this be an alternative....? :

If memory serves, was it Plank's Constant that addresses the amount of deflection a particle with undergo from passing between two edges (as in light spreading passing through a slit). What about the 'lens' being a sort of giant screen, strengthened with antigrav and made up of a myriad of such small slits.. perhaps even the gaps being gravitic in nature. The purpose and effect would be focusing the light, collecting it tighter onto a smaller screen, and another, and another, until it was collected enough that it was focused into an albeit huge, but more traditional optical telescope. Not saying that the gravitics were black hole strength... not bending light, just setting up the situation for the Constant to be in effect and give the light a little nudge in the right direction.

I could just be blowing smoke of course, but maybe?

 

[Icosahedron]

Sounds like this would give you a giant diffraction grating - requiring another level of interpretation. You'd probably be better with mirrors. There's a formula to calculate the diameter of the optics required to resolve objects of a given size at a given range but, like you, I can't remember it.
We make a real doddering old pair!

 

[atpollard]

We make a real doddering old pair!

But at least you are a 'doddering old pair' of physicists.

 

[robject]

This still sounds really cool. Imagine telescopes trained to critical points in the Fifth Frontier War for military and historical analysis... if you're writing that book, you can "be there" to get research firsthand...

"Well, I was just ten at the time it happened, but my first look at the Battle of Two Suns filled me with awe..."

 

[Andrew Boulton]

http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Longbow

 

[tjoneslo]

Granted 5,000 years in the future there may be some advances in the understanding of light that would allow optical images shunted from different wavelengths, but assuming there aren't (and forgiving my trying to remember my physics classes from twenty years ago), would this be an alternative....? :

If memory serves, was it Plank's Constant that addresses the amount of deflection a particle with undergo from passing between two edges (as in light spreading passing through a slit).

What you are trying so hard to remember is the diffraction limitation for a telescope's resolution. If you shove a packet of photons through an opening, no matter big, they begin to spread through diffraction. How much depends upon the wavelength of the light (shorter wavelengths diffract more), which is why optical telescopes have a more limited resolution. And on the size of the opening.

This second is why TNE introduced the gravity focused lasers. The idea was to create an intense gravity field as a huge (10m+) lens for the laser weapons to allow them to have the light second ranges they did in CT.

But I'd build the system as a series flat detectors, not a large mirror. The detectors would be sensitive enough to detect single photons (technology which exists today), and their energy. Then use a high speed computer to turn that data into a picture. The only limit on the resolution of my telescope is how many detectors can I afford.

 

[jfetters]

http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Longbow

Thanks, Andrew. You beat me to it.

 

[BlackBat242]

In other words, a focal plane array (FPA), also known as a staring array.

Far lighter than any sort of mirror/mirror-lens array of comparable resolution... all you need is lots of detectors designed for the spectrum you wish to observe, and lots of processing power.

 

[N.I.C.E. Labs]

Ah cool Well there ya go then

I hadn't come across Longbow in my CT days, so that part of it I think I'll leave out of the scope of my campaign, but it's nice to know my idea isn't so far fetched as all that (even if I weren't executing it properly).

Cool cool Thanks for all the input. I'll make sure when this current campaign comes across Looking Glass (as I call it), it will be sculpted properly given all this great info

 

[G. Fieendish]

The BITS supplement 101 Religions, had a adventure hook, in that the players were deploying satellites for their employer in deep space, to form part of a very big sensor array.
However, on returning they find their employers gone, "literally in the middle of the night", leaving them unpaid, and a cryptic note, in a deposit box telling them to "look into Longbow....".
(The wikipedia entry on Longbow is effectively censored, & and what reflects what people of the Imperium (i.e the players) would probably discover about Longbow....
The MegaTraveller/TNE "crossover" supplement Survival Margin does tell you the truth about Longbow however, including the fact it's still operational....)

 

[Qstor2]

The MegaTraveller/TNE "crossover" supplement Survival Margin does tell you the truth about Longbow however, including the fact it's still operational....)[/I]

There's a few notes on Longbow in some of the GT products too.

Mike