Maths Job

[Richard Saunders]

Hello.
Just reading another thread and an idea came to me and hear it is.
How fast would you have to be going (in space) to beat radar.
Yes someone will at this point say light speed but if you wait until i finish typing you will get the rest of the problem.
Radar must have a built in receiver bandwidth other wise it would pick up everything, now assumming a bandwidth of Mach 5 how fast would you need to go to not be spotted.
The reason i picked mach 5 is thats about the fastest an aircraft at our tech can go?????.
In traveller radar is used to track craft so how fast would a raiding force that wanted to splash the impi naval base have to be going to release the weapon (a rock would do) and not be tracked.

Why do i get visions of Londo and the Narn homeworld.
As an aside - the freefall cartoon is wonderful and i think i know the capitan, have down loaded all of them (the cartoon).
Whats happened to Raconteurs rest (friends in high places)????.
BYE.

 

[Andrew]

To the best of my knowledge you cannot go to fast to be seen on radar, in fact going fast makes you easier to pick out on radar currently , at a low speed, and a small target signature you can become confused with contacts like birds.
To defeat modern radar you either have to have too low a signature for the radar to notice you, be above the area scanned by the radar , or be too low for the radar to see you because of curvature of the earth and ground clutter.

If this is an attack from space against a navel base the only ways to avoid detection would be to misidentified as an asteroid, or merchant ship or too be sufficiently stealthy that the defenders cannot detect you.
If you are going sufficiently fast the defenders would not have time to react to the detection however that would need to be really fast . IMTU ships never get as fast as .1C so the defenders should be able to react.

Consider that if it was possible to take out a naval base just by moving real fast then everyone would do it and navel bases would be much rarer.
The people who built the navy base probably want it to survice so they will have deployed remote sensor drones to cover their blindspots etc.

 

[The Oz]

Lionel does have a point.

Radars do have circuits (or programming) that ignore some returning signals. This is done to eliminate false targets from the ground, birds, meteorites, etc. How this is done is very complicated and modern radars can usually adjust this signal processing since it's all in the computer software.

Radars (and other active sensors) in Traveller will certainly have similar circuity/programming. In theory if you knew what the enemy radars were set to ignore you could try to look like that. However, as I've posted elsewhere, the maximum safe speeds for Traveller ships are low enough that it would easily be possible to set these circuits to pick up anything moving as fast as a Traveller ship could go.

 

[Uncle Bob]

So if the radar is specifically designed to ignore hypersonic threats it will ignore the rock, probably by frequency gating the doppler return.
But no TL5 air traffic radar would need such discrimination, no TL8 space defence radar would want it.

 

[trader jim]

just for the sake of discussion, wonder what kind of math will be used in the far future???, like ours or something different???...any good Math guys out there willing to speak their Theory??

 

[Andrew]

Originally posted by The Oz:
[QB] Lionel does have a point.

Radars do have circuits (or programming) that ignore some returning signals. This is done to eliminate false targets from the ground, birds, meteorites, etc. How this is done is very complicated and modern radars can usually adjust this signal processing since it's all in the computer software.

I agree however the point of this is to avoid false contacts there are very few fast moving false contacts. In Nature nothing goes supersonic so you want to track anything going fast.
Depending how the software package on the radar is eliminating false contacts you may well be able to play games with it.
But the point I was making is that going fast is not going to fool any sensor array in practice it just makes you easier to pick out from the background.

 

[Andrew]

Originally posted by trader jim:
just for the sake of discussion, wonder what kind of math will be used in the far future???, like ours or something different???...any good Math guys out there willing to speak their Theory??

Maths will be fundementally the same at least at the levels you will encounter in anything resembling day to day life. (In terms of the UK education system nothing will change before about the 2nd year of your maths/physics degree, so less than 1% of the population would notice any changes )
There may be some new forms of higher maths particularly as used to try and describe Jump Theory or other new science theories.
However at the moment there does not seem to be any move to change the fundementals of maths so it will probbaly not change.

 

[Richard Saunders]

Hello.
Sorry but at some point your speed will move the return signal out of the radar band and into light, so radar will not detect you.
Am i to understand that each radar set will pick up every other radar set in existance (dosn't this make it fun at airports each plane has anticollision radar the airport has its approach radar the contollers have there hight and distance radar the police have there speed cameras, the military have there radar.
This may explane why somany collisions accure.
Nasty comment aside.
I assummed that every radar works within a bandwidth so it dosnt interfear with other radar's, if this was so then radar has a point at whitch it stops detecting things because they move out of its bandwith (dopler shift).
If i'm still wrong i'll get a life later today or tommorrow.
BYE.
Yet another entry in the SOCK race. (SOC)
SOC = silly old @#$%, (character).

 

[Richard Saunders]

Originally posted by Andrew:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by trader jim:
just for the sake of discussion, wonder what kind of math will be used in the far future???, like ours or something different???...any good Math guys out there willing to speak their Theory??

Maths will be fundementally the same at least at the levels you will encounter in anything resembling day to day life. (In terms of the UK education system nothing will change before about the 2nd year of your maths/physics degree, so less than 1% of the population would notice any changes )
There may be some new forms of higher maths particularly as used to try and describe Jump Theory or other new science theories.
However at the moment there does not seem to be any move to change the fundementals of maths so it will probbaly not change. </font>[/QUOTE]Hello.
Maths dosnt change just the way we interpret the results, new idea's may come allong like 0 and the square route of -1, but basicaly 1+1 will mostly make 2. except as interpreted by burocrats.
BYE.

 

[Andrew]

Sorry , Maths does change in the same way physics changes. "New" Maths is discovered , it has always been true but it is new to human society. Calculus was not known to the Romans for instance but has always been a truth of maths.
I would agree that most changes in maths are merely new way of using old maths , however "new maths" is on occasion discovered.
I am not a mathmatician so I have not kept closely in touch with the development of maths over the years, my knowledge comes from associating with mathmaticians and with the development of physics the theoretical side of which is hard to distnguish at times from Mathamatics.

Most maths has very little to do with actual numbers only low level artithmetic and such sordid things as real world maths actually uses many numbers

 

[Uncle Bob]

In fact, at a certain level mathematics no longer seeks solutions. It is satisfied to prove that a solution exists (or that it doesn't).

Chaos theory involves systems of equations with a very large number of (equally valid) solutions.

I have about 30 course-hours of graduate mathematics and I can only dimly see todays frontiers. I can't imagine how future mathematics can be included in any useul way.

 

[Uncle Bob]

Originally posted by Lionel Deffries:
I assummed that every radar works within a bandwidth so it dosnt interfear with other radar's, if this was so then radar has a point at whitch it stops detecting things because they move out of its bandwith (dopler shift).

I meantioned doppler gating in my original post, but I wasn't very clear.

Early radar (TL 4-5) had very wide bandwidths, and would probably detect up to at least 20 PSOL. They had a relatively short range and weren't aimed into space anyway. TL 7-10 space defence radars will expect high velocity objects.

The only place you would have to worry about dopplering is with TL 6-7 air trafic control radars, and they would be range limited and aimed horizontally anyway.

 

[PapaGolfWhiskey]

Math and Physics do not so much Overturn and replace what has been discovered before so much as they expand the frame of reference and/or add new refinement.

A student imersed in Lagrangian calculations might declare that Newton was full of excrement but but his 'laws' and equations still work fine for dumb shmoe's like myself who want to throw balls around by hand. Assuming they even bother to calculate what a quick toss and carefull eyeballing will tell them with far greater accuracy.

Seriously though. Newtonian Physics works fine if you're not a rocket scientist or an Artillaryman obessessed with pin point accuracy.

Likewise 2+2 will always equal three...er. four.

...unless you're adding molecules.

 

[trader jim]

Interesting thread...so nobody realy knows if we will reach a point that we will support a civilization like Traveller....even future math is not shedding any "new" light on the subject!!

Still trying to see the "future" with out a crystal ball....o'well....darn!!!

 

[Uncle Bob]

Originally posted by Garf:
Math and Physics do not so much Overturn and replace what has been discovered before so much as they expand the frame of reference and/or add new refinement.

A student imersed in Lagrangian calculations might declare that Newton was full of excrement but but his 'laws' and equations still work fine for dumb shmoe's like myself who want to throw balls around by hand. Assuming they even bother to calculate what a quick toss and carefull eyeballing will tell them with far greater accuracy.

Seriously though. Newtonian Physics works fine if you're not a rocket scientist or an Artillaryman obessessed with pin point accuracy.

Likewise 2+2 will always equal three...er. four.

...unless you're adding molecules.

Uh, Newtonian mechanics or Newtonian calculus.

Newtonian mechanics work pretty well for orbital mechanics. It's just that you have to use partial differentials to get the details right. Same problem with the ballistics that a rocket engineer or gunner deals with. They have to use differentials to estimate the way those molecules interfere. And I'm afraid its not pin-point accuracy either: if you go by pure Newton an artillery shell will be hundreds of meters off.

 

[PapaGolfWhiskey]

Newton's Equations work fine if you are NOT a rocket scientist/Artilaryman.

At least according to a Math student I remember from University. In his words "once you start studying Lagrange you learn that Newton was full of S%#$%t"

Despite his high horse, Newton works fine for dumb schmoe's like me.