Thermal masking

[far-trader]

In that case, please consider my comment to be a comment on the post you were responding to.

Works for me, your reply is better

About all I would add is there may be times when a convoy won't pay for escorts (too expensive perhaps, too few to go around maybe, etc.) and rely on massed numbers to dissuade raiders (or more likely the hope that of the 20 ships in convoy the raiders will take someone else).

Escorts work better if obvious. I'm not sure Q-ships are all that effective (historically, or fictionally in Traveller). Perhaps in very specific scenarios.

 

[Dragoner]

Meh. Not nearly as fun as say, using gravitics to warp incoming ladar/radar/sensors/ad-nauseum around your ship rendering it "transparent" so they never see you. But its much more likely to work.

This made me think of anti de stter space and thus my reply:

I was curious about newton-hooke and I found this:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0308200v1.pdf

Which raises an interesting idea that you could maybe "throw" your signature out of phase, so it might be seen, but at the wrong time/space from your actual position.

 

[Carlobrand]

...
Escorts work better if obvious. I'm not sure Q-ships are all that effective (historically, or fictionally in Traveller). Perhaps in very specific scenarios.

The historical Q-ship was a freighter armed with a hidden deck-mounted gun and put out to patrol as armed bait, introduced in WW-I to deal with the submarine threat. At the time - driven both by humanitarian concerns and the need to husband their few torpedoes - submarines (well, most of them) would surface to threaten civilian shipping, ordering the crew and passengers off and then using their deck gun to sink the now-abandoned ship. So, the Brits mounted guns on some of the ships, hiding them behind panels contrived to look like part of the ship's hull or like the sides of cargo containers. Another trick was to have the Q-ship act as a stalking horse, escorted by a Brit sub who torpedoed any German sub who surfaced to threaten the ship. Germans lost a few subs that way.

One wants to say the Q-ships were the reason the Germans sank civilian ships without warning, but in fact the Brits had been playing fast and loose with the rules of war from the beginning of the war, trying to reduce the impact of the U-boat siege by ordering their civilian ships to disguise their nationality and to turn and ram any u-boat that surfaced to make threats. (The Thrasher incident - an American named Thrasher had died in a U-boat attack on the Brit steamer Falaba - almost brought the U.S. into the war in 1915 before it was learned that the German sub had surfaced and given Falaba a chance to abandon ship, that Falaba had instead radioed Brit warships and given them the U-boat's position, that the U-boat had only fired at the last minute after Brit warships showed up to attack it, and that Falaba had been destroyed because the torpedo hit a hold full of explosives that Falaba was not supposed to be carrying.) The Germans responded by having subs launch submerged attacks without warning. Nonetheless, as late as 1917 SOME U-boats were still surfacing to give civilians a chance to evacuate.

The Brit feeling afterwards was that the effort had been less than successful. More Q-ships were sunk than U-boats, and not a whole lot of either for the number of encounters - in most engagements the Germans slipped away without damage. (Keep in mind that as of 1917, it was very hard for a submarine to hit a ship with a torpedo when the ship knew about where the submarine was and was trying not to get hit.)

The Brits tried again early in WW-II, arming 9 ships as Q-ships. Two were sunk, and the other seven never sighted an enemy ship before the program was ended and the ships retired.

And they never worked that well in Star Fleet Battles either.