Thermal masking

[Enoki]

Traveller gravitics are made possible by a negative entropy waste heat converter - discuss

Maybe they could simply convert energy (waste heat) back into mass. After all, there is a fusion plant aboard among other things.....

So, the waste heat is simply reconverted into say hydrogen or electrons (electricity) or something useful thereby getting rid of it in a sense.

 

[aramis]

Maybe they could simply convert energy (waste heat) back into mass. After all, there is a fusion plant aboard among other things.....

So, the waste heat is simply reconverted into say hydrogen or electrons (electricity) or something useful thereby getting rid of it in a sense.

Violates the law of Entropy.

 

[Enoki]

Violates the law of Entropy.

Only if you have a perpetual motion machine doing it. If the system operates at a net loss (ie., the energy in is greater than the equivalent mass out)...

But then again, given that in Traveller gravity is a known and manipulated force what says they haven't rewritten the law of Entropy among other things?....

 

[Carlobrand]

If the only thing that comes out of this exercise is that tansis link, it will still be worth it ten times over. That is one great link. Thanks!

 

[rancke]

My own preferred techno-babble handwave is a subspace heat sink. It allows you to get rid of heat into another dimension (not a jump-space dimension) instead of having to radiate it away. (They don't work in gravity wells, incidentally).

I'd want to work out rules for how big and how costly these devices were, though.


Hans

 

[Dragoner]

If the only thing that comes out of this exercise is that tansis link, it will still be worth it ten times over. That is one great link. Thanks!

This:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/Traveller

is a link. :devil:

 

[Icosahedron]

Maybe the experiments in artificial gravity, inertial compensation and reactionless drives at TL8 led to the discovery of Jump Space via energy mysteriously 'disappearing', and led to the creation of Jump Drives at TL9.
Jump space manipulation at low energies creates a heat sink, so any ship with a jump drive also has a 'dump' drive.

 

[mike wightman]

You'd have to make it part of the gravitics/maneuver drive because small craft and SDBs need to be able to dispose of waste heat too.

 

[Carlobrand]

Violates the law of Entropy.

I think the law of Entropy got seriously bent with the Black Globe. You turn the thing on, everything you radiate gets sucked up by it. Must be - you're not radiating any emissions anyone outside can see when you're inside. Then you turn the thing down or off and get to use that power a second time. Something ain't right about that.

 

[77topaz]

I think the law of Entropy got seriously bent with the Black Globe. You turn the thing on, everything you radiate gets sucked up by it. Must be - you're not radiating any emissions anyone outside can see when you're inside. Then you turn the thing down or off and get to use that power a second time. Something ain't right about that.

If the energy gets sucked up, you wouldn't be using it again. You'd be using your "new" "emissions". And if it is simply contained, there would be a bright flash, boom etc. when you turn the "shield" off - the trapped energy would be released all at once.
Also, if the Black Globe sucked up all the energy, it could use that energy to power itself the next time it was activated.

 

[warwizard]

Well for some real world tech added to this discussion:

Superconductors have the interesting property in that every part of a bulk superconductor is allways at the same temperature.

Suppose a sufficiently high temperature superconductor is found, (3000 years of trying, lets assume they find it.), the hot side of your cooling system is connected to the radiators by switched superconductor pathways, and the cold side... well that's switched to the rest of the hull surface, no hadium wavium required, just activley cool that which you do not want to radiate, and dump the heat into the brightly glowing radiators on the other side.

Enemy ship is vectoring around, all you do is switch off the radiators that the one you are hiding from will be able to see soon and turn on ones that it can no longer see, the hot radiator cools instantly, (you will have a jump in hull temp of a few degrees as the temp averages across the bulk of the hull.)

Yes it's not perfect, and it's not effective against a sensor you do not know is there, and a dusty environment will have the dust particles reflecting the IR you're sending out, but that's the basic assumption I use in my TU, to get the detection chances as put forth in several of the space combat rule sets.

 

[Carlobrand]

So it comes down to:

If you could come up with a perfect thermal insulator (almost certainly made of handwavium) and a superconductor to ensure that you could choose where the heat went, you could make yourself a nice little pirate ship that would be invisible to selected targets in specific directions. However:

1) a fleet - or even a small squadron - is going to send fighters or other small ships on flank in order to establish lines of sight that make that strategy invalid,

2) a well-settled world will have satellite observation systems to do the same thing,

and 3) nobody spends billions of credits and years of research just to come up with a way to be a better pirate.

So, if we start with the assumption that heat HAS to go somewhere, then there's no driving force to develop the technology because it's not useful in the arena it's intended for, and if the technology gets stumbled into for some other application, then it's still only useful for this purpose if you're a pirate around a world too poor to maintain decent satellite observation systems. Which gets into that whole pirate debate, which is NOT where I want this to go.

This has been quite informative!

 

[McPerth]

There is no evidence for the existance of dark matter or dark energy - it is a theory and nothing more.

The problem with dark energy and dark matter is there is not one jot of experimental evidence to support it - it is a mathematical construct that explains observations but has no empirical support.

Now they are designing experiments that may be able to shed some light (see what I did there) but until data is analysed and compared it os no more real than string theory, membrane theory etc.

There have been times in the past where mathematical equations have been used to revolutionise physics - maxwell's equations, einstein's theory of special and general relativity - but they were all able to be confirmed by experiment.

Dark energy and dark matter have no experimental confirmation as yet.

AFAIK (I'm not an expert in phisics), all this can be applied to gravitons too, and their manipulation is basic in traveller OTU.

When the existance of either is proven I'll change my mind, until then one word - ether.

Keeping in my ignorance about physics, I don't understand well the difference among the new concept of Dark Matery and the old one about the ether (aside from the naming, of course).

There are quite a few physicists who are starting to question certain "facts" - the big bang and the possibility of a unified field theory to name a couple.

There have always been. And I hope there will keep being ,as most of the time, those who make the technology/science advance come from this selected few (even while most of those 'questioners' end being wrong...).

One Catalan humorist said that a scientific is the only one that can give a theory, be proven wrong some time after, and be seen by history as a genius.

 

[Icosahedron]

So it comes down to:

If you could come up with a perfect thermal insulator (almost certainly made of handwavium) and a superconductor to ensure that you could choose where the heat went, you could make yourself a nice little pirate ship that would be invisible to selected targets in specific directions. However:

1) a fleet - or even a small squadron - is going to send fighters or other small ships on flank in order to establish lines of sight that make that strategy invalid,

2) a well-settled world will have satellite observation systems to do the same thing,

and 3) nobody spends billions of credits and years of research just to come up with a way to be a better pirate.

So, if we start with the assumption that heat HAS to go somewhere, then there's no driving force to develop the technology because it's not useful in the arena it's intended for, and if the technology gets stumbled into for some other application, then it's still only useful for this purpose if you're a pirate around a world too poor to maintain decent satellite observation systems. Which gets into that whole pirate debate, which is NOT where I want this to go.

This has been quite informative!

Depends how narrow an arc you can release the heat in. Would scouts/satellites on your flank see it, or would they need to be in your rear quarter?
Cost is no object for military applications. All pirates do is obtain old military stuff.

 

[Cryton]

EUREKA!!!

To quote:

"Your best decoy is to run with commercial traffic. He may be able to ID it as 20 ships pushing 0.005 gs with a drive output of 25 GW each, giving a rough mass of 5,000 tons each, but he'll have some difficulty (until they get closer) telling which ones are the freighters and which ones are the warships...
Ken Burnside"

Q-ships! You want to be stealthy, make your warship look like a Freighter!

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.

 

[far-trader]

EUREKA!!!

To quote:

"Your best decoy is to run with commercial traffic. He may be able to ID it as 20 ships pushing 0.005 gs with a drive output of 25 GW each, giving a rough mass of 5,000 tons each, but he'll have some difficulty (until they get closer) telling which ones are the freighters and which ones are the warships...
Ken Burnside"

Fine. We (my wolf pack) prepare for a crash jump and shoot a full spread of missiles at the "freighter" convoy. We win

Either:

They are just a simple convoy of sitting ducks and we can scrub our jump to continue to pound away at them with impunity doing great damage to your supply chain. Or continue our crash jump after hitting them and be happy with some damage done.

Or:

One or two (at most) freighters drop their guise, power up weapons and order flank speed. Not something they can do at the drop of a hat. Even their missiles will arrive too late and my missiles still take out at least one freighter or damage one of the Q-ships. As soon as they give away their game we jump away before they can bring anything to bear on us. I've still stung you and you didn't touch me. I live to hunt another day.

...after all the convoy may have been wary but had no real reason to suspect my own little "freighter" convoy were actually raiders until we fired :devil:

 

[rancke]

Fine. We (my wolf pack) prepare for a crash jump and shoot a full spread of missiles at the "freighter" convoy. We win

Either:

They are just a simple convoy of sitting ducks and we can scrub our jump to continue to pound away at them with impunity doing great damage to your supply chain. Or continue our crash jump after hitting them and be happy with some damage done.

Or:

One or two (at most) freighters drop their guise, power up weapons and order flank speed. Not something they can do at the drop of a hat. Even their missiles will arrive too late and my missiles still take out at least one freighter or damage one of the Q-ships. As soon as they give away their game we jump away before they can bring anything to bear on us. I've still stung you and you didn't touch me. I live to hunt another day.

...after all the convoy may have been wary but had no real reason to suspect my own little "freighter" convoy were actually raiders until we fired:devil:

There's not going to be a convoy. System Control will assign each ship an outbound track from the starport to the jump limit, making sure they are properly separated. System defenses will make sure the traffic rules are complied with. Arriving at the jump limit, each ship in turn jumps to the destination, where they will arrive in 168 hours +/- 10%. They arrived more or less at the same spot in space, but in different places relative to the destination world corresponding to the distance that world moves in the time it take the ship to make the jump. System defenses of the destination system will be standing by to cover their arrival.

Previous to that, your ship(s) has/have arrived at the first world spread out according to jump variation. As they arrive, each one is assigned a route to the starport (one that keeps the well away from other inbound and outbound traffic) and told to get a move on. If they try to linger at the jump limit, they attract the attention of system defenses. If they comply, they eventually arrive at the starport and are inspected, after which the authorities ask to see the books, as they are very curious about how such a heavily armed ship makes a living. Depending on the quality of their story, they may end up arrested or they may just be escorted to the jump limit and invited to leave the system and never return.

Now, if you're talking about a group of ships being escorted through a system without any defenses, the escorts jump first, far enough in advance to be sure they'll arrive first no matter what the jump variations. Then the merchant ships jump, arrive under the guns of the escorts, refuel, and jump on (I'm assuming to a system with adequate defenses -- a route with two defenseless systems in a row would be rare). Only when all the merchants have jumped out will the escorts jump.


Hans

 

[Dragoner]

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.

 

[far-trader]

There's not going to be a convoy...

The post I was replying to proposed a convoy of 20 ships plodding along at a snails pace. That was the sum total of my response parameters

 

[rancke]

The post I was replying to proposed a convoy of 20 ships plodding along at a snails pace. That was the sum total of my response parameters

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


Hans