Detecting Weapons' Fire

Detectable radiation, between muzzle and target.

The question would be, would there be excited sub atomic particles collapsing into our reality, and if we have sensors that would notice?
 
If "meson" weapons are to do with manipulating the strong and weak nuclear forces, gluons, mesons, pentaquarks, neutrinos and the like, then the neutrino sensor may be able to detect them, but referee's will have to decide that since I don't think there is an official explanation anymore of what a "meson" gun or screen actually involves.
 
Sigtrygg said:
If "meson" weapons are to do with manipulating the strong and weak nuclear forces, gluons, mesons, pentaquarks, neutrinos and the like, then the neutrino sensor may be able to detect them, but referee's will have to decide that since I don't think there is an official explanation anymore of what a "meson" gun or screen actually involves.
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Okay cool. I was wondering if it was stated somewhere in a book I may not have read. I am going to guess that they are not detectable. If they need a neutrino detector, they'd have to pass through the detector to be detected. If the ship isn't the target, then the beam would never pass through the detector.

Thanks! Basically, Mesons Guns and Particle Weapons are like the silenced sniper rifles of space combat. You can tell where they came from by their effect, but not by other means. (with the exception of if the shot passes through a neutrino sensor. :P)
 
In regards to meson weapons. Assuming that each single fire event is an emission of a large number of particles. The precision of the decay of the meson particles would approximate a bell curve and so some particles would decay early. So the burst area could a be a tear drop. . Now given the speed and power of future computers it might be possible to give an approximate angle of attack.
 
In terms of particle weapons. They will impart impulse to the ship and hit on a certain side of the ship. So it should be quite straight forward to follow that back to the origin. But you have to wait to be shot. If they miss you maybe a densiometer or graviometwr will be able to detect the relativistic mass of the particles travelling at very close to c. Depends how fast the particles go?
 
The OP sent me off on a canon hunt.
I found that in MegaTrav COACC one of the better attempts at discussing space-to-ground and ground-to-space combat and weaponry in the history of the game is made. Regarding deep site meson guns they say:
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I have been thinking. Shockingly. Detecting missed laser fire going past your ship would present most of the same problems as missed meson and particle fire.
I think the idea is that there would be some scatter from the occasional space particle getting in the way. But that same logic would apply to particle beams. It would be like LHC collisions occurring intermittently along the path of the particle beams. Looking for the gamma ray (presumably, at least X-ray) emissions from these collisions could give automatic systems on the ship a split second chance to respond. And a clear line of interactions leading back to the original firing ship.
This could perhaps also undermine the idea of PA weapons being effective long range weapons. Depending on if PA weapons fire a continuous stream or a ‘packet’. As each collision would release lots of particles that could interact with other particles in that stream or packet. Seeing as there is seemingly quite a lot of particles in a m^3 of vacuum, the number of interactions along the stream or packets route could be quite high, depending on how wide the beam is.
 
In movies we see the beams because of the "rule of cool" and because we need to tell the audience who is shooting. We see visible laser sight lines in films like Leon because they want us to know there are dozens of snipers. In reality you can only see the beam if there is a lot of smoke* and therefore scattering and it is otherwise dark. The usual give away is the red dot on the target because that is where the majority of scattering occurs. Often the target is unaware of the dot because snipers are careful to place it where they are unlikely to see it casually unless they want it to be a visible threat.

In star wars the beams are treated like tracer bullets (which are burning at the back and are specifically designed to be visible). Tracers are good for showing shooting is taking place and who is doing it (they even colour it so you know who is shooting but again real tracers are not designed to work quite like that and do not burn visibly until some time after they leave the barrel (specifically to avoid being able to track it back to the source).

Even non-laser beams are not visible much off their aimed trajectory. Lighthouses that rotate the light look like they go on and off. These are lights designed to be visible for a long way but beyond a few miles (where you might see reflections of nearby objects) you will only see it when it is turned toward you.

I am also presuming that the majority of beams are of short duration which makes detection of any stray beams even less likely.
Any directed fire to have any chance of affecting a target at space ranges would need to be highly collimated (or at power levels that are not credible even in Traveller terms). These are not like sound waves that propagate spherically and so unless you were "looking down the barrel" there would be only chance scattering to detect.

Beam weapons do not have "muzzle flash" as far as I am aware. That is about all that could be detected "off beam". Logic would say that would be eliminated as much as possible as it is a waste of energy. If the beam can be blocked by any sort of material (and if it can't then the crew of the firing ship become vulnerable) then it is a trivial matter to create the equivalent of a flash eliminator. The only consideration then would be secondary effects (scatter at the muzzle of other energy e.g. heat or particle emissions from scattering).

You can only detect scatter if you are "looking down the barrel" of the scatter itself (each photon or particle only goes in one direction in a path 1 photon/particle wide). At space distances you are highly unlikely to happen to be in the path of any specific scattering object and only increasing the number of objects scattered would improve those chances. If the scattering were significant enough to reliably detect, the beam would be highly dissipated (and in game you would expect damage to fall off at range - which it doesn't)

Scatter might cause secondary scatter where a scattered particle collides with another particle and causes a cascade of particles, but particle density in space makes this pretty unlikely in my opinion. Even if it did you would still need to be "looking down the barrel" of the newly scattered particles (and the original particle will either have been deflected, destroyed or it's kinetic energy dissipated). I cannot think of many particle collisions that create significant additional particles unless the medium is dense (e.g. a critical reactor environment).

In the unlikely event you were able to pick up a single scattered particle (and unless you were close to the point of scatter it seems astronomically unlikely you would be in the path of more that one) that just happened to hit your sensor, what would it tell you? If space has enough particles for scatter to be an effect, your sensor would be bumping into naturally occurring ones all the time anyway. One extra one would disappear in the noise. Unless the particle were signature of a particular weapon you wouldn't even be sure if it were naturally occurring and products of scatter are unlikely to be those signature particles.

Realistically there is no credible chance of detecting a directed beam that hasn't hit you. They are certainly are too low to be represented on a 2d6 based game system. The rules as written certainly don't support it (even in the slightly magical description of what sensors can detect).

Cinematically you might want to allow it but that is a story decision (and in supposedly hard science-fiction game like Traveller a questionable one).

If you are the target of such a beam however the situation is somewhat different. You might detect a near-miss. You could almost certainly identify the source of a hit on your own ship (and tabletop play would make concealing that difficult and pointless). The rules don't provide a mechanism for detecting weapons fire from an undetected ship, but HG 2022 p98 says that a Sensor Op could detect weapons fire. Since even the ship's cat could likely "detect" a weapon hit, it implies that they could detect a miss. However this may simply refer to the ability to pick-up incoming missiles before they impact.

Caveat sensor.

* Cigarette smoke has billions of particles per cubic cm. Space has less than 1.
 
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Well I don’t disagree with anything you have said in terms of what the end result is; a near miss might be detectable.
I think I was a bit overzealous with my description. I am anticipating that only the ship under fire would have any chance of being aware of that fact. But if the rules state a miss can be detected then clearly it is possible in the traveller universe. So the sensors and processing power must be to sift the noise and detect the particles and emitted photons from the collisions.
 
tomfreshwater said:
Well I don’t disagree with anything you have said in terms of what the end result is; a near miss might be detectable.
I think I was a bit overzealous with my description. I am anticipating that only the ship under fire would have any chance of being aware of that fact. But if the rules state a miss can be detected then clearly it is possible in the traveller universe. So the sensors and processing power must be to sift the noise and detect the particles and emitted photons from the collisions.
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If they can detect that at 1,000s of km away, then explain to me how Star Trek-style sensors are not a thing in Traveller? You are literally detecting a quantum size thing from 1,000s of km away to detect this weapons fire.

"I am detecting 6 lifesigns Captain. All human. 4 of Asian ancestry and 2 of Caucasian ancestry."
 
MasterGwydion said:
If they can detect that at 1,000s of km away, then explain to me how Star Trek-style sensors are not a thing in Traveller? You are literally detecting a quantum size thing from 1,000s of km away to detect this weapons fire.

"I am detecting 6 lifesigns Captain. All human. 4 of Asian ancestry and 2 of Caucasian ancestry."
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I am not saying it is visible from thousands of kms away. I presume if you miss you will only miss by a km at most. Most of particles produced will scatter vaguely in the direction the fire was heading. So a cone if you will, propagating from the firer to target. Photons released by such interactions will not be as dispersed and so will be easier to detect. If you were observing this from distance you would not be aware they were under fire. Except the other ship might be calling mayday?
 
tomfreshwater said:
If you want to. Seems unlikely to me. You would need a very long needle.
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Why would you need a needle? You think technology hasn't changed in several thousand years? Now we can detect and see human bones inside of the body. Go back 300 years and that was impossible without cutting them open. Now it can be done without even touching them. MRI? Same thing. If you can detect a neutrino from a km away, how much harder is detecting something vastly larger?
 
The only information I imagine you would need to have an indication that someone is firing at you is some particles and photons are just passing you at a high speed. What particles might be irrelevant? Also the size of a photon is irrelevant they do not have a size. They more energetic it is the greater the fluctuation in the EM field and the larger an area across it might be detected. (Like a large deviation in ‘space-time’ has a bigger gravity pull for a larger area) This is one of the effects that started quantum mechanics. Isn’t it, Young’s slit and all that. The wave front propagates across an area and only when checked is it found to have travelled along a single path.
 
MasterGwydion said:
snark? I am trying to have a serious discussion about the capabilities of sensors in Traveller based on other examples that have been officially published. So seriously. Why is it easier to detect something smaller?
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I think it is flippancy? Or facetious? Now I am definitely being pedantic. Please accept my apologies
 
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