Real world sensor cloaking
- Thread starter Stainless
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Captain Jonah
Mongoose
Stealth technology has been going in many directions for years.
This is just one aspect of it.
MBTs that mix the hot exhaust fumes with cold air to cool it before it is releases, venting the exhaust under the tank where it can dissipate and cool before it can be seen.
Heat is going to be a huge stealth problem for Traveller ships, far more so than radar since we can do low radar signatures now.
With the heat one thing that can be done for short periods of time is instead of radiating it outside the ship where it can be seen you transfer it into the fuel tanks (presuming you are using any sort of liquid H rather than gas).
Combats between warships would be more like 2300 or modern sub hunts, warships using Drones and probes to find each other while hiding under stealth. First one to spot the other gets in the first attack. Ships closing and flailing at each other is a good image and very 18th century but doesn’t reflect technology as it improves. 19th century Warship battles involve ships closing to visual range and pounding each other with guns, 21st century is far more Drones and missiles over the horizon and stealth attacks.
Civilian ships on the other hand should stand out like flares on the sensors, a warship could drift within laser range of a merchant before they even knew he was there but the warship would have been tracking the merchant from many light seconds away.
This is just one aspect of it.
MBTs that mix the hot exhaust fumes with cold air to cool it before it is releases, venting the exhaust under the tank where it can dissipate and cool before it can be seen.
Heat is going to be a huge stealth problem for Traveller ships, far more so than radar since we can do low radar signatures now.
With the heat one thing that can be done for short periods of time is instead of radiating it outside the ship where it can be seen you transfer it into the fuel tanks (presuming you are using any sort of liquid H rather than gas).
Combats between warships would be more like 2300 or modern sub hunts, warships using Drones and probes to find each other while hiding under stealth. First one to spot the other gets in the first attack. Ships closing and flailing at each other is a good image and very 18th century but doesn’t reflect technology as it improves. 19th century Warship battles involve ships closing to visual range and pounding each other with guns, 21st century is far more Drones and missiles over the horizon and stealth attacks.
Civilian ships on the other hand should stand out like flares on the sensors, a warship could drift within laser range of a merchant before they even knew he was there but the warship would have been tracking the merchant from many light seconds away.
Actually I don't think heat will be an issue. Assuming you want to infiltrate or make an attack on someone else's system, instead of skulking around you simply hide in plain sight. While your opponent will surely pick up on your heat signatures, just dump a bunch of drones in the system that generate the same heat signature as your ship and you'll have the enemy chasing down a lot of red herrings. Until they get close enough to use other forms of sensors to rule you out, they'll waste a lot of time... and space is big enough that this would be an issue for a defender.
far-trader
Mongoose
phavoc said:
Except that realistically said red-herrings will have to be pretty much copies of your ship costing a nearly equal number of millions of credits and taking up the same tonnage as your ship. So to decoy for a 20ton landing craft means carrying additional 20ton decoys that will cost almost the same as the actual landing craft.
And the system defense doesn't need to go chasing hither and yon after decoys. Presumably you actually want to go somewhere in the system. Somewhere the system is defending. You're coming to them, they just wait until you and the decoys are in weapons range. That is when you hope you have more decoys then they can shoot before you make it safely down, and that they don't target you instead of a decoy.
And of course that's hardly the end of it. If a decoy, or yourself, make it through the defensive fire screen you can be sure they aren't going to just call it a day "Oh well, some made it to the ground, guess we're done here boys and girls." No, of course not. They will have been tracking you and there will be other assets tasked with hunting you and the decoys down.
Instead of making a nice sneaky infiltration you just announced that your mission is so valuable that you'll gladly commit many millions of credits to expendable decoys in an attempt to get through the defenses.
Hiding in plain sight is a good plan. Decoys are not part of that plan. Going in disguised as a merchant ship and crew is. And by disguised I mean you use an actual merchant ship, with cargo and passengers* and you go through all the usual business as if you are merchants. You load up new cargo and passengers and then just go on your way.
* who may be a crack team of covert operatives who will play tourists as they carry out the mission and then book passage back off world
This article is based upon the work of Sebastien Guennau at theStainless said:
University of Liverpool, a lecturer in applied mathematics, who
assumes the use of theoretical "metamaterials", which unfortuna-
tely do not yet exist in the real world - and which may turn out to
be impossible to produce. In other words, it is pure mathematical
speculation, not something in any stage of development.
far-trader said:
Why? Today we have decoys that can spoof sensors that aren't exact replicas. Simple things like flares are enough to decoy heat-seeking missiles. Chaff has been used to spoof sensors. With electronics you can spoof radar returns. Every technology invented to destroy something has generally always had a defense and/or spoof of it invented about the same time.
Visual sensors are easily fooled. Yes, eventually its possible for most systems to burn through a spoof once they get within a set range, but at a distance everything electromechanical device used today can be spoofed one way or another.
far-trader
Mongoose
phavoc said:
If we're still talking spacecraft the problems are much bigger for a number of reasons.
Are your spacecraft decoys just drifting like the flares? That's a dead giveaway and they can be ignored if your real spacecraft is actually maneuvering to get somewhere. And again, if you're all going to the same place it matters not a bit if I can't tell deocy from real, I just shoot them all once they're in range. Unless you want to start talking limited resources, but that sauce is good for the gander too.
For your decoys to maneuver convincingly they have to mass about the same as the ship they are pretending to be. So they need the same size drives and powerplant. That's millions of credits. For a decoy you hope gets blown up. And you need several of them to avoid YOU being the one getting blown up. IF the defender is so limited in resources that they can't just kill every single decoy and you before you infiltrate.
Why? Because if the decoy is thrusting to match your maneuver capability, but is significantly smaller in mass then you are (to make it possible to carry many cheap decoys) then it's energy output is going to be equally tiny. Dead giveaway. As in you're dead. At best the defender will think they are missiles and shoot them down with point defense lasers and use the big guns on the real spacecraft.
Are your spacecraft flares burning out after a few seconds like the real world analogy? That's only useful for combat scenarios and brief encounters. Your spacecraft meanwhile is going to be detected at a great distance (there is no horizon to hide behind in space), in reality of course, not in Traveller
Are you spacecraft decoys simply trying to fool incoming missiles? That's a different story. Sure you can fool them with something simpler and cheaper but then it's probably even simpler to just shoot them down with your lasers or spoof them with jamming.
Chaff vs radar? Sure, but again only useful for combat, and nobody is using just ancient radar in space detection, unless the scenario is one of your spacecraft being TL advanced in which case you don't need decoys, your ECM/jamming and materials science is going to beat their antiquated detection...
...except for thermal (in reality) where you stand out like a flashing neon sign to even the simplest infrared detectors. Though this being Traveller we have super-tech that takes care of thermal emissions so it's ignored. Even going with simple visual spectrum detection it's not hard to spot a moving object against space, passively, but again Traveller ignores this in the interest of fun.
Nope, with regards to spacecraft, in reality, the only thing decoys do is cost a lot of credits and advertise the fact that something is up. In Traveller they are unnecessary as we have magic that makes spacecraft undetectable except at very close ranges and then only with good sensor rolls
And we're not even considering the other detection capabilities Traveller postulates, which again Traveller happily ignores in the interest of fun.
Reality = There is NO stealth in space.
Traveller = There is stealth in space. It's free with every ship and works perfectly. Except when it's more fun to say your stealth isn't working.
far-trader
Mongoose
phavoc said:
Or/And vice-versa of course
Sure, it's a constant battle of making better sensors vs. making better spoofing of the sensors.
You could have a 20ton drone giving off the EM and heat signature of a 200ton ship. Making it appear to maneuver as a larger ship is easy. Making it appear as hot is also easy - generating heat is the easy part.
The idea is that eventually all decoys and such can be detected - once you either get close enough for your active detection systems to fully identify the target or close enough that your active measures overwhelm their passive ones. That's a standard rule in ECM/ECCM - the man with the more powerful emitter generally wins in the end.
If your had a mass detector trying to read the mass of the ship, the way to defeat that is to send back the signals you want. Anything electromagnetic can be manipulated.
If you are using passive thermal scans, those, too, can be spoofed by generating the amount of heat you want them to see.
Visual sensors are easy to defeat as well. Simply have inflatable structures or lightweight metallic panels to simulate the rough approximation of the vessel you are attempting to pose as.
Energy output, in some instances, is easily created and tuned to the appropriate level. The one thing that would NOT work, however, is defeating neutrino detectors without a fusion power plant generating them. Though with a sun spitting out neutrinos, perhaps depending on where you are located in the system would make detection easier/harder.
I wasn't proposing dodging missiles (that would be a different type of decoy). All I was saying is that yes, thermal sensors will pick up ships coming in, potentially from a very long distance. However the farther you are from the detectors, the easier it is to spoof them. To fully determine what it is that you are looking at you need to get close enough that your detections systems have a much lower chance of being fooled. Detecting an inbound "ship" at 3AU is much different than seeing it at 100,000km.
You could have a 20ton drone giving off the EM and heat signature of a 200ton ship. Making it appear to maneuver as a larger ship is easy. Making it appear as hot is also easy - generating heat is the easy part.
The idea is that eventually all decoys and such can be detected - once you either get close enough for your active detection systems to fully identify the target or close enough that your active measures overwhelm their passive ones. That's a standard rule in ECM/ECCM - the man with the more powerful emitter generally wins in the end.
If your had a mass detector trying to read the mass of the ship, the way to defeat that is to send back the signals you want. Anything electromagnetic can be manipulated.
If you are using passive thermal scans, those, too, can be spoofed by generating the amount of heat you want them to see.
Visual sensors are easy to defeat as well. Simply have inflatable structures or lightweight metallic panels to simulate the rough approximation of the vessel you are attempting to pose as.
Energy output, in some instances, is easily created and tuned to the appropriate level. The one thing that would NOT work, however, is defeating neutrino detectors without a fusion power plant generating them. Though with a sun spitting out neutrinos, perhaps depending on where you are located in the system would make detection easier/harder.
I wasn't proposing dodging missiles (that would be a different type of decoy). All I was saying is that yes, thermal sensors will pick up ships coming in, potentially from a very long distance. However the farther you are from the detectors, the easier it is to spoof them. To fully determine what it is that you are looking at you need to get close enough that your detections systems have a much lower chance of being fooled. Detecting an inbound "ship" at 3AU is much different than seeing it at 100,000km.
Not really. The drone could have the same surface temperature asphavoc said:
the ship, but it would have a much smaller surface area, even our
current sensor technology would easily detect the difference.
A long range mass detector would almost certainly be some kind of
gravimeter, and therefore not use electromagnetism. To spoof a gra-
vimeter one would need a rather strange kind of gravitics technology
- perhaps possible in Traveller, less likely in the real world.
Captain Jonah
Mongoose
To make like a 200Dton ship your decoy needs to have the same return against all the sensors.
It needs to radiate both the same heat signature but also the same dispersal area. Perhaps it could inflate a radar reflective foil shell then use a heat generator to leak heat through the shell in exactly the same pattern that the ship does.
It needs an identical Radar and lidar return which could be covered by the inflated foil shell.
It needs a gravimetric signature of a 200Dton ship so needs a set of very precise Grav field generators and densitometer blocks so that not only does it seem to have a mass of 200Dtons but also the hull shows as solid.
It needs the EM signature of a ship, this includes radiation from the fusion plant, drive fields, life support, lights in the windows etc. Again possible but requiring dedicated equipment to fake the emissions.
It is going to need to move and manoeuvre like a ship so it needs a drive that not only moves the decoy but moves it in exactly the way that a 200Dton ship moves.
It is going to need a decent computer to run this lot, a proper power plant to keep it going for hours, a basic hull the size of a small craft and more besides.
This is a lot of money for just one, a squadron of them is going to cost more than the ship they are decoying for. :roll:
As Far Trader says, going in quietly makes far more sense. Alerting the defenders by giving them 10 targets to track tells them they have a security problem. Leaving them to sit at their workstations watching the routine traffic drift past while cloak watching till the end of the shift is far safer.
Drop a cry baby on the way in just in case you are spotted then go like the Ninja of old. Invisible in the crowd
:lol:
It needs to radiate both the same heat signature but also the same dispersal area. Perhaps it could inflate a radar reflective foil shell then use a heat generator to leak heat through the shell in exactly the same pattern that the ship does.
It needs an identical Radar and lidar return which could be covered by the inflated foil shell.
It needs a gravimetric signature of a 200Dton ship so needs a set of very precise Grav field generators and densitometer blocks so that not only does it seem to have a mass of 200Dtons but also the hull shows as solid.
It needs the EM signature of a ship, this includes radiation from the fusion plant, drive fields, life support, lights in the windows etc. Again possible but requiring dedicated equipment to fake the emissions.
It is going to need to move and manoeuvre like a ship so it needs a drive that not only moves the decoy but moves it in exactly the way that a 200Dton ship moves.
It is going to need a decent computer to run this lot, a proper power plant to keep it going for hours, a basic hull the size of a small craft and more besides.
This is a lot of money for just one, a squadron of them is going to cost more than the ship they are decoying for. :roll:
As Far Trader says, going in quietly makes far more sense. Alerting the defenders by giving them 10 targets to track tells them they have a security problem. Leaving them to sit at their workstations watching the routine traffic drift past while cloak watching till the end of the shift is far safer.
Drop a cry baby on the way in just in case you are spotted then go like the Ninja of old. Invisible in the crowd
:lol:
I think you guys are missing the point.
The entire point is to get the defenders attention and resources directed at the wrong thing. Which means you need to keep your distance and force them to expend time and effort at chasing ghosts. Most of the sensors mentioned here don't have ranges in millions of kilometers. Plus nothing in the rules even talks about spoofing sensors. Which is not uncommon for Traveller. I was just using real-world examples of how today we are able to spoof sensors and create decoys. Scaling it up to Traveller tech isn't that far-fetched.
The price of the decoys, if it makes your operation successful, is a price most victors are willing to pay. And if you look at d-day, the allies expended a great deal of resources to get the Germans to believe the allies had divisions of men and machines ready to invade the calais area, and subsequently tied down important German assets that could have threatened the allied landings in normandy.
The entire point is to get the defenders attention and resources directed at the wrong thing. Which means you need to keep your distance and force them to expend time and effort at chasing ghosts. Most of the sensors mentioned here don't have ranges in millions of kilometers. Plus nothing in the rules even talks about spoofing sensors. Which is not uncommon for Traveller. I was just using real-world examples of how today we are able to spoof sensors and create decoys. Scaling it up to Traveller tech isn't that far-fetched.
The price of the decoys, if it makes your operation successful, is a price most victors are willing to pay. And if you look at d-day, the allies expended a great deal of resources to get the Germans to believe the allies had divisions of men and machines ready to invade the calais area, and subsequently tied down important German assets that could have threatened the allied landings in normandy.
