How to Dectect Cloaked Ships

[Mr Bean]

It constantly comes up with new fokes to our board
*Well they could just cloak!
From Cloacked Ships and Rocks to Cloaked Planets we hear hear cloacks being used for just about everything

And yet its so easily unlike some belive to dectect cloaked ships and I'll go into the top three methods, with maybe the fourth or fith later on



Arlight the first method is the easiest

1. Drive Emissions
If a ship is moving one can find it simply by looking for its drive emissions, be they raditoactive enegy intensive or exotic, if a Cloaked ship is moving simply scan for these and you will easily find them

2. No-standered Sensors/Looking for them out of the corner of your eye
This method combins both the exotic methods such as gravtity field analyis devices such as Cyrstal Gravity Field Traps and dectection VIA non-standered mediums such as Subspace and Hyperspace.

Its clear in TOS how Subspace was seen, before it was gone into in TNG subspace is basicly seen as the same method employed in modern day submarines

Subspace sensors can be active or passive, when passing through subspace one distrupts it and this can be "heard" in a sense thus the passive as it requires no enegrey on your part to listen for it

The second half is active, Scanning and directional searching as often seen in TNG and a few times in TOS is the Active half, The "ping" as it where of sending out enegry and looking for anything for it to relfect off of

The second half of this style of looking for not looking for it directly is the exotic such as Cyrstal Gravity Traps which look for relationships and then check to see if they can find what caused them

A Cyrstal Gravity Field Trap works by first scanning whatever its been deployed on then looking for new things

What do I mean?
If you know down to twenty deciimal places what is pulling on you via gravity if it goes up or down you know somthing has changed, based on a few readings a CGT can trainglate these new things and check to see if they can see them
How a CGT is unqiue as its hooked into normal Sensors as well as itself

Meaning? IF you can find somthing via CGT but NOT normal sensors, good chance its a Cloaked ship eh?





3. Lastly third
Heat Flow Anaylis, the Easiest, most low-tech and often most effective method

For a ship to be in Space it will Raditate Heat, quite a bit actualy, away from it

This heats space for awhile and it slowly disspates but for that time its hotter, sometimes much hotter than the sourunding area, as little as three degrees as much a a hundred

But this provides somthing very odd but useful in decteting cloaked ships, As the ship heats up space either as it moves or sits still its creates a wake, of sorts very similiar to how a Ship at Sea creates a Wake behind it

Wakes are very long and with good enough Sensors VERY easy to see

While a ship might Half a Kilometer in length and width a Wake might be twice that in width and twenty TIMES it in length

Those are the three easiest ways of deceting ships that are Cloaked, more to come later

[Master of Ossus]

Incidentally, Chief O'Brien once used gravity to detect a cloak Romulan warbird, but it is unclear whether this is D'Derix specific (as the Romulans use singularities to power their starships) or whether it can be done by ST races to detect Klingon or other cloaked vessels, also.

[ClaysGhost]

I think gravitationally-based detectors are among the worst ideas for this sort of thing. Rely on the fact that if the enemy doesn't radiate, it will become hot, although I think the "moving" in the first message should be amended to "accelerating".

[Darth Wong]

ST6 made it clear that the people who design sensor technologies in the Federation are blithering idiots. It's not that hard to pick up a cloaked ship.

[Zoink]

3. Lastly third
Heat Flow Anaylis, the Easiest, most low-tech and often most effective method

For a ship to be in Space it will Raditate Heat, quite a bit actualy, away from it

I wonder if it would be possible to radiate heat in a specific direction. An energy beam, directed from the cloaking field to empty space, away from any nearby ships.

[Zoink]

ST6 made it clear that the people who design sensor technologies in the Federation are blithering idiots. It's not that hard to pick up a cloaked ship.

What I never got is why they didn't build a "Visual Distortion Detection and Tracking System".

[Mr Bean]

I wonder if it would be possible to radiate heat in a specific direction. An energy beam, directed from the cloaking field to empty space, away from any nearby ships.

It does not matter, its like the Wake of a Ship at Sea, If its infront, behind to the size its just as easy to see

[ClaysGhost]

I wonder if it would be possible to radiate heat in a specific direction. An energy beam, directed from the cloaking field to empty space, away from any nearby ships.

You then make the ship more visible from a particular aspect, even assuming that you can could get rid of the heat preferentially in that direction. Distributed systems like life support contribute too.

[Zoink]

I wonder if it would be possible to radiate heat in a specific direction. An energy beam, directed from the cloaking field to empty space, away from any nearby ships.

You then make the ship more visible from a particular aspect, even assuming that you can could get rid of the heat preferentially in that direction. Distributed systems like life support contribute too.

It would be more visible in one direction... but as long as there is no ships in that direction its not really an issue.

The idea I have is that if there is a temperature differential between the space around the ship, and the surrounding interstellar space, you could use this difference to create useful work, like create an energy beam. If this quantum heat pump [note to B&B: quantum heat pump (c)2002 Zoink] was 99.999% efficient (or enough to make it undetectable), perhaps the temperature of the ship's "wake" would be the same as normal space.

[ClaysGhost]

It would be more visible in one direction... but as long as there is no ships in that direction its not really an issue.

And you could determine this how? You couldn't know that there weren't other ships, or just sensor pods in any particular direction, and space is a nice cool background so you would have to get rid of heat from life support et al as well.

The idea I have is that if there is a temperature differential between the space around the ship, and the surrounding interstellar space, you could use this difference to create useful work, like create an energy beam. If this quantum heat pump [note to B&B: quantum heat pump (c)2002 Zoink] was 99.999% efficient (or enough to make it undetectable), perhaps the temperature of the ship's "wake" would be the same as normal space.

Where did quantum enter this? What do you mean by a wake?

[Sea Skimmer]

ST6 made it clear that the people who design sensor technologies in the Federation are blithering idiots. It's not that hard to pick up a cloaked ship.

What I want to know is why Kirk didn't just use his Balance of Terror phaser trick. Just by eyeballing the incoming torpedoes you'd have a good fix on them, and then it’s a simple matter of rapidly filling that space with low power phaser beams. Once a hit is made, go to high power, so as to avoid a stray shot hitting the planet.

[tharkûn]

Cloak detection counters (never seen in the series nor likely to be), no promises any of these will work cheaply (or even work), just some ramblings:
1. Inertia. Plot your course, give a big push and ride out the rest of the way. Likewise you can have some decoys so when you do need to accelerate you can dump them out the hatch and have them expel gas to create false trails.

2. Subspace ... haven't a clue, I assume a cloaked ship that is under "silent running" is not going to dick with subspace. Gravity traps ... launch a large number of cloaked rocks. The enemy has plenty of wildgooses to go chase. Another fun trick would be "warping space" and then hiding near the warp. Gravity is curvature, and if space-time is already curved (and preferably something noisy and dynamic) they are going to have a piss hard time sorting the noise from the. Let your decoys drift out of the back and slowly decel away from you. Accuracy to 20 decimal places is going to be nuts ... people moving a few metres from the sensor are likely to have more effect than a ship millions of km away.

3. Heat flow, this is the easiest. Take and super cool the hull (and whatever else you can get away with), dump the waste heat for this process back when you make your big acceleration. Sure you generate heat ... the vast majority of it goes into heating the super cooled heat sink. Remember in vacuum the only way to ditch heat is radiation, and black body radiation is nil if you are supercooled. With a large enough cold bath and some good adibiatic layers you can avoid making a wake. You can further dick with the anti-cloak guys by dropping super cooled blobs ... they should leave a wake that is opposite a normal one.

In short you want the most external surface exactly equal to ambient temperature. You want several adiabiatic layers to stop this layer from heating or cooling. You want a much colder sink to dump the heat generated from stupid things like life support into so your little system doesn't cook you alive.

The biggest reason why cloak ships are a royal pain in the ass to find:
space is BIG. Which is why I want to slap B&B every time they have planets within walking distance of each other or worse when two ships meet in Interstellar space by "accident". Unless your sensors against cloaks are good to at least light-seconds ... forget it anywhere but near potential targets. This is the big reason I think gravity detection is a crock. The effect of gravity at 10 au and up is so damn small you can forget about finding it. Your heart is more likely to set the damn detector off.

[Zoink]

And you could determine this how? You couldn't know that there weren't other ships, or just sensor pods in any particular direction, and space is a nice cool background so you would have to get rid of heat from life support et al as well.

Well you would see these other ships, just beam the energy beam away from any ships. If there was a ship or sensor system, along the beams path, it wouldn't be aligned for very long, making tracking unlikely.

The energy beam would include the heat from life support.

Where did quantum enter this? What do you mean by a wake?

Mr.Bean brought up the point that "space" itself would be heated. I'm not an astrophysicist, but I read stuff on the subject. He might be refering to the fact that there is a minimum possible heat. You can't ever reach absolute zero, the nature of the vacuum doesn't permit absolute zero (beieve its related to the heisenburg uncertainty principle). In a googleplex number of years, this will be the end temperature of the universe (if it keeps expanding). I can't really comment on it, but perhaps the presense of matter/energy affects this value... I'd have to read up on it.

If there is a heat difference, then you should be able to produce usefull work. Add the "quantum" because you're dealing with quantum properties (and B&B would like it).

I'm really just commenting on wether or not it would be possible to hide this heat. Mr. Bean might be able to shed more light on this process of a wake.

[Failed Glory]

3. Lastly third
Heat Flow Anaylis, the Easiest, most low-tech and often most effective method

For a ship to be in Space it will Raditate Heat, quite a bit actualy, away from it

This heats space for awhile and it slowly disspates but for that time its hotter, sometimes much hotter than the sourunding area, as little as three degrees as much a a hundred

But this provides somthing very odd but useful in decteting cloaked ships, As the ship heats up space either as it moves or sits still its creates a wake, of sorts very similiar to how a Ship at Sea creates a Wake behind it

Wakes are very long and with good enough Sensors VERY easy to see

While a ship might Half a Kilometer in length and width a Wake might be twice that in width and twenty TIMES it in length

Those are the three easiest ways of deceting ships that are Cloaked, more to come later

I agree that cloaked ships aren't really that useful in ST, especially if one is looking for them, let alone against the more advanced sensors of SW, but this last point doesn't make as much sense as I thought it should.

A blackbody emits EM, based on it's surface temperature (Wein's Law), into space. As the cloak wraps the light around it, this EM emitted would simply become part of the light wrapped around it, right? This is the "wake" you speak of?

It's not like a hot submarine that has convective currents (which affects sound speed, allowing for detection) around it in the water, because there is no mass in space to convect heat into. Deep space does not have "heat" nor "mass" in it, so you cannot detect differences in space's thermal properties. This would require a some sort of material in space to reflect the EM into other directions.

So the ship does not really have a blackbody, omnidirectional emission of temperature signature, nor does the ship affect the space around it for there is nothing to affect.

I still think that it is possible to detect these heat emissions from directly behind a vessel if they do emit such heat. But the question must be posed, why would the Romulans and Klingons rely on such a useless technology and why can't ST vessels easily detect them? The Aristotlean argument would be that the heat traces cannot be detected due to: A) heat is not emitted in any appreciable amount due to a technological device associated with the cloaking device, B) heat is emitted, but wrapped around the ship like the rest of the light and can only be detected in a line in one direction from the ship which makes such temperature detection nearly useless in 3D space, or C) ST writers are not as smart as Mr. Bean and have yet to really deconstruct the Treknology in any manner relative to modern physics.

[Mr Bean]

In short you want the most external surface exactly equal to ambient temperature. You want several adiabiatic layers to stop this layer from heating or cooling. You want a much colder sink to dump the heat generated from stupid things like life support into so your little system doesn't cook you alive.

Anyone see the problem with this?

What cools the much colder sink, Your talking about supercooling the hull and prevent heat from escaping

Ok where's the Heating going?

A Cooler one?

Ok where does THAT heat GO?

And don't say a Mini-Black Hole as that will Radiate heat that just accerlates the proccess

The end result is the same


Second fokes You CANT Directe a Wake

Observer


Big long trail, Its SPREADS OUT, in Space it does in 3D in a pretty big cloud, Depending on the Sensativity of the Insturments one could follow a ship from Thousands of KMs away thanks to Heat-Trace

[tharkûn]

What cools the much colder sink, Your talking about supercooling the hull and prevent heat from escaping
You take and supercool it before you pack and leave. Do some work on the sink and create one part supercooled heat dump and one part heat gas. The gas is dumped before you go.

In other words its a giant ice cube. Eventually the whole thing "melts" (reaches thermal equilibrium, whatever) and you have to break the closed environment, do some work to move the heat from the cold sink to something else, dump that something else out the hatch and continue on your merry way.

It's like a deisel sub going under. yes you eventually run out of juice and have to snorkel, but in the meantime you can truly go silent running.

Ok where's the Heating going?

A Cooler one?

Ok where does THAT heat GO?
Oh come now Bean how do you think they make liquid He? Your cold sink could be nothing more than a vat of liquid He (although I'd prefer something solid with a MUCH higher specific heat capcity) made using gas expasion and a vacuum pump to cool it more. Magnetic cooling can get you down to the level where you can make a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

Pick something with a high specific heat capacity, like say water or Li or something exotic. Park you warbird on your average low temp planet (like say one with solid nitrogen or methane). Take and dump your heat sink into a large bath of He(l) continiously replenished from a gas expansion cooler (which is dumping heat out of the ship for now), eventually you get a block of ice or Lithium down around 2 K, if this is connected to the hull, eventually the hull will equilibrate also and be around 2 K. At this point turn off the pump, lift off, raise some internal adibiatic layers, and you are heat free until you use up your heat sink. If the bulk of the ship is at a low temp (so you have a low average temp) and the heat sink is much cooler with a high specific heat capacity ... it could be a long time before you use it up.

This is NOT a permanent fix. This is a temporary measure so you can run silent when you really need to, you will periodically have to recool the hull and dump heated matter out of the system. Just because you can't stay truly cloaked forever does not mean you can't be truly cloaked for a decent chunk of time. It's just like a deisel sub, eventually the batteries die and you need to snorkel to run the engines. But you recharge and go back down. All I'm saying is use a glorfied icepack. I'm sure an egineer can design a better system, but it's not violating the laws of physics.

[Mr Bean]

It also however requires an extensive amount of space and retrofitting, stuff that will be useless if the ship is under power(And you don't have a system for holding that in)

Somthing one has to consider that "Glorfied" Ice-pack will be very energy intesive I should think along with those little fobiles like Life-support means one has to run the Engine which unless it uses a magic energy source will have to vent its waste which agian would be dectable

In fix one problem you make another greater, agian you could hold the waste in but that mearly shortens the time you can "snokle" as it where

[tharkûn]

It also however requires an extensive amount of space and retrofitting, stuff that will be useless if the ship is under power(And you don't have a system for holding that in)
Bean you are talking about something simple, a block of cold crap. All you want is for it to be cold. You know those omnipresent cargo containers in ST? How about the shuttle hangars? Just take crap like that out and fill it up with water.

Heat capacity is a function of mass. The ship is mostly AIR, and what isn't doesn't have the highest of specific heat capacities. If the ships average temp (consider that most of the mass is going to be cooled as the hull is cooled) is near its surroundings you only need to worry about the heat you produce. And that is only an issue until you blow your heat sink.

Somthing one has to consider that "Glorfied" Ice-pack will be very energy intesive I should think along with those little fobiles like Life-support means one has to run the Engine which unless it uses a magic energy source will have to vent its waste which agian would be dectable
Tell me Bean is an icecube energy intensive? How about a cold chunk of steel? Last week I took delivery for 800 odd kg of liquid He (the physicists use it to supercool an NMR machine). Now it has been sitting in a heated building (room temp) the entire time, it has no power supply, it just sits inside a stainless steel dewar and miraculously will be good for a heat sink when the physicists get around to refilling the NMR machine (which I'm told operates at 2.5 K).

Adibiatic layers are *passive* systems in most cases ... insulation and vacuum are good basic systems. We can already sheild cyrogens down under 4k with simple insulation and I'm sure you can do better if you try.

Insulation need NOT do work. The minimum energy requirement is ZERO, it might require energy, but there is not thermodynamic reason why your insulation would require it. The only things that require you to expend energy are those things that do work, others might, but there is not reason why they must.

Life support, yes you need to expend energy there: scrubbing oxygen heating the space crew lives in, and recycling water (and excrement) if needed. However this is not going to affect the vast majority of the ships mass. Places like egineering, the bridge, crew quarters, sickbay would be heate; everything else would not be ... if you need to go in there ... put on a bloody jacket (or space suit if its really bad). You need juice to run the computer and possibly your passive sensors. Is there something which does work I'm missing?

As far as venting the waste, umm what the hell are you talking about? You do realize that we have subs now that can contain "life support" and not vent crap all the time. Worst comes to worst ... throw your waste into a container, let the thermal waste conduct into your heat sink, and pitch out the airlock when conveinent. Space ships should not have to vent obscene amounts of waste, and if its normal matter, just wait for a conveinent drop time, and ditch it all at once.

In fix one problem you make another greater, agian you could hold the waste in but that mearly shortens the time you can "snokle" as it where
Other way around Bean. Snorkling is when you are loud making noise, and easy to see. Deisel subs have huge battery banks, these are charged when the engines are running. If the sub wants to stay underwater, but run its engine, they send up a snorkel to take air down to the engine. You can do that just about until hell freezes over.

Silent running is when you go under, turn off the engines, and run on battery power. Eventually the battery runs out and you have to recharge.

Same thing here. You have a heat sink, you can recharge it, but only by giving off emissions (just like snorkling), there are plenty of locations you could do this that nobodies cares about most often. If somebody is on your tail you low on silent running. When they leave, you go recharge. Dump waste as needed while recharging.

I mean seriously bean its bloody lightyears between planets, that means you have 4*10^48 cubic metres to hide it in. Nobody is going to notice the dumped waste until long after you are gone. Hell maybe you can rig it so when you dump waste you've just pumped your excess heat into it.

The main problem is your heat emissions and drive emissions. The latter you can work around using inertia and decoys. The former means you need a heat sink.

[tharkûn]

Oh and lest I forget. The energy for the systems you do need to run need not come from the engine, you can pull it off of batteries, flywheels, or whatever.

[SirNitram]

If it wasn't for his blatant mistakes, Tharkun might have had a point.

1) We've never seen Warp Cores powered down safely. Never. Whenever they are shut off, it's either by ubertech outside the Federation(The Doomsday Machine), or by catastrophic explosion(Generations).

2) Warp Signatures are so blatant they can be picked up lightyears off.

3) Recharging a heat sink. BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

[tharkûn]

1) We've never seen Warp Cores powered down safely. Never. Whenever they are shut off, it's either by ubertech outside the Federation(The Doomsday Machine), or by catastrophic explosion(Generations).
Considering the Romulans don't use Warp Cores, considering its explicitly stated they don't use the same tech this would be filed under:
Irrelevant

Warp Signatures are so blatant they can be picked up lightyears off.
Really this happens everytime right, no starship has ever managed to sneak up on another there have been no surprise attacks ever in the history of ST The dominion, which could detect cloaked ships at high warp was could still detect them when they went to slow warp

If warp signatures as so blatant, why does changing from high warp (which the dominion can detect) to low warp (which they can't under cloak) make any difference at all?

3) Recharging a heat sink. BWAHAHAHAHAHA.
Yes dumbass. Take an ice cube, leave it inside a sealed container with a small heat generator (say a discharging battery with a resisitor). Heat sink has been "drained" when the ice cube melts and reaches thermal equilibrium with the rest of the container. You recharge it by putting the water in an ice cube tray and putting it in the fridge.

Same thing here. When the heat sink no longer serves as the final dump for your waste heat, it needs to be cooled down again by doing work and dumping excess heat into the environment.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

The heat would still have to go somewhere, assuming your idea even was workable.

[tharkûn]

Spanky: That's why you have a bloody heat sink. Its DESIGNED to be a place for the heat to go until you can dump into a larger heat sink (like say an ocean).

Further if you run the ship at 273.15 K (0 C, 32 F) and the heat sink at 3 K the upper limit for thermal energy recovery, as per the Carnot cycle, is 99%. That's right only 1 part in 100 cannot be converted back into useful work. Take a block of the heat sink measuring 10 m in a cube. Water has a density of 1000 kg/m^3 (yes this is at STP, it can actually go *HIGHER* if you pressurize it up into the higher ices). So you now have 10^6 kgs of cold water. Water has a specific heat of water is 4.184*10^3 J/kg/K (again this is standard). So to heat up this miniscule 10 m cube by *1* K requires this means you need 4.18*10^9 joules of waste heat to raise the temp of the heat sink *1* K. Now remember that 99% Carnot efficiency? Well your upper limit is now 4.18*10^11 joules for this 10 m block.

Now this IGNORED the effect of cooling the hull, of having a greater heat sink on standbye (like say filling a shuttle bay with supercooled water).

This also ignored the possibility of dumping some heat to the environment (there are plenty of things which do radiate in space, if you chase every wake you will never find your target) I have no idea how much heat you need to find a cloaked ship, maybe Bean has some numbers. But it is not going to be a miniscule amount.

[Mr Bean]

I have no idea how much heat you need to find a cloaked ship, maybe Bean has some numbers. But it is not going to be a miniscule amount.

Anything over a 10 Degree K change is plainly visable by Todays VR tecnlogly though thats only down till around -20C then you got to get computer assisted as the naked eye can no longer tell

You however can not get colder than 2.7 K however no matter where you go with temptures in Star Systems ranging between 40 K to 200 K and higher up

Meaning your system would have to match the surrounding area constantly(Or pretty close) least you show up as a splotch of Black in a Sea of Blue

[tharkûn]

Bean: Actually you can go far colder than 2.7 K , you just need to use better heat exchange systems (like say magnetic cooling). But that is irrelevant.

If you are worried about being black on blue ... then you just intentionally release some heat. You can always generate more heat as needed. You don't need to be at the same temperature ... you just need to emit EM radiation like you are.