How to Dectect Cloaked Ships

[Isolder74]

There is one other thing that can be used to detect a cloaked ship. A ship no matter how well you seal the hull will leach some if its atmosphere into the surronding space leaving a low energy 'wake' in the direction of the solar wind or behind the ship as it moves. This cloud of breathable gases though fairly thin will be out of place in space and if added to other evidence would help in locating the 'invisible' ship.

[Failed Glory]

Even the deepest reaches of space, in between the galactic clusters, isn't completely empty. In interstellar space, the density is about 1 atom/cm^3. I think Mr.Bean is refering to the energy imparted to these atoms. The warp-speed cloaked ship will be interacting with about 1^14 atoms each second (warp 1).

Not necessarily...Remember Rutehrford's experiment where he pointed a radioactive source at a gold sheet? Not even all that radiation was deflected. In fact, only a small fraction of it ever was. Most just passed right through the gold sheet. Now space isn't gold. It's millions of times more sparce, so the imparting of photons from EM rediation to hydrogen in deep space will happen even less due to the difference in molecular density.

How is convection to occur in deep space? Convection is the transport of molecules from the motion of a streaming fluid. I do not see any flowing fluids in space, do you? Conduction is the diffusion of heat and is related to the mean free path of a molecule. The collision frequency in space for two hydrogen atoms at the aformentioned 1 H/cm^3 is 3.5 times per year. Hardly enough for either conduction or convection in the traditional sense, or any real sense.

So if both these processes are, for all real purposes, not occuring on the scale of a starship's size or speed, if at all, how are sensors to detect this wake created by a starship?

I am not saying it's not possible to detect cloaked ships, but if I was a cloak designer, and it were this simple to detect the EM radiation, I would eliminate this problem, pronto. I just don't think the heat tracing is as valuable as it has been made out to be. As well, no ST canon has ever touched on a heat tracing method in space for cloaked vessels. Not proof of course, but supporting evidence for the fact that heat "wakes" do not exist in any appreciable or detectable form.

[ClaysGhost]

I don't think this "wake" is particularly useful. Even in geostationary Earth orbit, the gas pressure is so low as to make most vacuums on Earth look very poor. A simple atom/hull collision will also not cause the gas to radiate, so tracking disturbances in something that's hardly there and that you can't see anyway would be impossible. EM radiation from the ship is far easier to track, and the only way to beat it would be to cool and thermally isolate the external surfaces of the ship at the background temperature and eliminate almost all additional waste heat emissions into the external environment. I've outlined my objections to a heat sink, and that method also doesn't appear consistent with what we see in Trek anyway (since most of this thread seems to be about Trek cloaks). If I were feeling malicious, I'd say that the writers just didn't think about these problems when they came up with the idea. If I were feeling generous, then I'd say that as any fool knows, you use a tachyon detection grid or whatever it is to find cloaked Trek ships. Or those antiproton beams the Jem Hadar used to use in DS9.

[Zoink]

Not necessarily...Remember Rutehrford's experiment where he pointed a radioactive source at a gold sheet? Not even all that radiation was deflected. In fact, only a small fraction of it ever was. Most just passed right through the gold sheet. Now space isn't gold. It's millions of times more sparce, so the imparting of photons from EM rediation to hydrogen in deep space will happen even less due to the difference in molecular density.

It depends on the type of radiation. Proton, electron, neutron radiation isn't EM. Place a piece of metal between you and a radiant heater, and you'll feel the difference. Kinda makes sense because visible light is EM radiation, and you can't see through solid objects. You'll need really high frequencies to see through.

I'm not so conserned about the EM radiation, rather the effect of a ship traveling at 300,000+ km/s impacting this gas. I great deal of energy should be imparted to these atoms. A system that detects and tracks interstellar gas patterns should see a noticable disturbance. Especially if that disturbance is traveling at FTL. Although, perhaps Star Trek lacks such a system...

[ClaysGhost]

I'm not so conserned about the EM radiation, rather the effect of a ship traveling at 300,000+ km/s impacting this gas. I great deal of energy should be imparted to these atoms. A system that detects and tracks interstellar gas patterns should see a noticable disturbance. Especially if that disturbance is traveling at FTL. Although, perhaps Star Trek lacks such a system...

Interstellar hydrogen is about 10^19 times less dense than air, so EM radiation is not really going to be bothered by it.

The collision will probably ionise atomic hydrogen, but the speeds you mention are so high and the densities so low that it probably wouldn't give rise to a detectable recombination signal. You can't track gas unless it emits something that you can detect, and the only way that will happen is when the ionised gas recombines (the 21cm line emission from the atomic hydrogen will be undetectable on these scales). I should think that everyone lacks such as system.

[tharkûn]

As for the heat sink business, you have to be able to cool the hull significantly, thermal insulation and heatshields and all (where would you get a precooled hull from?)
We can do this now. thermal insulation? It's called vacuum, dead air, and a whole slew of materials. Conduction/convection get stopped by simple layers of insulation (which you need anyways if you plan to go where the temperature of the surroundings is a danger to the crew).

It'll therefore take time, and you'll have to do this in space,
The amount of time is entirely dependant on the method used, the mass of the ship, etc. You can relatively quickly flash cool things down to 100 K, even below that doesn't take too long. The real bitch is getting down towards interstellar temperature, but not impossible.

since leaving the atmosphere of a planet would cause some heating (even assuming it's not a warm planet anyway),
No you don't. Heat is generated here from friction, no friction ... no heat generated. How do you get rid of friction? Move the air out of the way of your ship. The Russians have a very nice supercavitation system for torpedos underwater. You will generate heat, that does NOT mean it goes into the ship ... it might all but dumped into a specific location.


so you need a safe area guaranteed free of enemy shipping, which might be difficult if they managed to flush their heatsink before you did. Cooling the hull will dump heat into your heatsink, and since the mass of the hull that needs cooling is likely to be greater than the mass of the heatsink, you have a significant problem right from the beginning.
Not at all you cool the hull before leaving. The mass, while important, is not the only factor, you need to talk about the specific heat capacity also. Remember you can capture your waste heat to do useful work. The upper limit is 99% (for a sufficienty cold heat dump).


This is also assuming you can avoid firing the engines yet accomplish your mission, which will generate waste energy that you must absorb.
No this means you cannot *continiously* gun your engines. You can always fire off a big burst , lay out a few decoys and then ride inertia. Space is big. For all of Bean's talk about wakes its going to take some effort to find a wake in the first place.


You have a ship that is less maneovreable, has a higher mass, requires significant lead-up time to cloaking and most likely requires the crew to wear space suits all the time, compared to a ship minus the cloaking system. Is it even worth it?
Its the equivalent of a deisal sub compared to a surface destroyer. Both have their uses, I mean let us remember that even finding the thermal energy is a needle in a haystack to begin with. You wake is a miniscule fraction of the area an opponent would have to scan in a solar system. If you just cool the ship down you greatly lower your emissions. Let's say your wake 1000 km in radius. It's max 10^9 km^3, a ship has to find that in the midst of a solar system with radius 6*10^9 km, and a volume of 2*10^29 km^3. Now toss in the fact that you can dump decoys, and that plenty of other things radiate in space ... its still going to be hard to detect a cloaked ship by its effects on the surroundings. Cooling just makes harder still.

Use your heatsink to cool missiles before launch (launch them magnetically or with cold gas) and they're slightly more likely to make it through enemy point-defences.
At the expense of maneuverability and ToF.

[Neko_Oni]

The collision will probably ionise atomic hydrogen, but the speeds you mention are so high and the densities so low that it probably wouldn't give rise to a detectable recombination signal. You can't track gas unless it emits something that you can detect, and the only way that will happen is when the ionised gas recombines (the 21cm line emission from the atomic hydrogen will be undetectable on these scales). I should think that everyone lacks such as system.

I don't think its the recombination that would produce a signal (like you said) but more the actual impact. I mean even if it's only interstellar medium hitting a ship, its hitting it at greater than light speed, our particle accelerators can't reach those speeds (for obvious reasons), and even particle accelerators produce a spray of radiation and sub-atomic particles when they operate. I think this could be a traceble emission that any ship at very high relative velocities would produce.

[ClaysGhost]

As for the heat sink business, you have to be able to cool the hull significantly, thermal insulation and heatshields and all (where would you get a precooled hull from?)
We can do this now. thermal insulation? It's called vacuum, dead air, and a whole slew of materials. Conduction/convection get stopped by simple layers of insulation (which you need anyways if you plan to go where the temperature of the surroundings is a danger to the crew).

I meant that the external hull has to cool down despite the insulation. The primary mechanism will have to be radiation (as those insulating layers will, as you say, limit conduction and convection). Cooling this way will be slow, and while this is happening internal heat must be going somewhere; into your (massive) heatsink, which is probably not a good thing.

The amount of time is entirely dependant on the method used, the mass of the ship, etc. You can relatively quickly flash cool things down to 100 K, even below that doesn't take too long. The real bitch is getting down towards interstellar temperature, but not impossible.

And how would you flash-cool something of starship size and mass?

No you don't. Heat is generated here from friction, no friction ... no heat generated. How do you get rid of friction? Move the air out of the way of your ship. The Russians have a very nice supercavitation system for torpedos underwater. You will generate heat, that does NOT mean it goes into the ship ... it might all but dumped into a specific location.

Isn't that rather more difficult to do when the medium you're moving through is 1000 times less dense than water and you're moving maybe 1000 times faster than a torpedo?

Not at all you cool the hull before leaving. The mass, while important, is not the only factor, you need to talk about the specific heat capacity also. Remember you can capture your waste heat to do useful work. The upper limit is 99% (for a sufficienty cold heat dump).

The hull cannot have a low specific heat capacity, so you must find a material with a horribly low specific heat capacity or you will be towing significant amounts of heatsink.

No this means you cannot *continiously* gun your engines. You can always fire off a big burst , lay out a few decoys and then ride inertia. Space is big. For all of Bean's talk about wakes its going to take some effort to find a wake in the first place.

This wake business is Bean's, not mine. I don't understand what they're supposed to be. Your power plant will supply the engines for a shorter time but at a higher power level, so your heatsink will have to absorb the same amount of waste energy. Unless it's a magic engine, that will have be a very large heat sink. And if the engines happen to be pointing at something with a detector when you fire them, you're screwed, heatsink or no.

Its the equivalent of a deisal sub compared to a surface destroyer. Both have their uses, I mean let us remember that even finding the thermal energy is a needle in a haystack to begin with. You wake is a miniscule fraction of the area an opponent would have to scan in a solar system. If you just cool the ship down you greatly lower your emissions. Let's say your wake 1000 km in radius. It's max 10^9 km^3, a ship has to find that in the midst of a solar system with radius 6*10^9 km, and a volume of 2*10^29 km^3. Now toss in the fact that you can dump decoys, and that plenty of other things radiate in space ... its still going to be hard to detect a cloaked ship by its effects on the surroundings. Cooling just makes harder still.

Forget the wake business. I have. I'm talking about thermal radiation from the hull. As for finding the ship, the problem is one of sky area, not volume, unless you believe that lying B5 show, and both uncloaked and cloaked ships will have the same problem. I suppose the uncloaked ship could just keep watch on the planet-based cooling facility the cloaked ship needs. Even with that kind of search area, using sensors based on interferometric principles you could search for a spacecraft electronically. Plenty of things radiate in space, but they tend to be very hot or background, i.e. they don't look like a spacecraft.

Use your heatsink to cool missiles before launch (launch them magnetically or with cold gas) and they're slightly more likely to make it through enemy point-defences.
At the expense of maneuverability and ToF.

Now I thought cool objects would be invisible to sensors, so why do you care about maneovreability?

[Failed Glory]

The collision will probably ionise atomic hydrogen, but the speeds you mention are so high and the densities so low that it probably wouldn't give rise to a detectable recombination signal. You can't track gas unless it emits something that you can detect, and the only way that will happen is when the ionised gas recombines (the 21cm line emission from the atomic hydrogen will be undetectable on these scales). I should think that everyone lacks such as system.

I don't think its the recombination that would produce a signal (like you said) but more the actual impact. I mean even if it's only interstellar medium hitting a ship, its hitting it at greater than light speed, our particle accelerators can't reach those speeds (for obvious reasons), and even particle accelerators produce a spray of radiation and sub-atomic particles when they operate. I think this could be a traceble emission that any ship at very high relative velocities would produce.

That's why they have the Swiss-army knife of ST: the Deflector Dish!

No particles hit the ship, they are swept out of the way.

[SirNitram]

You know, I'm a little amazed at what I see.

1) EM In Space: We can detect it now. It's not invisible or undetectable just because space is big and empty.

2) Interstellar Hydrogen: I think the numbers right, but you're forgetting something: Nearly all of ST takes place in a solar system.

[tharkûn]

I meant that the external hull has to cool down despite the insulation. The primary mechanism will have to be radiation (as those insulating layers will, as you say, limit conduction and convection). Cooling this way will be slow, and while this is happening internal heat must be going somewhere; into your (massive) heatsink, which is probably not a good thing.
You are forgetting the nature of them system. Let's begin with a set up like this:
Cooling mechanism|Heat sink|water|hull

Heat will be conducted from the hull to the water, from there to the heat sink, and then your cooling mechanism will exchange that out into the environment.

So once you get everything done you evacuate the water and turn off the cooling mechanism leaving
Rest of ship|Heat sink|vacuum|hull

Now heat flows from the rest of the ship into the heat sink. However nothing flows across the vaccum to the hull.

This is a *dynamic* system, it goes from open to closed and back. Parts are insulative when you need them to be and conductive when you need them to be. You are thinking of a static system ... that is NOT a requirement.

And how would you flash-cool something of starship size and mass?
1. Flood the surface area with a colder liquid.
2. Use laser cooling.
3. Possibly use a transporter to cool the hull further (i.e. beam hot atoms out into a cold bath, cool them, and beam them back into the centre of the hull).

Isn't that rather more difficult to do when the medium you're moving through is 1000 times less dense than water and you're moving maybe 1000 times faster than a torpedo?
It's much easier when you have ST technobabble to do it. High strength B feilds would allow you to move the air without heating the hull.

The hull cannot have a low specific heat capacity, so you must find a material with a horribly low specific heat capacity or you will be towing significant amounts of heatsink.
Or using something with an even greater specific heat capacity. For instance uranium has spefic heat capacity which is 30 times less than that of lithium. Other substances have even higher specific heat capacities, besides which your hull itself can be cooled. Its all relative and most metals have low specific heat capacities.

Your power plant will supply the engines for a shorter time but at a higher power level, so your heatsink will have to absorb the same amount of waste energy
Unless of course while you make your acceleration burn you dump heated gas out the back.

Unless it's a magic engine, that will have be a very large heat sink. And if the engines happen to be pointing at something with a detector when you fire them, you're screwed, heatsink or no.

Nope. The heat of the engines can be ejected with the propellant. The engines only give you away if you don't dump some decoys (basically big cloaked thrusters). Remember unless we are talking about FTL drives, your waste is going to be going at STL speeds. With FTL drives they have to catch up to you before they can do anything ... when they get close ... drop a decoy and then drop to STL and go silent running.

I'm talking about thermal radiation from the hull. As for finding the ship, the problem is one of sky area, not volume, unless you believe that lying B5 show, and both uncloaked and cloaked ships will have the same problem.
Fine radiation from the hull. It drops off by the square of the distance as you get away from the hull. Let's say you had a borg sphere 2km across and say the photons have diffused enough after 500 km they are no longer discernable from the background (please note this is a 250,000 fold drop in intensity). Now take the surface of that 1000 km sphere and compare it to the surface area present in a solar system ... yep same problem.

Your emissions are going to diffuse, and they do so with the radius squared. It does not take long for a cold ship to be indistinguishable from the background.

Even with that kind of search area, using sensors based on interferometric principles you could search for a spacecraft electronically. Plenty of things radiate in space, but they tend to be very hot or background, i.e. they don't look like a spacecraft.
only up until the signal is drowned out by the background. And evertything's heat signature in space ends up looking like a sphere, if you cool the hull to close to the ambient background ... you won't look much different.

Now I thought cool objects would be invisible to sensors, so why do you care about maneovreability?
Area effect counter measures . If they know the direction is being fired from they can take a counter shot on likely trajectories and fry everything within distance. Just because they can't see it doesn't mean they can hit it, especially if they opt for saturation coverage. One of the ways to kill subs is to simply saturate the area with depth charges. Area effect is bitch if it ain't on your side.

1) EM In Space: We can detect it now. It's not invisible or undetectable just because space is big and empty.
No but it does get drowned in the background. In an NMR machine you can pick up the radio transmissions from individual hydrogen nuclei ... rarely can you here them next to a commercial broadcast station. As intensity decreases with radius squared ... its a small area where you can detect it from. If your blackbody radiation is the same as the background ... EM detection is not worth much.

[Darth Wong]

Oh, for Christ's sake. Tharkun is spreading his trademark long-winded technobabble over a very simple problem, as usual. His concept is extremely simple: he complicates the hull into a long-winded description of hull with internal convective heat transfer systems to an inner wall of supposedly greater specific heat capacity, but the gist of it is this:

The hull has a very high specific heat, and gets pre-cooled to blend into the background before a cloaking attempt, so it will take a very long time to heat up.

I don't know why the fuck he has to make things sound more complicated than they are. However, there are several key holes in this theory:

1. It would take a lot of time to cool the hull down to 2.7K. They don't necessarily have that kind of time before they must engage their cloak.
2. He has not demonstrated any evidence whatsoever for his mythical cryogenic hull cooling system. He seems fond of slitting his wrists with Occam's Razor. Naturally, he mumbles something about using transporter-based technobabble ...
3. Even if we disregard waste heat from active systems, the fact that the interior of the ship is maintained at roughly 300K (humans are walking around in there, remember?) means that it will transfer heat to a cold hull at a rate of 450 W/m^2 through radiation alone (zero conduction, zero convection). Given a surface area of, say, 1 million square metres, this is a constant heating rate of hundreds of megawatts.
4. He assumes that the propellant of the drive system is its only output (no waste heat?), and it will all be precisely collinear with no particle interaction (since ionized gases apparently don't interact ), so there is no lateral emission of any kind. Tharkun, please introduce yourself to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
5. He assumes vast specific heat for the hull in order to make this harebrained scheme work. If anyone tries to add on more heating requirements, he arbitrarily declares that the hull must be made of something that can handle it. However, he is forgetting that what goes in must come out. If the hull has such a spectacularly large heat capacity that it can remain indistinguishably cold against the backdrop of deep space for extended durations despite absorbing significant internal heating, then a huge amount of heat must be released when it's being cooled down in the first place. In other words, just before you cloaked your ship, you would have to turn yourself into a ridiculously bright radiation beacon.

As for the difficulty of picking up warm objects against a cold backdrop, methinks Tharkun is overestimating the difficulties of doing so. Modern equipment can pick up the warmth of a human body UNDERGROUND from aircraft, where it would seem to be hopelessly obscured, and in a relatively noisy terrestrial environment. And that's picking up a temperature difference of less than 20K!

If a ship is so far away that you can't pick it up despite being much warmer than its environment, there are a ton of ways it could conceal itself without all of this bullshit, like, oh, hiding behind something, like a planet, a moon, or an asteroid. The whole point of a cloak is that you can actually approach your target without being detected (to an optimal range of less than 3km, according to TNG dialogue). And the whole point of this discussion is that this doesn't work if your enemy has a brain in his head (which, fortunately for the Romulans, most feddies do not).

[Patrick Degan]

Tharkun's scheme strikes me as being about as practical as trying to air-condition a cactus in the middle of the Mojave Desert at high noon on the hottest day of the year.

Even if the system he proposes worked as advertised, the point of emission for the whole system would still be emitting heat and enough for it to stand out like a beacon. And what would be the point of an invisible ship that has a very visible beacon?

[tharkûn]

It would take a lot of time to cool the hull down to 2.7K. They don't necessarily have that kind of time before they must engage their cloak.
a. Which is kind of why I'd think you'd precool the hull before you ever needed the cloak.
b. You might have an active cooling system on the hull to remove heat from the hull and dump into something else that can be ejected just before cloaking. Basically continiously cool the hull while you are not cloaked so it is ready for when you cloak.

He has not demonstrated any evidence whatsoever for his mythical cryogenic hull cooling system. He seems fond of slitting his wrists with Occam's Razor. Naturally, he mumbles something about using transporter-based technobabble ...
Namely because I don't know the numbers on cryogenics techniques. I know laser cooling works at getting things cold, but I have no idea how to get rates and energy usage. Likewise with simply dumping it into a vat of whatever cyrogen you like ... I know qualitatively what will happen, but haven't a clue about the rate at which it will happen.

Even if we disregard waste heat from active systems, the fact that the interior of the ship is maintained at roughly 300K (humans are walking around in there, remember?) means that it will transfer heat to a cold hull at a rate of 450 W/m^2 through radiation alone (zero conduction, zero convection). Given a surface area of, say, 1 million square metres, this is a constant heating rate of hundreds of megawatts .
Yes and as I recall of those 450 W/m^2 you can recover up to 445.5445% to use as work if you have a 3 K sink to dump into, at least I think that's the Carnot limit.

He assumes that the propellant of the drive system is its only output (no waste heat?), and it will all be precisely collinear with no particle interaction (since ionized gases apparently don't interact ), so there is no lateral emission of any kind.
No I assume you WON'T BE RUNNING THE ENGINES when you are under. When you do fire them ... the waste propogates at c, you don't. If you launch decoys when you fire the engines, they are not going to be able to easily detect you. The idea is fire the engines, drop some decoys and be gone by the time the EM radiation reaches your pursuer.

He assumes vast specific heat for the hull in order to make this harebrained scheme work. If anyone tries to add on more heating requirements, he arbitrarily declares that the hull must be made of something that can handle it. However, he is forgetting that what goes in must come out. If the hull has such a spectacularly large heat capacity that it can remain indistinguishably cold against the backdrop of deep space for extended durations despite absorbing significant internal heating, then a huge amount of heat must be released when it's being cooled down in the first place . In other words, just before you cloaked your ship, you would have to turn yourself into a ridiculously bright radiation beacon.
Specific heat of the hull, and possibly filling a good chunk of the internal volume with something like say supercooled water. If 2/3rds of your mass (and this mass has specific heat capacities higher than the rest of the ship) is supercooled would you still have this problem?

I realize that the heat has to come out, but what stops you from cooling the hull on the Romulan side of the Neutral zone, and then taking off? I was thinking it would take hours or days to get the ship cooled down, what is a more reasonable estimate?

As for the difficulty of picking up warm objects against a cold backdrop, methinks Tharkun is overestimating the difficulties of doing so. Modern equipment can pick up the warmth of a human body UNDERGROUND from aircraft, where it would seem to be hopelessly obscured, and in a relatively noisy terrestrial environment. And that's picking up a temperature difference of less than 20K!
Let's say the aircraft is 10 km up. The thermal image has only diffused 100 fold from what it was at 1 km. Now take a ship and scan with ranges of 400,000 km (distance from earth to the moon). This heat signature is 1.6*10^11 times more diffuse. Let's try 450 W/m^2 with a million m^2 of surface area (say 1 m from the hull), now let's let look from 100,000km away. You are only looking for 4.5*10^-14 W/m^2, tell me Mike, where can I pick up an IR detector with that type of sensitivity? Of course if its just 1 ship in the solar system they need to be able to detect a ship at ranges of up to 6*10^12 m. Or about 1.25*10^-23 W/m, but hey you can get that type of IR detector at Radioshack, right?

Just how little thermal radiation can you detect?

Besides all of this is the simple problem of detection speed. Unless your sensors are FTL you need to be RIGHT DAMN ON TOP of the cloaked ship. If it takes a 5 minutes for light to travel between the target and the cloak you are already working at a deficit, by the time you find the signal the ship can go hide, warp out of the system, etc. If a cloak does nothing but disable FTL detection ... it's still worth it.

If a ship is so far away that you can't pick it up despite being much warmer than its environment, there are a ton of ways it could conceal itself without all of this bullshit, like, oh, hiding behind something , like a planet, a moon, or an asteroid. The whole point of a cloak is that you can actually approach your target without being detected (to an optimal range of less than 3km, according to TNG dialogue).
Unless of course there were none of those around. Or if the cloaked ship needs to stay in orbit of a target. And if you are trying to hide from the enemy you don't think they might not CATCH ON to such tactics?

If you are so hideously paranoid about being detected by your heat emessions:
1. Cool the hull, perferably back on Romulus.
2. Load every cargo/shuttle/whatever bay with supercooled water.
3. Turn off the heating in the ship and wear EVA suits.

[SirNitram]

Your basic idea shows that you do not understand the Second Law, nor the basics of outer space. EM IS A HUGE THING IN OUTER SPACE. So are all forms of radiation.. This is why you need specially built ships, but wooden boxes. Heard of the solar winds?

Right now, we can pick up things emitting EM/Visible/Gamma/X-ray from thousands of lightyears away. Yes, you can use many techniques to drop emissions and lower the hull temp. But this is Star Trek. The Warp Cores emit massive excess radiation, at all times.

Hell, I write submarine-style space warfare, but I acknowledge the difficulties in hiding a ship. You haven't appeared to have considered any of it.

[tharkûn]

Your basic idea shows that you do not understand the Second Law, nor the basics of outer space. EM IS A HUGE THING IN OUTER SPACE. So are all forms of radiation.. This is why you need specially built ships, but wooden boxes. Heard of the solar winds?
Yes this is called BACKGROUDN NOISE when you are looking to find the thermal signature of a cloaked ship. EM is of course emitted, however the INTENSITY, WAVELENGTH, and DURATION are all important if you can detect it. If it's very low in intensity then you are going to have trouble detecting it, stronger signals will blow it away. Wavelength determines how easily it gets scattered and deflected. And if its of short duration then its even harder to detect.

But no all EM radiation is the same, sun radiates 1.4kW/m^2 near the earth.

For the record solar radiation is NOT EM it's loaded with protons, alpha particles, and lots of other ions.
and lower the hull temp. But this is Star Trek. The Warp Cores emit massive excess radiation, at all times. [/i]
Unplug the damn thing and coast on batteries. Yes I know that requires more compotence than ever exhibited since TOS.

Hell, I write submarine-style space warfare, but I acknowledge the difficulties in hiding a ship. You haven't appeared to have considered any of it.
No I just realize that space is big and that most detection methods decrease with the distance squared. I have no idea how far away current technology can detect a ship radiating 450 W/m^2 over a surface area of 1 million square metres (perhaps Mike knows), but its not that easy. We are still discovering new moonlets on planets and new asteroids, all of which we start with MUCH more initial knowledge than finding a cloaked ship.

Things like solar wind, planets, asteroids will make it easier to hide your ship. If you don't know where to look for a ship to begin with it is NOT trivial to find it.

[SirNitram]

No Trek ship has ever demonstrated the ability to turn off their power core without catastrophic explosions. Or uber-beings doing the switching off.

Of course, you are ignoring the fundamental probelm that fucks your idea up the ass with a barbed wire dildo. Trek combat ranges are within a few shiplengths. At these ranges, you cannot hide yourself, not even visually. These ranges do not permit the fancy smancy ideas you throw around to work. Hiding your background heat only means something if you are out of visual range.. Which Trek ships never do.

That's your big problem. While some of your ideas sound halfway decent, you are forever crippled by the sci-fi you try to apply it to.

[Master of Ossus]

Tharkun, are you aware that modern methods of super-cooling things to a few degrees above Kelvin must necessarily drop that heat off SOMEWHERE? Are you aware that laser-cooling is impractical for something the size of a hull, and are you aware that composite materials are not affected by laser-cooling (because the light that cools one kind of atom is absorbed by another kind of atom which heats up MORE than the amount of energy absorbed by the first one? In addition, the color of light is so sensitive that the VIBRATION OF THE FLOOR changes the color of laser light so much that the laser-cooling method does not work. Clearly laser-cooling is not practical in ANY way for a starship.

You can also clearly not use electromagnetic trapping to cool the hull, because that would require a hull that has VAST portions continually vaporizing (and, of course, those atoms and molecules have to go somewhere). So we see that there is no practical method of cooling a starship to the degree that you would need to hide it against space (at least, none that we know of).

[tharkûn]

No Trek ship has ever demonstrated the ability to turn off their power core without catastrophic explosions. Or uber-beings doing the switching off.
Didn't we see that happen in ST:III (when they want to decomission the E-nil)?

In any event only a moron would design a cloak with a hideously noisy engine that can't be shut down.

Trek combat ranges are within a few shiplengths. At these ranges, you cannot hide yourself, not even visually. These ranges do not permit the fancy smancy ideas you throw around to work.
This is because Trek writers/FX guys haven't a clue about decent tactics in space. Battles should rarely occur in the voids of space, defensive battelines shoud be utterly and completely scrapped, etc. Trek combat only makes sense if battefeilds are so hideously jammed you can miss targets 100's of m's long at km ranges (while having a visual on them no less).

That's your big problem. While some of your ideas sound halfway decent, you are forever crippled by the sci-fi you try to apply it to.
If we limited the discussion of possibility to the stupidity likely to crawl out of B&B's asses it would be boring as hell. Yes I realize this requires far superior engineering, planning, and tactics than seen in ST. I have never once suggest canon Star Trek would take this bent.

[Master of Ossus]

No Trek ship has ever demonstrated the ability to turn off their power core without catastrophic explosions. Or uber-beings doing the switching off.
Didn't we see that happen in ST:III (when they want to decomission the E-nil)?

In any event only a moron would design a cloak with a hideously noisy engine that can't be shut down.

Why would only a moron design a noisy engine for a starship?

This is because Trek writers/FX guys haven't a clue about decent tactics in space. Battles should rarely occur in the voids of space, defensive battelines shoud be utterly and completely scrapped, etc. Trek combat only makes sense if battefeilds are so hideously jammed you can miss targets 100's of m's long at km ranges (while having a visual on them no less).

Okay. So they can miss targets 100's of meters long at km ranges while using visual sensors. Clearly suspension of disbelief is involved in this, and clearly this leads us to the conclusion that ST targetting is absolutely atrocious.

If we limited the discussion of possibility to the stupidity likely to crawl out of B&B's asses it would be boring as hell. Yes I realize this requires far superior engineering, planning, and tactics than seen in ST. I have never once suggest canon Star Trek would take this bent.

Do you know what suspension of disbelief is? What is onscreen is what we use in these debates. Unless specifically labelled as being pure speculation, we do not create technologies that do not exist for the purposes of these debates. Further (and more importantly) you appear to suggest that it's okay to do this. It is not okay to go beyond what is in the show unless it is ABSOLUTELY required. Clearly ST sensors are too primitive to detect EM radiation generated by a cloaked starship.

[SirNitram]

Perhaps you should check which forum this is, Tharkun. If you want to discuss realistic approaches to stealth ships, go to Other Sci-Fi, or if you feel the urge to go full on science, the Science And Logic one. This is Trek and Wars. Trek is what we see, and yea, it's not realistic. This isn't news.

[tharkûn]

Tharkun, are you aware that modern methods of super-cooling things to a few degrees above Kelvin must necessarily drop that heat off SOMEWHERE?
Yes. If its an active cooling system you dump that heat into the local environment. This may or may not require an open system with respect to matter.

Are you aware that laser-cooling is impractical for something the size of a hull, and are you aware that composite materials are not affected by laser-cooling (because the light that cools one kind of atom is absorbed by another kind of atom which heats up MORE than the amount of energy absorbed by the first one?
No. All I know about laser cooling is that you shine a laser at a specific wavelength on the atom, the photon is absorbed and comes off with more energy than it went in with.

In addition, the color of light is so sensitive that the VIBRATION OF THE FLOOR changes the color of laser light so much that the laser-cooling method does not work.
This does not seem to be a hideous problem if you have anti-gravity and inertial dampening on a feedback system.


You can also clearly not use electromagnetic trapping to cool the hull, because that would require a hull that has VAST portions continually vaporizing (and, of course, those atoms and molecules have to go somewhere). So we see that there is no practical method of cooling a starship to the degree that you would need to hide it against space (at least, none that we know of).
Now perhaps one of you can provide equations for simple conduction. Take a cyrogen (liquid He, supercooled ice, whatever) and place it directly on the hull. When temperatures equilibrate ... lather rinse repeat. Or perhaps have a reaction with a highly spontaneous and endothermic reaction go off right on the surface of the hull.

I don't know the numbers for all the cyrogenic techniques, I understand them qualitatively but not necessarily quantitatively.

[tharkûn]

Why would only a moron design a noisy engine for a starship?
If you want it to run CLOAKED? The point of a cloaked ship is STEALTH. Loud engines ... might no be avoidable, but if your engine is going to give you away ... shut it down and run on batteries. This is not a radical concept.

Okay. So they can miss targets 100's of meters long at km ranges while using visual sensors. Clearly suspension of disbelief is involved in this, and clearly this leads us to the conclusion that ST targetting is absolutely atrocious.
Yet they can launch probes at much greater distances and get them there. My bet is that starfleet battles are so full of ECM that even the visual is being scrambled and its computer corrected on the viewscreen. Missing ships the range they do is flat out HARD to do, I swear you'd have to TRY to miss with a decent fire and forget shot.

Do you know what suspension of disbelief is? What is onscreen is what we use in these debates. Unless specifically labelled as being pure speculation, we do not create technologies that do not exist for the purposes of these debates. Further (and more importantly) you appear to suggest that it's okay to do this. It is not okay to go beyond what is in the show unless it is ABSOLUTELY required. Clearly ST sensors are too primitive to detect EM radiation generated by a cloaked starship.
Bean listed methods for detecting cloaked ships, to the best of my knowledge those are not done in ST, and only one in SW. I posted ways to counter those an explicitly stated they were not ST SOP.
If you wish to speculate about what could or should be done, then you are not limited by the purile "imagination" of the writers.

[Master of Ossus]

Tharkun, you have clearly not read the thread. We did list methods of detecting cloaked starships that have been done in ST. Be that as it may, I cannot believe you think that cooling a single starship with liquid He to the point that would be required is practical. You cannot laser-cool it. You cannot cool it with radiation. You cannot cool it with EM trapping, and clearly cooling a ship with a "very high specific heat" using something like liquid He (so you need the ship to be at only a few K) is ludicrous. The ECM jamming in ST battles that you came up with clearly cannot operate for a cloaked ship, because numerous times cloaked ships have been able to aproach starships without even being DETECTED. ECM jamming would allow them to avoid being locked on to, but it would BROADCAST the presence of a cloaked starship. This is not what we see in the show.

[ClaysGhost]

I don't think its the recombination that would produce a signal (like you said) but more the actual impact. I mean even if it's only interstellar medium hitting a ship, its hitting it at greater than light speed, our particle accelerators can't reach those speeds (for obvious reasons), and even particle accelerators produce a spray of radiation and sub-atomic particles when they operate. I think this could be a traceble emission that any ship at very high relative velocities would produce.

The collision products, if enough energy were transferred into the atom to split it, would still not be particularly dense, but I don't know how an atom would react to colliding with something travelling faster than light, and especially not something travelling in a warp field. If the ship were travelling at the speed of light, then you'd get about 10^16 collisions per second assuming a cross-sectional area of 28,000 square metres.