From: pksuk@mothra.syr.EDU (Peter K. Suk)
Subject: Re: Weapons systems?
Keywords: high-G space weapons
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 20:47:19 EST

In article <By6Fso.FnE@helios.physics.utoronto.ca> 
neufeld@helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Christopher Neufeld) writes:

>In article <1992Nov22.120640.13084@newstand.syr.edu> 
>pksuk@mothra.syr.EDU (Peter K. Suk) writes:
>>
>>What if you built an entire warship around this principle?  You could
>>cool the entire thing down to a few degrees K.  If everything is 
>>horrendously efficient, then you stay cool for a while.  No radiators
>>shouting, 'Hey You!  Missle!  I'm over here!'  
>>
>>So, is this thermodynamically legal?
>>
>   Yes, briefly. Not in the steady state. Your ship will be trying to
>generate heat, if for no other reason than the 100 watt space heaters
>which represent each human being. 

I had thought of this.  I meant to imply that you couldn't have a
human crew.  (At least not one that felt very frisky:) So such a
weapon would be unmanned.  This will get us to the point I made
earlier about the blurring of mine/missle/fighter and to the
practicality of mining.

>You'd have to carry your cold sink around with you...  ...heat
>capacities generally fall rapidly with temperature...  Once the cold
>sink warms up past the average temperature of the ship around it the
>efficiency of the system goes down in a hurry and you have to pump
>more and more energy into the cold sink...

I thought to avoid this by using the whole ship as a 'cold sink' and 
keeping it sealed in a thermos-bottle.  After the ship gets to a certain
temperature, heck with it.  Switch to high-energy, high-G, mayhem mode.
Bring on those missles!  But this is no different in principle than
the good ole 'cold sink' idea.  It doesn't last as long, but it could be 
cheaper to implement.  

>   If you're trying not to radiate thermally you'll have a hard time
>applying thrust. If you want to pretend to be a thirty degree rock
>(roughly the mean temperature of the background within the galaxy...

I love this group!

>...you'll have little choice of thruster systems.  Rock-tossing
>reaction jets could probably be designed to radiate minimally.

Here is what sparked this idea in the first place:

You can prevent any spacecraft's radiating anything -- except heat.
Therefore, any "stealth" spacecraft has to do something about its
IR signature.  However, the only practical way of hiding IR is to 
concentrate your thermal radiation in a particular direction.

Someone could defend a particular location from these stealth-ships
by surrounding it with stealthed detectors.  A way to counter this
defense, then, would be to mount an advanced attack with robot 
fighters built around the low-temp principles I outlined above.  

These would be piloted by AIs running on superconducting computers *
and would be equipped with a variety of passive sensors and a
superconducting mass-driver, which would act both as main weapon
and drive.  They would be launched from a mother-ship using yet
another mass-driver, and would spend as much time as possible gathering
intelligence before their IR would give them away, communicating
their findings through tight-beam bursts.  Then, they'd make all hell
break loose.  

Here we have something that somewhat resembles a mine, a fighter, and
a missle.  It's flung toward your enemy like a missle.  Sits around
watching and waiting like a mine.  Then becomes a fighter.   Perhaps
it might kamikaze something after receiving damage, becoming a missle 
once again.  One could imagine a warship carrying a whole lot of these 
things, the crew programing them for different tasks as needed.  

Also, the difficulty of making low-temp drives would mean two distinct
types of robot-fighter in a warship's arsenal.  One type of ship would
have the ability to sneak around, emitting nothing.  The other type
would advertise its presence more or less openly, but depend on
superior firepower and manuverability.  (See my other post on the
difficulty of targeting objects that are 1000G nimble.)  The warship
would send these in once the element of surprise had been lost.

	--Peter Kwangjun Suk

(* - Of course, computers are highly ordered.  Which means that they 
have got to produce a corresponding degree of entropy SOMEWHERE.  
This usually means heat.  Is there any way to avoid the heat?)
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