From: scooper@kepler.physics.uq.oz.au (Steven Cooper)
Subject: Still WASTE HEAT?
Keywords: surveillance stealth detectors computers aesthetics
Organization: Physics Dept. The University of Queensland
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 02:17:37 GMT



pksuk@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Peter K. Suk) writes:


[ stuff about the silliness of Star Trek... ]
>
>I'm NOT supporting the screen interpretation.  The speeds and distances are
>more suited to the final battle in Antony & Cleopatra than sci-fi combat.

I didn't actually mean to imply that you were. I was just giving Star Trek 
itself ( and any number of other sf movies ) a serve.

>
>And Steve, you're forgetting to take some of that incredible 'magical'
>seeming technology into account.  The crew would only have to _think_
>about their commands, and they wouldn't be the ones flying the ship,
>or firing the weapons.  They'd be making strategy.  In fact, in a lot
>of cases, the ship will take action, THEN inform the crew, who might
>change their strategy accordingly.  (For more, see below.)

I couldn't agree more! I thought that's more or less what I implied by my 
comments about hooking computers direct to pilots brains etc.
Maybe the computers could handle the strategy as well ( unless there's something
unique about red squishy computers - which I doubt ).

[deleted]

>
>Remember, we're dealing with muy funky stuff here.  Assume
>"nanotechnology" of the highest order.  Remove the crewperson's brain.
>Replace all of the glial cells with nanomachinery which is MUCH
>stiffer, and which duplicates their function.  Reinforce the cell
>membranes of the neurons in some way.  Connect him/her to a computer
>which generates a vitual reality of a body, command center, etc.

Forget the body. Give the pilot a virtual reality in which he IS the spaceship.
Maybe nanotechology will get this good. It sounds like a lot of trouble though.
If such technology existed surely it would also be possible to make a computer 
at least as smart as a person and just let the computer/spaceships fight the 
battles.
Of course, this would mean that craft containing people would be very easy 
targets but presumably you just designate 100G ships as military and 10G ships 
as easy targets. Not much different to F15's and 747's. 

>Now, if you wanted to, you have a scene just like Star Trek. You could
>even have everyone fall out of their chairs!  :)

Oh God! I think I'm gonna puke :()=@&$^%^ ,.* & .
>
>Would society allow it?  Any society that could contemplate destruction
>on the scales we'd see in a war with THIS technology, SURE.  And who's
>to say that we couldn't reverse the process?

Fair enough.

[ deleted ]
>
>>>      o  How to defend a civilization against such weapons
>>
>>The simple answer is to have 100G spacecraft yourself...
>
>Actually, you just _move_ the whole darn thing.  Seriously.  The only
>civlizations that can survive this kind of thing are Macro-Lifes.

I agree that a planet or system based civilization would be toasted in no time 
by such conflict, but surely you could follow and toast even a Macro-Life. If
you want to pick a fight with a Macro-Life then you'd better be one yourself. In
this case, surely you'd be quite capable of meeting them wherever they happen to
be camped. Wide dispersal of a Macro-Life would make it hard to take out in it's
entirety, but so would a multi-system civilization.

>
>>civilization would quickly run out of intact hardware. This would strongly
>>affect the strategy to be employed. A similar situation would probably arise
>>today if we were so ill advised as to have an all out war ( with whom? ). How
>>long do you think all that expensive machinery would last?
>>
>>I think a more interesting strategic situation arises if you limit spacecraft
>>to small accelerations so that everyone takes forever to get anywhere. The
>>strategy of battle would then become more like a naval engagement. Lots of
>>careful manouvres and forward planning.
>
>You'd have just as much of this in my paradigm, especially to preserve
>stealth.  In fact, this would look a lot like _Hunt for Red October_.

This is probably quite right.

>The ships are capable of some impresive destruction and zooming around,
>but doing this will make you a sitting duck (& a dead duck) in short
>order.  And it would still take a long time to get anywhere.  But the

With 100G and a decent exhaust velocity and mass ratio, you'd be able to blast 
around a system in no time. Stealth would be all but impossible under 100G
but you'd arrive so fast that your victims would only be able to make short term
preparations. Presumably this would give rise to at least two different
strategies. Either you sneak up slowly with the lights off and try to catch your
victim in a moment of ill preparedness or you come screaming in with guns 
blazing and again, hope that the speed of your assault will give your victim 
little time to prepare.

>brief bouts of action are a whole lot flashier.
>
>[stuff about a different paradigm with slower ships deleted]
>
>> Slowly accelerating vessels would be such wonderful sitting targets
>>( especially those huge incandescent radiators ) that the winner might
>>even be the first to get a shot in if the weapons are nasty enough.
>>Would this not need some very clever chesslike tactics? Chess is much
>>more cerebral than a bullfight.
>
>Remember the game Archon?  It was like chess, except when the pieces met
>you had to fight them like a video game.  Just as much cerebral stimulation
>as "beep-beep zip-BANG!"  :)  Basically, both paradigms are complex and
>involve a lot of strategy.  I just like thinking about mine because the
>stuff involved is so much beyond the level we're accustomed to dealing with.

Aesthetics. It just muddies my brain because it is really so far beyond anything
even remotely extrapolatable. I find it only marginally more satisfying than
musing about hyperspace and similar fanciful plot devices. 

I think that musing about future technology always has a component of fantasy
to it. Trying to predict technology even 100 years from now is really doomed to
failure ( judging by past attempts ) but at least if we stick to the not too
distant future we have some hope of making some reasonable extrapolations. I
find such short term musings interesting because I can actually make reasonable
educated guesses about how certain elements of technology might work. Go too
far in the future ( not far at all actually ) and it all becomes just baseless
speculation ( except for things like thermodynamic limitations ). Such 
speculation seems to me to be not far from fantasy.

This is all just a matter of personal taste I know.

For the purposes of meaningful discussion, what is required is a fairly rigid 
set of starting rules. Decide in advance precisely what the imaginary technology 
is capable of. Decide what the society(s) is to be like. Only then will the
discussion be able to meaningfully consider things like the strategy ( or even
possibility ) of war, colonisation etc etc.

>
>>>>I agree that stealth would be useful ( and possible ) on some
>>>>occasions but what about the sentinels?
>[deleted]
>>>
>>>Of course, an alert civilization will have ships out on patrol.
>>>[deleted]  The situation will be very much like the
>>>recent contest between US and Soviet snuclear submarines.
>>
>>I still disagree about stealth in a widely patrolled system being of much use.
>>I'm only talking about fast ships with big radiators here.

[deleted]

>
>Yes, but Steve, who guards the guardians?  /B)  If someone's going to
>attack a system, she/he's not going to leave the sentinels alone.  And by
>the same arguments you've just put forth, how do you protect your sentinels?

You don't have to. See below.

>
>>I think it is safe to assume that any technology capable of making
>>even the wimpy spacecraft I've been championing would allow a detector
>>to fully characterise every photon above a certain energy that passes
>>through it's aperture ( to within the limits of quantum mechanics ).
>>There would also be long periods available to gather lots of photons
>>and so get good statistics. Add to this some *awesome* computer power
>>for data analysis and I think that stealth would become rather
>>difficult.
>
>Of course, and you've just shown how difficult detection could be.

Difficult mainly in terms of computer power. Not so difficult in terms of
detectors. A 1E10 Watt radiator at a distance of 1 A.U. would appear as a 15th 
magnitude object ( well and truly detectable even in 1900 ). At 10 A.U. it 
appears as a 20th magnitude object and at 100 A.U. it would appear as a 25th 
magnitude object. I don't have up to date figures but at the end of the 
seventies Schmidt sky survey plates ( on the UK 1.2m instrument ) could detect 
objects down to magnitude 23.5 and an automated device could read the 
coordinates, sizes, magnitudes, orientation and shape of the half million 
objects on each plate in about 18 hours. I don't know what area of sky each 
plate represents but I understand that a Schmidt telescope can take images up to
a few degrees square ( maybe 10's ). Probably of the order of 1000 plates would
be needed to cover the sky ( any astronomers out there with corrections? ). 
Current photon counting detectors can detect objects much fainter than these
film based sky survey plates. I therefore don't doubt in the least that the sort
of detectors that I've been talking about will be available long before our
spacecraft are even slightly impressive. Now, what about the required computer
power? From the above musings lets say that there are 10^9 objects above 23rd
magnitude. The computer knows where the cataloged objects will be found so as
it checks each detected object it merely has to compare it with the catalog of 
that small part of the sky. Anything out of the ordinary is noted, the rest 
ignored.

Not a problem! All it requires is a LARGE database and a good deal of number
crunching to calculate the positions of all of those solar system objects. 
Judging by the rate at which computer power is currently increasing and assuming
that there isn't some unseen brick wall that we're about to run into, I cannot
see this being a problem - especially by the time we have wimpy spaceships.

>
>>You could probably hang around at 100 AU past the
>>last patrolled region and remain undetected.
>
>You could go right up TO the patrolled region, if it was big enough and
>had few enough sentinels in it.

How close you can get depends on how stealthy you are prepared to be 
( compromising with travel time, acceleration etc. ) and on the detection 
capabilities of the sentinels.

>
>>but if you tried to enter a patrolled system, you'd be spotted.
>
>Maybe.  (See below.)

DEFINITELY if you're under power.

>
>[stuff about detectors]
>
>>and the motion of the blip. This is compared with an inventory in the
>>computer's memory of every celestial body likely to cause confusion
>>and an inventory of every body in the solar system above a certain
>>size and it's orbit.
>
>AND every ship in-system?  Would there be ANY civilian ships?  Who
>would keep the database updated?  And how?  And wouldn't transmitting
>the information reveal locations?  (Not necessarily, I know, but look
>at the tertiary implications.)

I'm not suggesting it would be simple. Just possible with appropriate computer
power and detectors. Keeping track of in system spacecraft would presumably be a
job for the future equivalent of air traffic control. We use radar to track the 
locations of aircraft. Space traffic control might use fancy detectors and huge 
computers ( by our standards ). 

Whether a civilization could be bothered with all of this would depend on 
whether there was some more local reason to do so ( like space traffic control )
and on their level of paranoia about their neighbours. 

It is very difficult to extrapolate technology. It is even more difficult to
estimate the relative advancement of different technologies. Which will we have
first, a basic fusion drive or made-to-order genetics? 

Going on what we have seen so far, it seems reasonable that we will have some 
pretty amazing computers long before even a basic fusion drive rears it's head. 
How powerful would my hypothetical surveillance computer have to be? I don't 
know. What I do know is just how difficult even fusion power will be to get 
going. Even very wimpy fusion engines look like being a long long way off. By 
the time we have them, I wouldn't try to guess what sort of computer power will 
be available ( except via superlatives ).

>
>Well, think about whatever paradigm you want.  I like this one.

Which paradigm you choose is a matter of aesthetics. Whether stealth is possible
is not. It depends on limited calculation and vague guesses about likely 
technological prowess.


in a separate article
pksuk@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Peter K. Suk) writes:

<deleted>

>>>scooper@kepler.physics.uq.oz.au (Steven Cooper) writes:
>>
>[stuff about how to sneak up on a system deleted]
>>
>>>What?! Inter system warfare? What a silly concept. Let's assume our
>>>assailants are silly for the purposes of the argument...
>
>Of course, Steve!  Space warfare is pointless!  (It's a fact!  :)

We are agreed on this point at least.

>
>>Since you've come from another system you will be moving relativistically
>( unless you're unusually patient ).
>
>Space warfare will probably take generations.

You'd have to really hate the Romans!

<deleted>

>You and those ice-cream licking sentinels!  Those check-writing, AI,
>IR-telescope-looking, waterlogged sons of Baal are going to save
>everything, right!?  WRONG!  I'm gonna BLOW THEM UP!  :)
>
>*maniacal laughter!*

Don't you like my sentinels? :(

>
>But seriously now, wouldn't they be the first target?

Yes, of course they would, but the mere act of destroying them would alert the
owners of the sentinels that something was up. As such they would still have 
served their purpose. 



Steven Cooper
scooper@kepler.physics.uq.oz.au


Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.science,rec.arts.startrek.tech