Balance of Terror unbalanced - the Romulans never had any chance

I believe what Timo is suggesting, perhaps inelegantly, is the equivalent of a ship having suspending a sort of umbrella towards the target and trying to dispose of heat/waste energy in the opposite direction. I'm not saying that would work.

 

^It wouldn't; one would be able to see the energy dump via its effect on the local interstellar medium or stellar wind. IOW, a nice cold spot surrounded by a nice warm glow.

Thanks for the bull's eye.

 

The keyword there is "until". Space stealth would be much like submarines diving: there would be practical limits to it. Engineering decisions would then define which resource runs out first; it might well be crew patience or lifespan.

Again, you design up to the specs you need. If stealth is important for you, you dedicate the appropriate resources. And no, the medium needn't be ejected in my ship's shadow - I can also eject it inside an initially background-cold shell so that it only develops a heat signature some distance away from me, at which point it has also maneuvered to create disinformation about its origins.

If I'm invisible, that's not a factor. But ejecting an object from the ship will not result in any momentum transfer unless I want it to happen: the heat capsule may be of a swim-out type just as well. There are two ways to do that: eject propellant from the pellet in the shadow of the ship (it takes special ballistics care to accomplish that without hitting the ship), or eject propellant that is stealthy in itself. The latter isn't too difficult to engineer: just fractalize the whole procedure so that the pellet ejects further cold-to-the-exterior pellets etc.

But that's what you need perfect stealth for. In real-world combat, it's not a defensive measure, but an offensive one. Low-observability is worthless as a defensive tactic unless you know where the enemy is and what he is doing.

As for freefall-only stealth, that's again a matter of defining what you propellant is going to be like. Non-emitting propellant mass is always a distinct possibility. But let's remember that rockets cannot fight in aggressively maneuvering space engagements today - they are mere toys, insufficient for the job. Any future Newtonian drive will have to come up with new tricks, and stealth may be something considered worth pursuing there. Or then not.

There's no "space" today. It's all speculative. But there was no "air" yesterday, and no "underwater". Engineers went through hoops to create wonder machines that sacrifice unbelievable things to make the unthinkable possible. They did this because they knew very well that there was no natural law stopping them from doing so - just as with space stealth.

Absolutely not - what I pointed out was that the Star Trek fiction need no be considered at all in the context of this sub-discussion. (Sorry about that!)

Well, airborne stealth was possible until about six months ago. Today, it's not. Two years from now, it will again be. And so forth. The engineers know the limitations involved, and they know what the enemy is capable of, so they never need to fight absolutes.

Space war would come a bit closer to fighting absolutes (say, three Kelvin and all that). But the enemy could still be fooled, until he could not, and again could - as there are no theoretical obstacles to it. Only practical ones. And stealth is one of the least challenging aspects of space warfare! Designing a sensor suite that can detect non-stealthy enemy vessels is still well beyond our capabilities (say, we have no idea how to build a system that could watch the whole 4pi angle for tiny heat signatures or radar echoes), so it will be a long, long time before we will have to worry about three Kelvin...

Timo Saloniemi

 

It was in "Schisms" that it was ultimately expanded into "a whole continuum of other places parallel to ours". Basically, if you go deeper into subspace, you just find other places for humanoids to exist in. And they aren't all that different from the plain planes of non-subspace existence, either - Riker can still swagger about while immersed in deep subspace... (Perhaps he does it at warp six thousand, though?)

In other TNG/DS9/VOY contexts, "phase space" displays the same properties, but appears theoretically distinct.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I'm bowing out of the stealth in space discussion. It's like arguing with a Flat-Earther.

Have fun, guys!

--Alex

 

Which means only that the cloak can't be maintained indefinitely, not that it can't be done at all.

 

Well, it is pointless if you don't enjoy it. "My pretend reality is better than yours." and such.

 

FWIW, a "flat earther" would stick to what his grandfather believed in, would discredit phenomena and applications that were merely implied or allowed by theory but not yet manifest in his immediate surroundings, and would not be open to speculation and expansion of worldview... It is left as an exercise to the viewer how this applies to the stealth-in-space discussion.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Fighter nozzles are made to reduce heat these days.

 

Totally irrelevant to space combat. The theater of operation in an atmosphere close to the warm ground (relatively speaking) is in no way similar to cold hard vacuum with no horizon in sight.

--Alex

 

Use the transporter to beam it into space as dispersed particles, better still store it in the pattern buffer until you're (reasonably) sure there no enemy about.

 

Please don't misunderstand me. I'm arguing against stealth in actual future space-combat scenarios, not in Star Trek.

In the context of the show, cloaking technology works splendidly and somehow, the issues of heat have been magically and quietly dealt with. It's a fantasy. A very enjoyable fantasy. With warp drive, and transporters, and artificial gravity, and aliens that are somehow so human you can casually interbreed with them.

So, IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SHOW, I have no problem whatsoever with stealth. It's established and that's A-okay. No sense getting too hung up on the physics of one little detail and letting it ruin the fun of the fantasy.

But in real life, it's a fundamental impossibility. That's all I'm saying.

--Alex

 

And that's where you are fundamentally wrong.

Although merely fundamentally. There are all sorts of practical hurdles with space stealth, just as there have been all sorts of hurdles with all sorts of military technologies (because military technologies exploit the edge for the slight advantages it provides). But the argument that thermodynamics would "fundamentally" prevent space stealth or even make it particularly demanding are utter nonsense. Vacuum is the most benign environment for hiding heat (or, more exactly, the whereabouts and origins of heat) known to the fighting man today. And conversely, space is among the more demanding opponents to sensors - free of clutter, perhaps (until one applies countermeasures), but vast and full of "blink and you miss it" tactical opportunities.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Yes the more magical Trek makes its tech, the harder it is justify the exclusions to that tech. Why is the method used to detect the ship in STVI not viable to detect cloaked vessels later in TNG. Why can't sensors target the centre of gravity distortions created by the Romulan power source? They can scan life forms at a sub-atomic level at a distance of 80,00km (or several light years in NuTrek) so why can't they track the movement of hydrogen and other gases disturbed in the Romulan wake? The more you make sensors able to detect stuff accurately and instantaeously, the harder you have to work (as nerds) to explain away why they suddenly can't work. The writers just cough and cite a wizard did it and wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

 

The big question is, why did it work in the first place? That is, why did Chang's ship have a tailpipe? Submarines make do without one, at least for the periods they wish to remain unobserved.

What gravity distortions? And in any case, even the most primitive cloaks mask gravity somehow, or else generic mass-indicating techniques (whatever those are in Trek) would reveal the presence of an invisible starship.

These are good questions individually (this being the best of them), but the cloak may well be a catchall answer. Indeed, it probably has to be. It's a generic "not-being-here" device that leaves things undisturbed, except when it's malfunctioning, running at the edge of its performance, or immersed in a demanding environment. "Empty" space oughtn't count as "demanding", because that's the very environment the cloak was designed to work in; its inventors wouldn't have launched series production until they had empty-space performance down pat.

Then again, the Romulans apparently did jump the gun in "BoT", what with Spock so effortlessly observing them turning and whatnot, despite the supposed invisibility.

Timo Saloniemi

 

This bugs me in TNG:When the Bough Breaks, in which an entire planet is cloaked by "bend[ing] light rays around the planet's countour."

Even today, we find exoplanets not by observing the light reflecting off them, but by observing the effects of their gravity, which causes the stars they orbit to wobble. Bending light rays around a planet wouldn't hide the planet from astronomers, but would starve the planet of sunlight and kill everything.

 

Indeed, it's a major minus there that the writers go so explicit on how they think the cloak works... It's not just a case of there being much more going on than we're told, but also what we are being told being flat out wrong.

We should note that Trek displays rather complete mastery over gravity: Earth ships from the 1990 have onboard gravity systems that work without a hitch forever on minimal power, providing each deck with Earth-like pull, and their propulsion defies everything Newton believed in. It might not take long to refine this control into systems that mask mass signatures, and/or indeed bend light with sheer pull of gravity. Although we never quite learn what fictional technologies the cloaks we (don't!) see are really based on - e.g. Spock's light-bending doubletalk from "BoT" is mere speculation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

This was the checks and balances of having a cloaking device in Star Trek. The enemy possess it but their shields would be minimal and their hull would not be as strong. Another cool nod to this element was from Star Trek VI with a ship which fires while cloaked.

Just imagine Ronald D. Moore and the rest of the creatively bankrupt writers from DS9 handling the classic Balance of Terror??? They would've invented armor hulls and all sorts of nonsense to avoid pure drama.

 

Hmh? DS9 did a better submarine combat show, "Starship Down". Pseudo-technologically and pseudo-scientifically better, that is. This wasn't the episode where they did better drama than TOS, alas (that was more or less all the other DS9 eps!).

Timo Saloniemi

 

The irony is that Chang's ship didn't have a tail pipe. Look at the damn thing - nothing at all looks like an exhaust.