Cloaking devices a step closer
- Thread starter Deckerd
- Start date
Why would someone want to cloak a coastline? 
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
What i'd like to know is, what happens when we do get cloak technology. How the heck do you defend against them. A nation could build cloaked space weapons, planes ships the lot and there's nothing could be done against them.
Tachyon Shield,
Very good point.
Not to mention you could also cloak satellites, cameras, and even troops or police (if they were wearing a suit fitted with the equipment to allow a cloak), which would mean the government could also spy on it's own people without anybody able to know or do anything about it too.
CuttingEdge100
Very good point.
Not to mention you could also cloak satellites, cameras, and even troops or police (if they were wearing a suit fitted with the equipment to allow a cloak), which would mean the government could also spy on it's own people without anybody able to know or do anything about it too.
CuttingEdge100
More useless paranoia...
There are pretty easy low-tech ways to defeat a personal cloaking device on a cop. Run from them into a construction site. There's enough dust there for the cop to get very dirty and it will create an outline around him.
If that's not an option, use your ears. Just because you can't see him, doesn't mean you can't hear him.
Try precedent from Ghost in the Shell. There are all kinds of gadgets and devices specialized at penetrating different cloaking devices, but the most effective is always to throw something at a cloaked person/plane/tank/etc so its outline becomes visible.
IOW: countermeasures for optical camouflage can be anything from a $20,000 infrared eyepiece to a fistful of confection sugar. In either case it takes a great deal of creativity both to use and to beat such devices.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Still though, if you're not actually intentionally looking for something like a cloaked plane what are the chances of finding it.
A fleet of cloaked bombers with nukes and you could surprise attack another nation, especially if you are the first country to acquire the cloaking technology and nobody else has it.
Cloaked spies could infiltrate facilities to find out the location of the target countries nuclear weapons.
One thing i'm interested in knowing is this: On films like the invisible man they use infra-red goggles to find him. In reality if someone had a cloaking device which bends EM waves around them would that not also make the person or objects heat signature invisible also?
A fleet of cloaked bombers with nukes and you could surprise attack another nation, especially if you are the first country to acquire the cloaking technology and nobody else has it.
Cloaked spies could infiltrate facilities to find out the location of the target countries nuclear weapons.
One thing i'm interested in knowing is this: On films like the invisible man they use infra-red goggles to find him. In reality if someone had a cloaking device which bends EM waves around them would that not also make the person or objects heat signature invisible also?
There's not much technobabble to understand, really. It's just a really hi-tech form of refraction, the same phenomena which makes a pencil in a glass of water look broken from a side view. The phenomenon, with correct tuning of refractive indices (the property of 'how refractive' something is, basically) could potentially be used to 'bend' light around an object and give the impression to your eye of an unbroken light path, something some optical illusions already rely on.
The trick is creating a material which can do this well enough to hide something from view more permanently and from more angles than a simple 2D optical illusion.
Doesn't need a construction site, a bit of grass would do. An invisible person still makes footprints. Look for shoe sized patches of crushed grass approaching you. A lot of people claim they can 'sense' people in the room with them even if they haven't realised they're there yet - this is because your mind is processing information from all your senses, not just sight. Even air movement, it is believed, can betray a presence in the dark - your touch receptors are sensitive enough to detect it, even if you're not consciously aware of it.
The IR they're emitting would be coming from inside the cloaking material, it's unlikely optics designed to bend outside light around it would also prevent light emitted from within from passing out.
Why wouldn't you be looking for it? Knowing as you do that your enemy has them?
We already have this with SSBN submarines. Only two countries in the world really have them, and both have the ability to nuke any other country in the world into dust without the missiles being traced back to their country of origin.
But even invisible bombers is unnecessary. If someone out there REALLY wants to nuke you, there isn't a damn thing you can do about it even if their bombers are visible.
In Ghost in the Shell different devices had different refraction ranges. Cheap thermoptics could be detected with simple infrared, while the more advanced stuff used by the military was invisible even to that. Togusa once used a weight sensor to detect the presence of two cloaked cyborgs, and in the Stand Alone series all the members of Section 9 use ultrasonic devices to detect cloaked adversaries.
WHY would someone want to cloak a COASTLINE?
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
To confuse illegal immigrants?
It's the only real way to throw off the guidance systems of cruise missiles, which do not home by radar guidance and therefore cannot be jammed. Most of these weapons find their targets by image-recognition of the target area's terrain; if there's no terrain to follow, the usually get lost.
The exception being GPS guided missiles which--I'm sorry to say--are not anywhere near as accurate as advertised (and GPS, unlike terrain-following missiles, CAN be jammed).
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