Re: Troop Capacity

John spake thusly upon matters weighty: 

> >meters of armor on the planetary defense batteries. Thinking about
> >the vulnerability of their sensor systems, it seems likely that there
> >would be duplicated sensor systems, and/or portable ones (grav
> 
> Here's a nasty premise for you:
> 
> Starships have enough energy emissions from the drive, electronics, 
> weapons, etc to be targetted with passive arrays.  How do you find a 
> passive sensor array?  I mean yeah, with gee-whiz sensors you can find

> out a LOT from orbit, but there is a vast difference between having
the 
> raw data and spending the time to make it usable.

Okay, but it would be fair to say the reason we use active sensors is 
they give us more data, faster. Passive solutions take longer to 
develop and are usually less deterministic. So there is a point in 
having active sensors. And these can get located from orbit or by EW 
fighters or recon missions by SF. Now... once the active sensors for 
PD are down.... then they can go to passive and still be a threat. 
But a lesser one, and perhaps slower to react, giving the invader 
opportunity if he is quick. 

  Remember the ruckus 
> when CIA was accused of not finding out about India's nuclear tests?	

> They had all the evidence they needed on film, and actually delivered 
> to the photogs.  But they didn't interpret it in time.  That's the 
> killer.  If you take film with a 1cm resolution and photograph a small

> continent, anyone wanna speculate on how many hundreds of miles of
film 
> that translates out to?  

With computer power doubling every couple of years, would you care to 
speculate how easy this simple pattern analysis (simple i'd guess 
with the heurestic expert systems employed in 300 years) is even for 
a whole continent? I'm thinking that this might be hard to do now... 
but isn't too hard in the future. So locating ground sensors might be 
a competition of your camouflage system vs. the enemy's terrain AI.  

 
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