More EW, the celebration continues!

Heat masking: 
----------------------
Several methods. I use superconducting wire. I refrigerate my hull. I
suck
the excess heat into my ship and every so often drop out an insulated,
stealth coated trashcan which contains (under the stealth coat and
insulation) one freakin pile of heat in a what is essentially a
disposable
heat sink. You can't see it (it's encased in an insulated case) and you
can't see the ship (same deal). Eventually, your insulated case will
heat
and your trashcan will be visible, but you'll be long gone potentially. 

Or maybe in 2183, I suck up all that heat and have a near 100% efficient
way
to turn it back into power I can use elsewhere - store the energy from
heat
in my beam capacitors for example.  

Not sufficient over weeks of operations, but for the times where one
goes to
high readiness/alert and high EMCON levels, maybe quite sufficient. 

And how easy do we think it is to pick out diffuse radiation of heat
from
the background with a passive thermal sensor? How long does it take
scanning
the region of the ship to detect it? I'd say a while... and there is a
lot
of sky to scan if you don't know where to start. 

Drones
---------
UAVs for FT. I need a system to go active in order to lock on real hard
on a
target. But when I spark it up, I say "shoot me" with a neon sign.
Solution?
Drones. I launch my scan-drone (passive). When I need a firing solution,
I
bring it active (it links to me via either a neutrino comm system or a
laser
- neither of which is detectable by emission unless you are in line of
transmission AFAIK) and I get the fire control solution without risking
my
ship. You fire, you kill my drone. Oh woe is me. I have twenty or a
hundred
or a thousand of them. Okay, if you think sensors are expensive, it
might
not be cheap BUT it will be cheaper than losing my BB. And then this
data is
(by similar hard to intercept/detect link) spread around the fleet of
passive 'silent' ships. 

General
-----------

Strikes me that this style of hide-and-find warfare makes finding other
ships (especially with passive systems) a product of 1) an emission on
their
part, 2) good luck on the searchers part, or 3) lots of time. A hint (ie
some tactical guess as to where to look) might give you a much better
chance
of #2 and cut #3 to reasonable levels. It is one area where tactical
insight
or a lucky guess could really affect the battle. And sensor drones would
make for an entirely interesting (but somewhat un-FTish) space combat
game. 

-----------------------------------------------------
alea iacta et pessimo	|  Thomas Barclay
resulto factura est	|  Software Specialist 
------------------------|  Defence Systems
ave, Caesar!		|  xwave solutions
te morituiri salutimas	|  www.xwavesolutions.com
			|  v: (613) 831 2018 x 3008
-----------------------------------------------------