RE-(FT)ECM, never leave home without it

Laserlight wrote

>> I`ve read, passive sensors usually out range active sensors.

>Of course, if one side is using active.  If you bounce a signal off a
>target and get a usable response, the target will be getting your
>signal, four times as strong as the bounce you're reading.

>If you're both using passive, then passive may be shorter range than
>active.  I assume here that some degree of effective stealthing is
>possible, although I haven't come up with a plausable way to hide the
>ship's IR or thrust plume signatures.

>No.  If the target is X distance away, it's still that distance away
>whether the signal being returned from it is a reflection or its own
>noise.

<snip>

>The rest of this sounds pretty reasonable.  Of course it's 1:30am
too...

What I`m trying to say is that the commander of your fleet will only
have a
limited time to react to infomation collated by the sensors on the ships
before giving orders. If you are using active sensors (e.g.-radar), you
have
to wait for the energy pulse to reach the target and return, where as,
if
you are using passive sensors, you are just using the emissions from the
enemy ships to detect them, so they only have to travel from the enemy
to
your ship, not there and back.

I did have a idea for the stealth built into the hulls of millitary
ships
after the mail was sent, and it goes along the lines of that civillian
hulled ships have a emmision signiture size of their mass per 25 mass
(i.e.-1-25=1, 26-50=2, etc, twice millitary sizes).

Also, I forgot to include that when using area effect ECM, you need to
roll
to defeate the area ECM first, before you cen scan any ship within it`s
effect radius, and then maybe defeate any individual ECM mounted on the
individual ship your scanning.

Does anybody else detect DS2 influences in these rules, but instead of
building stealth into the vehicle, you use ECM systems, which can be
defeated with sensors.

BIF
"Yorkshire born, yorkshire bred,
strong in arms, thick in head"