Re: Sensors

Ryan Gill wrote:

> Further, just relying on passive sensors to recognize a
> vessel will lead to funny incidents of "seeing" a harmless
> tanker when in reality it is a CVA dressed up with the same
> active emmissions.
>
> The above has happened in exercises where a very large CVN
> (Nimitz class) was dressed up by the crew with all of the
> correctly placed running lights and apparently masquraded as
> a tanker in civil lanes in the Med. The Red force guys
> waltzed right by it and didn't think to really check her
> out. "Port side watch reports sighting a large tanker, very
> well..." How do you loose a Nimitz Class CVN in the Med?
> Very sneakily....

I had heard that it was the opposite.  The plucky brits (possibly
aussies) lit
up their vessel as a cruise liner and sailed into the middle of a CVBG
(which
couldn't warn off the "civvie" vessel without violating EMCON). [Naval
exercises
are never over before the CVN is sunk]

>
>
> If a force gets very careful about how much they emit and
> what they emit, they can get very "dark" to prying eyes. Add
> to that in FT we're talking about using lots of whisker
> lasers for close by data links, ranging data and lots of
> telescopes I suspect.

EMCON in FT is exacerbated by the problems of maintaining cohesion after
a
jump.  Everybody's FTL drive being slightly different combined with the
fact
that an infinitesimal error multiplied by several light-years is
probably
several AU.  Unless there is some method of detecting FTL travel at FTL
speeds,
invasions are probably on the lines of jump for a point that is several
light-days away from the target, find everybody else, get together and
do a
short, in-system jump that will only have a small error, so the force
will
arrive in some semblance of formation. (assuming that maneuver in
hyperspace is
impossible)

>
>
> Obviously when you light some one up with beams, or fire a
> missile salvo at them, you've probably just announced for
> all around that you've got "a Leica Astrosystems Ranging
> Laser and Hellseye Mark6 Beam Battery" or "a
> GEC-Marconi-Lockheed Aerospace Mark 23 Fire control radar
> and a Thiokol-British Aerospace Dynamics Lightingstrike
> Salvo Missile launcher".
>
> All of this goes out the window if you can tell the type of
> plant a ship has just from its use of a captive singularity
> irregardless of the drive using thrust or not. Passive
> gravitometric emmissions could tell the size and probably
> the field used to keep it from hitting the reactor sides and
> making the ship go boom. If its just a fancy Fusion plant
> with a big magnetic bottle you're going to have to get a lot
> closer to tell if its a Big Merchant or a Big Warship, by
> then you can probably read the hull number with your
> Graflex, Inc Catadioptric Telescopes attached to your fire
> control systems. This all assumes that the target at 48MU
> you're looking at don't thrust at 4MU/sec/sec with enough
> engine effulx for a Foch Super Carrier making it
> obvious its not a 150 Mass bulk carrier).

Not that difficult (depending on how much wizardry is available). 
Passive
infrared will give a hull temperature and neutrino spectroscopy will
give the
powerplant output.  These two pieces of information correlate to reveal
the hull
surface.  It is more difficult if it is not radiating its heat
uniformly, but
not as difficult as not radiating heat into space.

>
>
> So I guess the question is, what kind of drives are they?
> Thats the first thing.
>
> Second is how much passive emmissions do the ships give off?
> You know something is there. How far beyond 54" do you know?
> (TK drive emmissions are another thing, boy this long range
> sparky stuff gets tricky...)
>

That calculation would require specific scientific units applied to
ships' mass,
turn length, and the length of an MU.