austenandrews

Re: Estimated date for affordable and portable Augmented Reality?

"Affordable" is a relative term. They can make augmented reality glasses fairly cheaply now, if they want. In fact I'm pretty sure some are already on the market. I expect they're not the highest quality yet, but I'd be surprised if labs across the globe aren't working on them in a bid to grab market share when it breaks open. They'll be huge.

The key will be making them durable, reliable and stylish. I don't think any of those is unfeasible within five or six years. At that point you Bluetooth it to your smart phone or tablet and you're good to go. Make sure Apple gets the first ones to market, so public interest skyrockets, and you're golden.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

That looks like the cover of a Yes album!

Yeah, very Roger Dean. (One wonders if Avatar will renew interest in the man's work.)

Re: Big Freakin' Lasers!

Many people have said that, engineering-wise, lasers will not be preferable to bullets and missiles in the foreseeable future.

Re: The original War Wheel 1917

Reminiscent of the Tsar Tank. Probably would have worked as well, too. Interesting how it was considered a viable possibility at the time.

Re: Is there a semi-plausible way for battlesuits/powered armor to do HVAC?

As I understand it, heating and cooling a person's core can be done fairly efficiently. Generating heat against extreme cold should be straightforward enough, though building machinery that operates in extreme cold is another matter. Same with extreme heat - it'd be hard to build a machine that operates inside a blast furnace, but otherwise a circulating coolant system should be straightforward enough. So you've got those kind of temperature extremes as outside boundaries. Within those limits, I think heavy-duty insulation would largely suffice to protect the wearer against outside extremes, with circulating fluid for heating and cooling inside. I expect in high temps or a vacuum, there will be a much shorter time limit for cooling than there would be for heating against extreme cold.

I believe waterproofing, pressure-proofing and vacuum-proofing should be a "mere" engineering problem with current tech. Is the suit required to work in high pressure? If you use a dense breathable medium against high pressure, a la The Abyss, that may provide a handy medium for temperature control.

The combination of all these features will probably give you something more mech-like than clothes-like. I wouldn't bet money on the various systems functioning reliably if it gets knocked around in a battle.

Re: Space fightercraft in RPGs.

There's no such thing as total ignorance. You can always find someone more ignorant than you previously thought possible.

Re: Jokes

Hero gamers don't work math problems. Hero gamers let math problems work for them.

Re: "Neat" Pictures

What is that, pollen? Seashells? Snack food?

Re: "Neat" Pictures

It's a dually. I bet he takes it mudding.

Re: Space fightercraft in RPGs.

The other thing is that unmanned drones are great - no need for g-limits imposed by a squishy crew' date=' more space per tonne devoted to armament, far more expendable - provided the computer on board is capable of near human level decision making in all possible situations. Because if your opponent can, with [i']manned [/i]attack craft, provide your drone swarm with a situation they can't handle, you lose.

Depends on how far from the mothership the drones go. If they're close enough to make remote control viable, you augment it with AI and it's effectively the same as manned craft.

It's an interesting thought, though. Let's assume an engagement too distant for effective remote control. What might a manned craft do, that an AI-controlled drone couldn't, to gain the advantage over enemy drones? Bearing in mind the diminished capabilities of a craft with life support.

Re: Space fightercraft in RPGs.

I can see small, crewed ships for operations too distant for effective remote control and too complex for AI control. Patrols that cover large volumes of remote space, for instance. Though I'm inclined to think the manned ship would be more of a local command center for remote-controlled drones.

Re: Astronomy Pic of the day: 2 Million Galaxies

So it's mitosis?

Re: "Neat" Pictures

Aftermarket body kits to take your Smart Car from this:

Those are awesome.

Re: Megastructures: Bigger-Than-Worlds

I think you could set a pop density goal = earth density when human pop was around 10 million(about 1/1000 of our current pop density) and still have room for hundreds of quintillions of people.

Or at the present population density, enough humans to approximate the mass of the Earth? That's a whole lot of real estate.

Re: Megastructures: Bigger-Than-Worlds

I'm swearing off of gravity. It's only holding me down.

Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Re: Stealth in Space

Okay, since my previous post was nonconstructive pre-coffee grumbling, allow me to add to the discussion: It occurs to me that we're making the assumption (often considered erroneous, even for modern aerial warfare) that any craft in question will be of the "people riding in a tin can" variety. I wonder if it's not reasonable to presume that unmanned drones would be the norm rather than the exception in a space engagement, and that drones would be easier and cheaper to mass-produce.

Here's a scenario: Your primary weapon is an antimatter payload or whatever, loaded into half a dozen drones, which you send inside a volley of several thousand far cheaper secondary drones with identical signatures and much smaller atomic payloads, plus a few thousand more unarmed drones. They all have a package of AI-guided evasive capacity, ECM, etc. (possibly supported remotely by other drones or whatever - not assuming each drone's defenses are entirely self-contained). You blast out this death swarm and they spread over a huge area, in some configuration designed to tax whatever defenses the target has. The atomic warheads will nickel and dime the target, but the antimatter bombs will destroy it. The attacker's job is to make the primary, secondary and decoy drones look identical. The target's job is to choose which drones to focus its attention on. Given what we know, is this kind of approach (a) scientifically possible, ( technologically feasible and © strategically/tactically sound? (Assume for the moment that alternate delivery methods like smuggling in the antimatter isn't an option.)

Re: Stealth in Space

(OK' date=' stealth has gone out the window[/i'])

The conversation shifts. Is that a horror? People take a "no stealth" stance, and when the topic shifts to drones, they say "Who needs drones!" as if drones weaken their stealth argument. Huh? The reason we shifted to drones is because the "no stealth" argument is so strong. Then interesting drone discussions are met with "But drones aren't stealth!" Response: Facepalm.

You could apply all the drone arguments here to current technology: you could build drones that look just like real planes and use them to protect your planes on high threat missions. The idea has been suggested multiple times in real life. The reason it's never been done in real life, is always the same: by the time you make a drone that looks to contemporary sensors just like a real plane, you've spent enough that you might as well stick weapons in it and call it ... oh, I dunno, Taranis sounds like a good name.

I refer you back to Jhamin's good point about environmental differences. Making something fly in an atmosphere is hard. In space, not nearly as much. Plus the distances and targeting opportunities are orders of magnitude different. When you don't have much stealth in space, the topic shifts to "What else is there?" I apologize if "Nothing, dadgummit!" isn't much of an answer.

Honestly, what's so awful about the concept of decoys that they don't even warrant idle speculation? I'm baffled by the offhand dismissal.

Re: Stealth in Space

The problem isn't just the mass. It is the heat. Any ship with a crew will be radiating heat from the life support system (the temp you have to heat the ship up to in order to keep the crew alive will shine like a beacon in the cold of space). Just engine heat=drone. Engine heat + Life Support heat = ship.

 

And anyway, if these drones are so cheap why are you using them as a distraction? If they can move fast enough to fool an enemy, they are moving fast enough to act as missiles. Just slam them into the target.

These types of arguments truly baffle me. Does it really have to be specified that a drone disguised as a ship would be designed to generate the heat of a ship? Can you honestly not think of a reason drones might be used as decoys instead of missiles? Maybe I'm expecting too much, but dismissals like these read to me like you're not really thinking about the situation.

Re: Stealth in Space

But it isn't necessarily the case when you move to a new medium - where there's almost nothing to hide behind and where transit time is measured in weeks to months.

In such a scenario, it could be useful to create your own environmental conditions around your enemy. When you're at war with someone, fill their skies with decoys, redirected asteroids, dust clouds, false signals, jamming signals, etc. Give them enough to chew on that when you slip in the real thing, the alarm bells don't ring as loud.

Of course the real answer may be to use ordnance that doesn't care if you detect it at the edge of the solar system.

"Hey Floyd, is that a ten-mile-wide comet heading straight for the Earth?"

"Yep. It'll get here in six months."

"What can we do?"

"We have no chance to survive make your time.""

Re: Stealth in Space

It's an interesting question. If I can hover a helicoptor right over a battlefield and make it look like it was five thousand feet in the air, would that be considered stealth technology? Or camouflage? Or something else entirely? I think Ian's idea has merit - if you know an enemy spaceship is out there, but you're not sure if he's a hundred miles away or a hundred thousand, that's a pretty big advantage.

Re: Stealth in Space

I think that austenandrews' point was that you could "fake" mass' date=' size and thrust by sending fake data at the signals so that your decoys didn't have to be as massive and complicated as your actual ship, since if they were, there'd be no point in having decoys.[/quote']

Right.

 

I agree with you that it doesn't seem at all likely to work, since, as noted you'd have to know not only where every sensor platform was, but what it was monitoring at any given time.

Correct, it would only work if you had that kind of intel. You wouldn't use it otherwise. So it's probably not going to work against an entire developed system's sensor array. It would be more suited against individual ships or small stations. In any case, as noted above, decoys are transitory feints that aren't intended to stand up to prolonged scrutiny. If they're effective enough to make the enemy commit resources against them in the second or two required to get data from more remote sensors, they've done their job.

 

not to mention that if you have information bearing FTL transmissions you'd be able to watch your enemy's reaction to your actions prior to actually making them and then make your battle plans based on that, which makes my brain hurt to just think about it.

Has anyone written a story like this? I think you could hammer out a workable tactical system, given time. It's mind-bending because it's unfamiliar, rather than illogical.

 

*of course if we have FTL spaceships, then we're in the rubber science zone anyway, so really, I have no problems with "cloaking systems" or massless decoys - you could produce decoys by making multiple planned entries to the system and then hiding among the echoes generated by your Schrodinger field

Love it!

Re: Stealth in Space

But it would only work if you knew where every sensor was' date=' ahead of time - meaning that you already have acheived total superiority in terms of targetting. How you manage to locate all the sensing platforms without active scanning - which means turning yourself into giant beacon and shouting "Here I am!" - and how you manage it without lighting yourself up for the other sensors (since you'll need to hit every sensor simultaneously, otherwise you'll look anomalous to the system) .....[/quote']

Sensors don't get stealth either, right? Anyway intel is what spies are for. If all that data is coordinated, it's cataloged somewhere. Heck, you might be getting real-time feeds, the same as your enemy.

 

I'm thinking it would be much more feasible to simply build a decoy the same as your actual ship.

Doesn't scale if you're talking about massive power generators.

 

And of course that still wouldn't give you stealth - it'd just make it harder to target your ship. But if you can already target every single sensor they have simultaneously .... what do you need decoys for, again? Just knock 'em out. You're going to be announcing your presence anyway.

Decoys are temporary feints, part of some larger tactical or strategic plan. I don't think it's difficult to imagine a scenario where such a scheme could be useful.

Re: Star Wars Hero: Advice please...

Here is TheQuestionMan's impressive compilation of Star Hero conversions. Much Star Wars is on the list.

Re: Stealth in Space

What do you mean by decoy beams? I'm imagining it like shining a flashlight in someone's eyes to blind them.

In short, if you shine a beam of light at me in the right way, it'll look like you're shining a much more powerful light in all directions.

A sensor recognizes a spaceship by actively or passively detecting various flavors of radiation emitted, reflected, refracted or obfuscated by said ship. The sum of these signals comprise a "beam" with a certain signature that strikes the sensor. A real ship will show such a signature from any direction. That's why it would take a lot of energy for a decoy to mimic a real ship's powerful engines. But if you only have to send that energy in a small beam to a sensor, the energy requirement is far less. That way you can mimic a fleet of ships without having to expend an equivalent amount of energy.

Assuming' date=' of course, you already know (1) where a large enough number of those sensors are ahead of time, and (2) the spectral sensitivity and other response characteristics of those sensors. I think that's sort of like assuming you've already belled the cat.[/quote']

Yep. That just means it's hard, not impossible. With the right intel, you could pull off amanojaku's decoy scheme without actually building an expensive fleet of decoy ships.

 

"Assuming you've already belled the cat" sounds like a "no true Scotsman" argument. If it works, it works.

Re: Stealth in Space

This isn't impossible' date=' just very expensive. If the enemy's passive sensors are any good at all, you'll need the decoys to have exactly the same emissions profile as the spacecraft they're supposed to imitate. Sure, you can create a false radar contact with a small decoy that looks convincing, but its engine output for a given acceleration will be much lower than a full-size spacecraft, which gives away the game. So in the end, the decoy needs to have similar size and power output to the craft it's imitating to be convincing.[/quote']

Not if you can target the sensors you want to fool. Even if there are a million sensors, shooting decoy beams at each one will take only a fraction of the energy of mimicking the energy signature in all directions. You could bounce power beams between them, so they wouldn't even need to generate it all themselves.