I was hoping he'd go into the particulars of mass effect's stealth system or something more detailed.
Sounds like someone wants to get raided by an alien race that uses technologically undetctable invisible shuttlepods that attach to the hull
One thing about the Puddle Jumper is that being actually invisible IS an advantage a lot of the time, since they have to land the ships. That and they can be used to follow people on the ground who you can't track with sensors, or move people into position without being seen. All of which are done regularly on SG: Atlantis.
[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;52992430]One thing about the Puddle Jumper is that being actually invisible IS an advantage a lot of the time, since they have to land the ships. That and they can be used to follow people on the ground who you can't track with sensors, or move people into position without being seen. All of which are done regularly on SG: Atlantis.[/QUOTE]
Yeah iirc a lot of the puddle jumpers invisibility was used for when they were on a planet.
Another usage of invisibility in star trek is to uphold the prime directive and ensure that no one visually spots them.
The prime directive itself frequently ended up being a somewhat questionable philosophy but that is a different matter
Another possible scenario is someone being unable to detect the ship through any other sensors yet having vastly superior visual detection systems that can rapidly scan and magnify the entire surrounding area.
[QUOTE=genkaz92;52992438]
Another possible scenario is someone being unable to detect the ship through any other sensors yet having vastly superior visual detection systems that can rapidly scan and magnify the entire surrounding area.[/QUOTE]
That's what I was thinking when watching it. He assumes all visible stealth tech would be to prevent people looking out a window, but we're getting pretty intelligent visual detection already, not counting what would exist in a sci-fi story. Though it does hold true if there's no light obviously, which I assume is a lot of the time in space.
[QUOTE=Firo;52992474]That's what I was thinking when watching it. He assumes all visible stealth tech would be to prevent people looking out a window, but we're getting pretty intelligent visual detection already, not counting what would exist in a sci-fi story. Though it does hold true if there's no light obviously, which I assume is a lot of the time in space.[/QUOTE]
They could do what data did in that romulan detection episode and do a particle/emition pulse and have a device which monitors how it bounces around. And if the federation/stargate/mass effect dudes stumble upon a ship that is advanced enough to hide from a particle pulse then they are probably not in for a good time anyway
He mentions the distances involved, but didn't really touch upon the speeds that come about as a result of those distances.
Space combat as it is described in most scifi settings is more akin to conventional dog fighting. The reality would probably be considerably different. Fuck the ray guns. Can your shields/armor/whatever withstand a projectile moving at a third of the speed of light?
The kinetic energy involved in traversing the distances of space is nothing short of gargantuan. Hitting grains of sand is already a problem for our satellites, and those are only moving at orbital speeds of a few dozen kilometers a second. Interstellar vehicles would be moving at a couple hundred [i]thousand[/i] kilometers per second.
Visually detecting targets moving at those kinds of speeds is hard enough when they aren't hundreds of thousands and millions of kilometers away. When you start factoring in the distances, and all the relativistic nonsense on top of the time delays, you're probably spending more time looking for the byproducts of of a ship's passing than the actual ship itself because it's easier to track.
[QUOTE=S31-Syntax;52992412]I was hoping he'd go into the particulars of mass effect's stealth system or something more detailed.[/QUOTE]
Basically the stealth system on the Normandy is just giant heatsinks to reduce infrared signature. It pulls itself around by asdfghjkl mass fields. Once it's in a safe place it discharges all the heat build-up.
I always assumed that in Star trek they're not just looking through some window on the ship. Like they always say "entering visual range", which is way further than you could see with the naked eye, and then say "on screen", implying that they have external cameras that they can feed to the main screen on the ship. So I thought the implication was that "visual range" is not human visual range, but just what their telescope cameras are able to see. The only tech needed to visually observe a ship decently far away is a bunch of telescopes with cameras on them that can rapidly scan space in 360 degrees in the horizontal and maybe 90 degrees in the vertical (the Galaxy is a disc after all), and the computer processing power to determine whether a feed contains a ship on it. It would require some intense tech but it does take place in the 24th century after all.
I think the premise of the video is a bit misguided. In all sci-fi that I've heard of cloaking devices typically entail invisibility to all instruments; that's their primary function.
Ship hulls becoming see-through is for the most part a visual short-hand signaling to the audience (who are observing through the close-proximity fourth wall rather rather than a camera or viewport hundreds of kilometers away) that the vessel has has disappeared from sensors.
I really hate it when people raise hypotheticals in sci fi like it was ultra hard-science (everything gets reduced to interplanetary missile volleys), along with only ever setting the scenario as an active combat altercation happening in the dead of nowhere at random
besides the obvious "long range missiles are easy to intercept so you need to get closer to surprise foes or use ballistics or whatever", there's so many situations where visual stealth could play a key role to missions and story instead of treating this as a shitty pvp game where you're just there to blow each other up
[editline]e[/editline]
and of course the raw storytelling factor in the above post, where it's more a cue for the audience to understand than anything else. Space battles that are small ships fighting like wwii planes launched from carriers is also largely a chosen method of action because it's flat out fun, and easy to understand based on realworld knowledge
Yeah, it could be sort of difficult to portray it in a truly sci fi fashion without it being either incomprehensible or extremely boring. Similarly to how it's really difficult to come up with non humanoid alien races for the same reason.
The same issue also inversely affects the genre of sci fi horror and how it is difficult to make something comprehensible and technological scary.
[QUOTE=Im Crimson;52992593]I think the premise of the video is a bit misguided. In all sci-fi that I've heard of cloaking devices typically entail invisibility to all instruments; that's their primary function.
Ship hulls becoming see-through is for the most part a visual short-hand signaling to the audience (who are observing through the close-proximity fourth wall rather rather than a camera or viewport hundreds of kilometers away) that the vessel has has disappeared from sensors.[/QUOTE]
Or you could with it the Mass Effect way explain why they are "invisible"
[video]https://youtu.be/hJLBVyz4GBs[/video]
[QUOTE=Zephyrs;52992538]He mentions the distances involved, but didn't really touch upon the speeds that come about as a result of those distances.
Space combat as it is described in most scifi settings is more akin to conventional dog fighting. The reality would probably be considerably different. Fuck the ray guns. Can your shields/armor/whatever withstand a projectile moving at a third of the speed of light?
The kinetic energy involved in traversing the distances of space is nothing short of gargantuan. Hitting grains of sand is already a problem for our satellites, and those are only moving at orbital speeds of a few dozen kilometers a second. Interstellar vehicles would be moving at a couple hundred [i]thousand[/i] kilometers per second.
Visually detecting targets moving at those kinds of speeds is hard enough when they aren't hundreds of thousands and millions of kilometers away. When you start factoring in the distances, and all the relativistic nonsense on top of the time delays, you're probably spending more time looking for the byproducts of of a ship's passing than the actual ship itself because it's easier to track.[/QUOTE]
I mean, yeah they friggen can. Just about every piece of media tends to say that kinetic based weapons are pretty devastating if you don't have shielding. Guess what, they all have shielding rated for VERY VERY VERY FAST MOVING KINETIC OBJECTS. Mass Effect explictly states that even the simplest guns have an actually ability to cause massive damage, but due to Element Zero it doesn't happen. Other media has in simple terms, for Star Wars. Very fast kinetic based weapons have little effect on shields because they're designed to prevent high speed collisions. In Return of Jedi had Admiral Piett had forward power to their shields, the A-Wing would've never crashed into the bridge. More recently in The Last Jedi [sp]The Supremacy and half the fleet would've been fine had they actually had their actual shielding up, which would've mitigated the damage from the hyperspace ram. They didn't, because they never expected that to happen.[/sp]
Yes, people who write Sci-fi thought about these situations and have in-universe lore explaining it.
[QUOTE=RG4ORDR;52992648]I mean, yeah they friggen can. Just about every piece of media tends to say that kinetic based weapons are pretty devastating if you don't have shielding. Guess what, they all have shielding rated for VERY VERY VERY FAST MOVING KINETIC OBJECTS. Mass Effect explictly states that even the simplest guns have an actually ability to cause massive damage, but due to Element Zero it doesn't happen. Other media has in simple terms, for Star Wars. Very fast kinetic based weapons have little effect on shields because they're designed to prevent high speed collisions. In Return of Jedi had Admiral Piett had forward power to their shields, the A-Wing would've never crashed into the bridge. More recently in The Last Jedi [sp]The Supremacy and half the fleet would've been fine had they actually had their actual shielding up, which would've mitigated the damage from the hyperspace ram. They didn't, because they never expected that to happen.[/sp]
Yes, people who write Sci-fi thought about these situations and have in-universe lore explaining it.[/QUOTE]
They think of the impacts, but my point is more that they don't think of how absurdly fucking hard it is to track something moving at relativistic speeds. I didn't make that very clear. Even if the object is emitting insane amounts of energy (IE it's colliding with lots of stray dust particles resulting in gamma ray bursts), everything we know about physics say that it's going to be incredibly hard to track something moving at relativistic speeds. Even tracking the particle trails it leaves behind is difficult, and that's just for stuff 'nearby' in light terms.
The stealth tech in Mass Effect, which is about as "real" as anything we currently can even model, is only going to be relevant in close quarters where the speeds and distances are considerably lower. Landing sneakily on a planet? Approaching some space station/asteroid installation? Yeah, makes sense. Hide your signature and you can poke around without being detected. But for screaming around between the stars? Not really relevant. The time delays alone make proper stealth pretty worthless when you are moving fast.
On the other hand, reality is pretty boring. Nobody wants to play a game or watch a movie about 4D chess where you have to plot out time dilation's and delays in 3D space, often hours in advance. So it's conveniently ignored for the exact same reasons that explosions happening miles away instantly make noise. Because reality is not what you expect or want.
One thing I always thought about was how realistic cloaking devices always seem to just store the heat by some method instead of radiating it away from whatever is trying to detect you. It should theoretically be possible to collimate your IR emissions so that you still appear cold from the perspective of the enemy. If you are going full realism its also likely that enemy ships will be more or less in the orbital plane of whatever is nearby, so if you emit your heat 90 degrees to that it is unlikely anyone will see it.
[QUOTE=Zephyrs;52993314]Approaching some space station/asteroid installation? Yeah, makes sense. Hide your signature and you can poke around without being detected. But for screaming around between the stars? Not really relevant. The time delays alone make proper stealth pretty worthless when you are moving fast.[/QUOTE]
why do people keep positing situations where you're not gonna care about stealth anyways
in what media are people trying to use stealth while doing anything other than approaching close things sneakily or trying to evade a ship that's close enough and moving along with you for an engagement already
[QUOTE=genkaz92;52992626]Yeah, it could be sort of difficult to portray it in a truly sci fi fashion without it being either incomprehensible or extremely boring. Similarly to how it's really difficult to come up with non humanoid alien races for the same reason.
The same issue also inversely affects the genre of sci fi horror and how it is difficult to make something comprehensible and technological scary.[/QUOTE]
Watch the expanse. Some of the most terrifying space combat I've ever seen. It heavily leverages newtonian physics (to the extent that budget allows) and hard sci fi without ever being boring. Quite the opposite, the adjacency to reality makes the show much more engaging.
Probably my favorite show on TV.
Also the plot is heavily influenced by the use of stealth tech in space.
[QUOTE=dai;52993495]why do people keep positing situations where you're not gonna care about stealth anyways
in what media are people trying to use stealth while doing anything other than approaching close things sneakily or trying to evade a ship that's close enough and moving along with you for an engagement already[/QUOTE]
What are we defining close as though? Close in space terms can mean hundreds of thousands of kilometers. In an interstellar scifi/fantasy setting close can be light years, sometimes thousands of them.
Shows like the expanse constrain things to a single solar system, and they keep things slow enough that it can take days/weeks to get between planets. That gives higher density and allows for much slower and closer interactions between ships.
In a universe like star trek it makes no sense because the ships are moving out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and frequently doing so at relativistic velocities. Oh, two enemy ships just happen to bump into each other on the outskirts of an oort cloud? Sorry, but no. The probabilities of that are simply infinitesimally small, even around a system populated by billions. The probabilities of it happening every couple of days are functionally zero. That doesn't mean that it can't be good television/whatever variety of media. It just means that you need to come up with ever more contrived reasons to justify running into enemies so frequently.
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