@Joe Shumo I've never worked security and I know better than that. Always, ALWAYS check, double check, cross-check and double cross-check anyone who wants to look at anything you keep secured for any reason. And even then, they could just be casing the joint for a later pen test.
@@ww8251 A thing like being the guy making coffee or delivering pizza either works flawlessly or gets you caught instantly. That's because it's meant to be someone doing something that nobody would want to stop, but it might be that nobody would ever be allowed to do that where you are. (For instance, it would absolutely not work for getting into any sort of proper archival storage.)
Unironically true. A ship fitted with (fake) maintenance equipment and cargo containers would likely go unnoticed until it opens one of its containers and boom, it's full of missiles.
The best stealth is honesty. The ship is exactly what it says it is, its cargo manifest and passenger list are accurate, it's not deviating from its properly-filed flight plan, and the crew has no ulterior motive or information that could give anything away. But... A fingertip-sized rock (concealing a tiny solar-powered snooping device) fell off the ship at specific point in its trajectory, and coasted off towards its target, to be retrieved months or years later, by an entirely different ship. A pin-sized card carrying terabytes of very illegal data is suspended in a grimy grease smear behind a life support hose, waiting to be retrieved by a cleaning robot in the hangar. A chip full of digital minds designed for covert software intrusion was wired into a circuit board in the ship's refueling system, waiting to be activated by an unsuspecting dockworker. Malware in the ship's guidance computer is waiting to spin the ship's main engine exhaust towards an unsuspecting habitat, as soon as it gets close enough.
As someone studying CyberSecurity, this is 100% my fear of what will happen when we live in space... There's no livable atmosphere to fall back on if our tech fails
@@MiningwithPudding well... yes, but assuming you're not stupidly automated and centralized, it's not an issue. For instance, outside doors should only open with a local confirmation. There should be multiple pressure hulls between the exterior and the living space. Each living space should have it's own, locally controlled, life support systems, and there should be emergency pressure cabins with it's own life support system and multiple EVA suits inside. If, somehow, someone manages to kill main life support AND depressurize the habitat, you just fall back on your local support shelter (remember, it will take time for all of the atmosphere to evacuate the habitat) throw on your EVA suits, shut the doors and open the pressurized oxygen bottles. Then you can fix the life support system in shirt sleeves.
Issac - "Sometimes you want the enemy to know what you are doing." Reminds me of Dr. Strangelove - "The Whole Point of the Doomsday Machine is Lost if You Keep it a Secret!" dialog.
Agreed. They HAVE to know your super weapons exist in order to fear them. If they don't fear you because they don't know you can destroy them, then they will not capitulate to your demands. Sure, a surprise nuking sounds fun. However, if they knew you had nukes, you probably could have saved your plutonium for more important targets that still refuse to "see reason." That sort of thing.
@@laikkelynneross2800 I was playing around with a story idea of a power faking a new super weapon to frighten an enemy only to inspire them to actually make one themselves, possibily with the twist of that being the intention because stealing the plans would be faster and cheaper than doing it themselves.
Cartoons have taught us that anyone trying to approach stealthily is always accompanied with 'stealthy, sneaky, approach music'. Our detectors need only listen out for that music and they're busted.
Even so, we should still let the inconspicuous man with a mustache and thick glasses by. He's only here to perform routine maintenance on the habitats.
A couple things that I think are not stressed enough in most discussions of "stealth": 1. You do not need "stealth" in all directions to be useful in most situations. You only need to reduce your signature in the direction of the detectors you want to elude. You can be bright as a flare at other angles if there are no adversary detectors in that direction. 2. Your stealth does need to render you completely invisible to be useful, only lower your signature enough that you are not noticed before you get "close enough". This could be close enough for your spy sensors, close enough to launch an attack, or close enough that the adversary cannot launch an effective intercept before you move out their engagement envelope.
I keep seeing these "there's no stealth in space" discussions that all depend on lines of reasoning that would also negate stealth in air combat. - Your enemy has satellites that can see everything - Your heat signature is bright enough to be detected from millions of kilometers - Active sensors can pick up scattered returns - You still can't hide from a visual search All of which basically ignores the entire point of stealth aircraft. They aren't supposed to be undetectable, they're supposed to be just hard enough to detect that by the time you actually see them they're already in a good firing position, ready to kill you. Modern submarines and stealth aircraft work exactly this way: you can't actually "hide" a submarine from from any decently modern sonar, but you CAN avoid being noticed long enough to get into torpedo range. Ballistic missile subs have it even easier: American surveillance systems could absolutely locate every Soviet submarine in the Atlantic, but not all of them at once, and not at all times, and which means there's no guarantee that you know where all of them are. This is also the theory behind road mobile ICBMs: your satellites can probably locate them, given enough time, but if one of them is getting ready to launch, that's time you don't really have. Basically: stealth isn't invisibility. Stealth is camouflage. The goal isn't to avoid detection, just to DELAY detection until it doesn't matter anymore.
Another role of stealth, particularly stealth in space, could be to build a relatively small number of stealth ships, but by doing so force your opponent to expend vastly more resources on that detection grid
@@davispeterson1876 Any battle strategy that depends on your enemy reacting in a highly specific way -- or making a mistake at that -- is a bad strategy. This is an excellent example: your enemy might not bother with an expensive detection grid and instead employ some kind of automatic hair trigger response ensuring total destruction on detection. A planetary "trespassers will be shot on site" policy would reflect a belief that the failure of a spacecraft to announce its presence with a transponder or filing of a flight plan is evidence of criminal if not destructive intentions, and then your stealth ships become much riskier to use in peacetime.
@@newtypealpha ok but in order to do any of the things you suggest they would still have to build some form of detection network. The point is that you can make a couple stealth ships, and your opposition would need to build a sensor network around every point they want to defend from those ships. Even if the ships can't penetrate the sensors, they've already forced the enemy to expend far more resources than you have. And if they DON'T build the sensors, then you have a small flottilla of stealth warships that your opposition didn't invest in a proper counter for. So either way you come out on top. The correct counter of course would be for your opponent to build both the sensors and stealth ships of their own in order to force you to build sensors as well, so this strategy would only really be useful if you have significantly fewer assets to defend (or if those assets are much more concentrated) than your opponent. Nonetheless there is a clear niche for stealth warships in at least the early stages of space warfare, before we get to the point where we can cheaply saturate the entire solar system in observation satellites
@@davispeterson1876 Unless your enemy is kind pf pacifist commune that doesn't normally even maintain a professional military, they wouldn't have to build anything they weren't going to build in the first place. You might as well be saying "The advantage of building fighter planes is forcing your enemy to spend a lot of money on anti-aircraft missiles." Which, in a world where air power EXISTS, is a weird thing for them not to be doing already. The bigger point is that stealth detection systems are far, FAR cheaper than the stealth weapons they fight. A fleet of ultra quiet nuclear submarines would (and eventually did) cost the USSR half a trillion dollars to build and maintain over the life of the cold war. SOSUS only cost $16 billion over that same time period. Same thing in air power: $150 million dollar stealth fighter can still be detected by a $2 million radar and shot down by a $1.5 million missile. If you have the kinds of enemies for whom poverty is their achilles heel, you should probably step back and rethink your life.
@@davispeterson1876 And the far MORE important point is that ordinary traffic control sensors would be more than adequate to track stealth ships. If your enemy can't afford to even monitor COMMERCIAL traffic in the skies above his planet, then the stealth ships are a waste of YOUR money, not his.
HAN: "Well, if they follow standard Imperial procedure, they'll dump their garbage before they go to light-speed, then we just float away." LEIA: "With the rest of the garbage"
@@АйбулатИсхаков We saw an Imperial ship go to lightspeed after that? Or before that, for that matter? (Not that you'd actually DO that, anyway. The equipment is worthless, but the MATERIALS are not, and doing that in inhabited systems, which they would visit frequently, would cost more than transferring it in dock because somebody would have to go collect it with a specialized ship.)
One my favorite episodes thus far and one that finely distinguish between no stealth in space and "no stealth in space" as it did provide many possible ways in which one can reduce its detection signature, among which was my favorite, that being using stars to hide your burns. What i'd like to address is that in the past, even now, and most likely in the future, stealth doesn't mean you won't get detected eventually, just that that detection might be too late or late enough for you to achieve some sort of advantage over the opposition. On a separate note, just as two boxers, of a same build, same experience and same "skill" don't always end up in a stalemate, neither do two civilizations with similar levels of economic and technological development end up in one too. Not to mention that the race for better defenses to overcome current offenses and vice versa, extends to detections as well. So though maybe long term, the ability to stay hidden levels off to the ability to detect someone, it's possible to reach local "dips" and "peaks" that prevail one side or the other, but as the video mentions, that is not the scope of this presentation.
Exactly, unless both sides reach their absolute peak of technology there could always be one that temporary gains enough of an edge in technolgy to win the conflict.
That's not how science works. We can't say it isn't possible, but based on all of the evidence we have, it is likely not possible; at least given our current understanding of physics. That's how science works.
Thanks so much for this Isaac! I'm currently lorecrafting and have always deemed a spaceborne people to be so adept at detecting miniscule energy emissions that it's basically pointless to try to avoid any form of detection, much less visual detection. So every spacecraft is adorned with decorative regalia or vivid markings, as a warning. Your video has validated my decision somewhat.
Yeah I've wondered about that for spaceships down the road, if they might decide to go the peacock/blowfish type strategies if the chameleon one isn't viable. Look bigger, look meaner, or look cooler. :)
The most plausible one achievable with current tech (the Hydrogen Steamer and ATOMSS: the Advanced Triple Observability Mode Stealth Steamer proposed by Matter Beam of ToughSF blog) is to cool one side of the hull with liquid helium to match CMB temperature and radiate heat to the other side. Propulsion is done by expanding the exhaust gasses to very cold temperatures and near vacuum pressure as well. Though this type of stealth is very directional and time limited.
This reminds me of the "cold black mirror" in Anathem. One could extend this further to surround the vessel in a modular cryo-shell, then carefully vecotor the heat along a more narrow cone. This would interfere with the already significant problem of radiant cooling. It might require a kind of sub-style "silent running" albeit one based on energy and heat rather than noise. The crew might be walking around in low lighting, eating cold food, with some hibernating, just to save on energy.
@@amyfox3877 The effectiveness of any heat radiator is directly proportional to how much of the "sky" is can radiate into. The narrower you try to make the emission cone, the less efficient it will be. And any ship with crew will need to keep enough power going for life support that turning down the lights isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.
@@keith6706 This is years old, I know, but the cool thing about the ATOMSS stealth design is (iirc) the propulsion system is a nuclear thermal rocket fueled by the liquid hydrogen/helium transferring heat from the hull, so the coolant doubles as fuel and the rocket has a long expansion nozzle (either curved or shuttered with pulsed operation) so the exhaust cools before leaving the ship. The result is theoretically perfect stealth. At a certain range, no matter what you do you'll be detectable from things like radar, but it's only a couple thousand kilometers, which is practically right on top of you in space.
One thing worth addressing: being difficult to *detect* and difficult to *track* are quite different things. It's perfectly possible to detect a fighter dropping flares but tracking it is very hard because you'll get distracted by the flares.
Same goes for being difficult to *identify* which is a more accurate description for what an craft trying to hide in plain sight among a crowd of objects the adversary wont consider a threat. In that case evading detection is not really the goal as you are not trying to hide the fact that your signature exists but rather alter it such that they fail to identify it as a threat. That is to say basically it is not an attack on their detection system but their IFF system trying to manipulate the latter into flagging a hostile object as something else ie a friendly or a neutral natural object. It is the trojan horse strategy disguise your attack as anything but an attack until it is too late.
I'm dismayed at how often 'drawing fire' seems to make someone running out into the range of an accurate weapon invincible or hard to hit. I mean just because a friend is firing a few bullets from a place of cover in no way stops a protagonist lying prone with a good rifle from taking out any running attacker with ease.
@@seraphina985 The phony IFF beacon gimmick will probably never work again. These were feasible in the days when IFF beacons were purely analog affairs, but modern ones are digital and can incorporate powerful encryption.
@@James-ep2bx You appear to have entirely misunderstood. The cybersecurity systems make faking an IFF beacon entirely impractical. You'd have to defeat the encryption used, and it is not unreasonably difficult to make the expectation for the time to brute force a key longer than the expected lifespan of the universe if you could turn all the matter in the universe into supercomputers to work on this one problem. (Can you get lucky? Sure, you might get lucky and have short times to a few keys, but the expectation time is a statistical property of the problem, and that's how long you expect it to take on average to brute force any given key. And you can change the encryption keys in a military IFF system as often as you want.)
So what I'm getting from this isn't so much "there's no stealth in space" so much as "there's no perfect stealth in space." Sure, no matter what you do you COULD be detected but unless you are entering a fully developed system with a massive detection grid in constant action surveying the entire sky there are all manner of things you could do to simply not draw any attention to yourself. Fair to say?
There are roundabout ways, but all of them will fail with decreasing distance. For example, you could mount a huge array on your ship that cools down its skin to 2 Kelvin (background radiation) and dumps the heat in a direction where the enemy has no eyes using a shaped radiator. However, once you are close enough to your target you will be detected in one of two ways: 1. you go past one of their eyes (EG: you are approaching the Earth in stealth mode, redirecting your heat away from it. You pass the Moon. The terran moon base can now see your heat and warns Earth) 2. they see you directly through sheer proximity and a good telescope
You don't need a "fully developed system" or a "massive detection grid". We could deploy a highly effective space detection system _now_ that would cover a large position of the solar system, but don't simply because it would cost too much for something that pretty much doesn't exist, ie a hostile force you'd want to detect. None of the assorted detection methods to detect spacecraft is necessarily technologically more advanced than what we have available now, we just don't have the means to cheaply put them in position. To give a simple example, say you have a sensor platform consisting of a wide-field IR telescope, a narrow-field higher resolution IR telescope, and visual telescope, along with the required power systems, communications, and so on. Or three satellites in formation instead of a single platform, whatever. The wide-field IR completes a full-sphere scan once every few hours, say six hours for a full scan, which is entirely doable. If the computer identifies an IR source that isn't in the catalogue of known objects, you point the narrow-field and visual telescopes at it and start looking at it more intently. Now put, say, a constellation of six of these sensor platforms 2 AUs out from the sun, in various orbits from near polar to closer to the ecliptic. This gives you a full scan, getting the most of the space in a sphere around the sun, on average once an hour (if you time the scans appropriately). If one sensor platform gets a hit, others can use their telescopes to take a peek as well, which vastly diminishes the ability of someone trying to hide. Here's the bonus: set up your constellation effectively and you potentially have the equivalent of a telescope with a primary diameter of up to 4 AUs which gives you theoretically utterly absurd resolution with interferometry, limited only by how many photons you collect. Again, none of this is technically outside our capabilities now, we just don't have the means to deploy it cost-effectively. But, here's the thing, and it's an important one: if the system you're approaching doesn't have the tech to deploy s few of these sensor platforms, why are you even bothering to hide in the first place? If they can't afford or able to throw up what, for your tech level, are a few basic satellites (which have additional obvious secondary uses such as looking for potential impactors that could threaten the planet), while you're casually puttering around solar systems, why are you bothering to hide? it's not like they'll be able to do anything about it.
Omuamua (sp?) was a rock with unusual characteristics... got spotted within days of its close flyby of the solar system and its course projected. The question is really not, can you stealth in space, the question is, how far out before that stealth gets noticed. If you wanna just flit about sure, stealth, but the big issue... once you go anywhere that matters, stealth is off the table. You will be noticed. The options at that point become, can do a reasonably good job at being noticed but appearing to be something else. I Guarantee if Omuamua (sp?) was on a direct course towards earth or its course would bring it to earth instead of away from us, we'd have been all up its grill looking for alot more detail... and if it was slowing down or adjusting course.. dead giveaway.
Great video, the one exception to the equal technology caveat is a temporary breakthrough. Similar to modern stealth aircraft if you develop a technology that enables stealth, you can hide it to maintain a monopoly on the detectors for a few years while still being at roughly equal technology levels as your opponent.
The best stealth might probably require a better distraction. Keep them watching something else, or blend into a crowd. It might be ridiculous to think about the last part without there being crowds of spaceships
It's hard to blend into a crowd when traffic control is probably going to require every vessel to carry an active identification beacon. That's not a matter of surveillance, either, active beacons are going to be necessary just to keep track of all the moving ships. While collisions in free space are vanishingly unlikely, a ship will almost always be going between two minimally mobile installations, and there is almost certainly going to be enough traffic around a lot of them to make collisions likely.
@@evensgrey Don't forget the issues of very nasty exhaust products creating a hazard volume much larger then the physical volume of the ship producing it.
@@evensgreythis is true but it doesn’t entirely negate the natural stealth support a space faring civilization would provide. Every non military vessel having a required ID signal that they are transmitting still means that any sensor’s computer will have to sift through all of that data, cross referencing every IR signal with every ID signal, singling out the IR signals not transmitting a corresponding ID. That’s a lot of computation and that’s before considering things like false IDs, or if you manage to be able to reduce your IR signal by cooling your hull or something, which would require even more computation because now it has to also cross reference IR and ID signal data with reported destinations and use that to calculate every signal’s likelihood of being a false flag. Or in the case of cooking the bill, sensors now have to cross reference the light you’re blocking (which is already harder to detect and requires many calculations for sensor computers on its own) with the expected blocked light from every asteroid, debris field, or any other object that doesn’t emit a signal to detect, in order to single out your ship as something that shouldn’t be there. This is all also assuming your civilization even has an ID system. It might not require one for the simple reason of piracy which becomes an issue if there is no central checkpoint all traffic must go through before leaving the planet, and if spaceships are like cars and the average person can get on and off planet as they please that would be impossible. So would policing the solar system so effectively that piracy wouldn’t be an issue. It would be a lot for a government to ask its citizens to just constantly transmit a beacon calling any unwanted attention your way if that’s a common issue, and even if a government did ask that in a situation like that civilians would just simply ignore it for their own safety. A much more likely system would look like a restriction on the sensitivity and range of civilian IR sensors (no point in not requiring an ID signal if the IR signal is just as easy for pirates to detect), and only require ships to transmit an ID specifically to a traffic control tower when trying to enter the flight space of space stations, atmospheric infrastructure, terrestrial cities, etc. There would probably also be a civilian ban or restrictions on any IR signal reducing technologies if that exists again to reduce piracy but also so that militaries have even a chance at detecting enemy vessels using tech like that because again that’s already an incredible amount of calculations.
"1,700,000,000,000 days without a single accident or outage" -- Tbf, I could do that too if I was allowed 500,000km of shielding material around the active core, but . . . budget cuts"
I love how you never run out of material, and even though most of your topics are derived from science or science fiction, it remains fresh and alive, even if we are talking about the black coldness of space. ;) I just wanted to say thank you. I've been a follower for a number of years now and there is nothing like what you have going on. Keep up the good work!
I only recently became an Isaac Arthur fan, I can't believe I didn't find out about him before, all your videos are freaking AMAZING. Your WHOLE CHANNEL is binge watchable, dude. Wow. My new favourite content creator on YT.
The Normandy-class Stealth Reconnaissance Frigate from Mass effect does stealth really well. In Mass effect space combat is often conducted beyond visual range. As a result, most ships don't need windows and the ones that do would normally have them sealed by shutters during combat. This means that the Normandy-class doesn't have to be concerned with visual detection and has no need for the clocking mechanisms used in IPs such as star trek. Instead, the Normandy-class attempts to avoid electronic detection with its Internal Emissions Sink(IES) Stealth Systems. The objective of the IES is to hide the ship's heat signature. This makes it invisible to passive infrared sensors and on active Ladar and Radar, it would register as a derelict or asteroid. The purpose of the Normandy-class is to monitor hostile systems and drop Infiltration teams on hostile worlds The IES has 2 components. The first is Lithium heat sinks built into the ship's hull and the second is its Tantalus Mass Effect Drive Core. The Tantalus uses Mass effect fields(Dark energy) to create mass concentrations that the Normandy-class "falls into" allowing it to fly without the use of it's thrusters. Limitations The IES has a limit to how long it can sink heat before u have essentially turned the ship into an incendiary granade. Several days passively drifting. 3 hours during flight. The IES doesn't work with FTL travel as mass effect's version of FTL travel blueshift's the ships emissions. Pushing them into frequencies to high to sink. Every time the ship enters or exits FTL flight, it's like setting off a flare. This limits the range of the Normandy-class stealth capabilities. The Normandy-class is also very expensive. The 130m frigates costs about the same as a 700m Heavy Cruiser each and u could build drive cores for 12 000 fighters for the same price as a single Tantalus Drive.
Was going to argue about excluding the stealth by metaphorical flashbang of overloading their sensors, but then you went and acknowledged it as one of the valid workarounds, people often forget stealth is simply about the otherside not seeing you, not not seeing anything, or you being unseen. So stunts like smoke screen, distractions, etc. are a factor
Problem is, you've just told everyone where you are. It's the equivalent of a submarine generating a huge amount of noise to overload nearby sensors, which may work on someone within a few thousand meters, but anyone further away (or with less sensitive instruments) have it easy. In the case of spacecraft, it just means they can use lower-resolution and weaker telescopes to follow you since you're advertising your position.
@@keith6706 no stealth is ever been perfect as it is, it's always been, and likely always will be, a matter of choosing the right option for the right situation, to assume otherwise is to have a faulty understanding of what stealth is
This always assumes moving, which makes sense when you want to attack an enemy, but what about just hiding your habitats, cylinders, etc. Maybe you dont want to attack, maybe you just want to be left alone, "stationary" where you are. Could you make an episode about "stationary" stealth in space?
I like the way Expanse does it, Speed up to as fast as you need on the rigth trajectory, kill everything that makes heat or emits energy, and on the true stealth ships, coat it in basicallyt hat B2 paint and have insanely big internal heat sinks
The heat has to go somewhere and the only somewhere is out. Now if you could come up with a place to put it internally you could get around that. Say a material with an astronomical heat capacity or enthalpy that could store heat for the duration stealth was needed.
@@bentuovila5296 usually yeah, the expanse ships either dump as much as they can before, dump/store atmo/ or have big fuckin heat sinks while they coast.
This kind of thing is why my favoured story stealth method would be tucking into a form of subspace bubble and have it be more like a 3D submarine to surface ship search and destroy. And if you have 'frequencies' involved then you could have an equivalent of 'depth charges' looking to ping off them and hit them to get a return... But that is just me :P
I like that. Like imagine using hyperspace to travel at FTL, but also to escape normal methods of detection, sinking deeper in 4d with the dangers it might entail or even travel across some particular currents where hyperspace guard ships aren’t common.
Watch Space Battleship Yamato 2199 they have a battle with a ship that is just like a sub in sub space forget which episode. Found the original Star Blazers version th-cam.com/video/WPLHJcIs3Is/w-d-xo.html
The novel Here Be Dragons had an excellent method of stealth, at least in-system. They had a reactionless drive, though an extremely weak one. The ship would make a burn, expecting to coast for months, but they had a few newtons of force pushing them to a different vector the whole time. By the time their foe (who assumed they were primitive and only bothered to track their ship by its exhaust plumes) looked for them, they were tens of thousands of kilometers away from the predicted path, and successfully evaded the intercepting fleet.
You see I know about this already through the spacecraft known as Prowlers in Halo. They do not use a cloaking shield or anything, you don’t really need that. What they do instead is they give off as little heat as possible. Prowlers are actually so good at this job that they are better than Covenant stealth craft, which are you know, honed over thousands of years of improvement. A little fun fact is that if exiting Slipspace, the ejection of all nuclear warheads and mines is required for full stealth because Cherenkov Radiation is given off when nuclear weapons exit Slipspace.
It could help if you hide in a hole in an asteroid, provided of course that there is no giant space creature that wants to eat you also living in that hole. Caveat Emptor. - Don't go into a cave unless its empty.
Being stealth from a properly fortified and developed planet does sound near impossible. But in the event you’re trying to remain undetected from a lone starship or relatively closely packed fleet, you can use directionality much more to your favour. So long as you ensure the front of your spacecraft is conical and very reflective, possibly just made of multiple layers of spaced foil like the back of the JWST, you could reflect all thermal emissions away from the enemy, and all optical and radio signals transmitted at you wouldn’t be sent back anywhere near the enemy ship. Cold gas thrusters could probably provide a reasonable measure of stealthy propulsion, and of course very directional photon drives or particle beams could be ideal for this. As for occlusion, you’d just need to ensure that your optical footprint is comparable in angular size to other stray objects, be they space debris or naturally occurring asteroids. A plume of gas coming out of your spacecraft could be difficult to detect if you were mimicking or hiding behind a comet, and warmish planetary atmospheres or stellar winds could mask emissions from warmer engines. In all these instances you wouldn’t be accelerating very fast if at all, you’d be more likely sitting around while listening for enemy comms, biding your time and sending laser comms back to your own fleet. When your distance to the enemy fleet is closer than the enemy fleet is wide, you’re going to have a hard time hiding your position and shape but disguising your vessel as a comet or other debris could still be fruitful, especially if it is just travelling in an orbit with only a little computer inside taking up power. You could use up more power if you connected or bored a parabolic heat reflector to the back side of the comet. That way you could even run refrigeration to pull the comet’s temperature below what it would naturally be, and this could work relatively close to the enemy. Of course, the fleet might get suspicious if a different piece of debris orbits past them such that they can always directly see at least one at any time, so best hide a tree in a forest. Hiding unwanted radio emissions might get very difficult at close distances, but only for a sensor designed to give off very little unwanted emissions itself. The closer you are to the enemy fleet, the more you’ll be able to hide your signature amongst that fleet. The same applies to gaseous emissions too, a fleet performing complicated manoeuvres would likely leave a cloud of spent propellant around itself, which will also serve to mask thermal emissions. An extreme scenario may be flying inside a protoplanetary disc or supernova remnant or other very messy part of space, where stealth could be exceedingly easy. In proximity to a pulsar or other very strong magnetic field radio emissions would be very difficult to detect, and close to any old star thermal emissions would be hart to spot also.
And how do you know they haven't deployed sensor platforms doing the exact same thing as your ships and that they've been watching since you cruised by an undetected picket that now has a clear line of sight up you fleet's skirt?
@@keith6706 It's a function of time, have your stealthy microdrones been watching them long enough to see their stealthy microdrones manouver into place, or vice versa I'm struck on how similar starship combat is to modern submarine combat. Directionality and target geometry are critical.
Also, even if you can hide all of the light/heat your ship emits your enemy can detect you by looking for areas that are too cold/quiet relative to the area around them. (For example, let's say there was an assassin that had a spell that could hide all of the sounds they make when they enter your detection field. If you listen for the sound you won't find them but if you listen for the spot that is completely silent regardless of the ambient noise around it then you will find the assassin easily. Needless to say, I got this idea from a manga with magic in it. but the point remains the same.) If your ship makes even the tiniest difference in light/heat/gravity etc. between it and the surrounding area you can be easily detected.
Your assassin example illustrates the problem with this thinking. The only way to locate the quiet spot in a noisy room would be to walk around the room until you find an area where the ambient noise level drops. At which point you have just placed yourself within stabbing distance of an assassin. 🤷🏾♂️ How close do you have to be to detect that kind of variation against the thermal background? If that distance is less than the effective range of your enemy's weapons, the answer is "too close."
Infrared stealth is easy to achieve, and sustain, with current tech given a few particular conditions. It requires that the observer is looking at you from exactly one angle, that you are not under acceleration, and you know what the angle is. You run a power plant, use heat pumps to cool your hull on the side facing the observer, and keep the body of your ship between the observer and your heat radiator fins. You probably don't want to go all the way to 'invisibility' and the CMB background temperature - do that and your enemy's radar will detect an asteroid much too cold for its location. Instead you'd want 'camouflage' at the temperatures a local asteroid would achieve.
What about ships on the extremely small scale in terms of size? Like something the size of a grain of sand, or even smaller, piloted either by an AI or a digital consciousness. Could scanning technology really get to the point where it could detect the heat emissions of something the size of a blood vessel?
anything that small would have to have an external power supply, which suggests its being beamed power with a laser or whatever. and that laser could be detected, even if the microchipship can't.
@@lucky-segfault That actually depends. I can see two options here: 1) The microships got up to insane speed before entering detection range. 2) They use a Sc-Fi energy source that is used to propel their tiny mass forward. To be fair, advanced detection methods tend to be surprisgnly good at picking up small stuff.
@@peterpan4038 maybe, but whatever hardware is on the microchip is gonna need at least some power to continue working, even if it's just listening to radio signals and saving the interesting stuff for later recovery after it's passed thought the system. and there's not much room for a power supply in a grain of sand
With smaller ships you need less energy to change its course, but I think not for active scans. If you sent something the size and mass of a pinhead into the inner solar system, had it do passive scans (EM imagining, radio and laser intercepts). and then continuing on its orbit to a quieter place in the star system, I think it'd be pretty stealthy. It's still working uphill -- whatever is being scanned doesn't have to be shy about the power it puts into active scans.
@@lucky-segfault Not to mention that to merely observe your surroundings in any detail, you have to have a receiving array that's meaningfully larger than the wavelength (electromagnetic or gravitational) of what you are trying to detect... Unless you're an inert hypervelocity kill projectile that's already been aimed and fired by something else, it's not very helpful to be 'unseen,' if you can't 'see,' either.
Elite dangerous allows a Pilot to turn off practically everything and run hidden to sneak into stations, but it builds heat and compromise the ship. It is still possible to get detected with a bit of bad luck.
My favourite "plausible" stealth in space ideas are: -control of your electromagnetic emissions - directing heat away from known detectors, or focusing specific beams of tuned frequencies of light at detectors to avoid being detected as a "shadow" where light is expected (the latter point mentioned in the video). -decoy/overload - instead of being invisible, be so excessively visible they can't pinpoint your exact location as a target. Scattered reflectors or light/heat sources that draw attention away from your real ship can divert enemy attention. If you have a swarm of bright attention-grabbing objects that you appear to just be one among many of, and the rest are harmless, you might be able to get through without being looked at closely enough to notice there's one that doesn't quite match. If your ship has a large "signature" marking its location, but could be at a random point within a much larger space than it takes up, enemy fire could easily miss, and that potentially risks hitting their own detection systems and making such detection even less accurate than it already was. -Relativistic speed - quite simply, the closer you are to lightspeed, the less warning any potential detection provides. This is primarily how projectiles would achieve "stealth" not ships. If you're moving too fast to be seen coming, then it doesn't matter how agile the enemy is. If you're detected when you're 1 light second from a target, but you're travelling at 90% of lightspeed, by the time they realise you're coming, they have 0.1s to avoid the impact.
My in universe stealth ships are only a prototype class. They use a metamaterial hull that can change the spectrum it emits by lessening certain frequencies and adding that energy to others. There is a net loss in the amount of energy, as the material absorbs some. This is pulled out of it by internal heat sinks, usually the water reserves, but that can only soak up so much. This shifts their radiation spectrum away from all of the common ship "signatures" as well as going away from what normal sensors are tuned to detect. Its both harder to see, and takes more processing power to figure out what it is. This isn't true stealth, it's closer to dazzling camouflage, looking so confusing to detection systems that it takes a while to figure out what they're looking at. This is generally enough time for a stealth ship to shoot first, and if that's a "dumb projectile" like a railgun bolt, it will hit. Those types of impacts are generally instant kills. In one side, out the other, with plenty of spalling in the middle. Thing are also hidden more crudely inside a drive plume. By decelerating with the main engines straight at your opponent, your massively bright drive can blow out the very sensitive detection grid, like taking a picture of the sun. You can hide a less bright projectile you shot ahead of yourself in the over saturated sensor region. A hail of PDC fire generally isn't a threat at longer ranges as they don't stay on one target long enough to bore through the whole hull, but setting them to fire for a few seconds during the burn in will do some serious damage when they hit and the little clumps of iron will be hard to spot in the drive plume. Railgun bolts and missiles can also be hidden rather well. Of course, you are a very bright target basically asking to be run through with a railgun bolt, but sometimes crazy and stupid works.
On Star Trek's Treaty of Algeron... It was signed in 2311. The Federation tested the Genesis torpedo in 2284. Imagine a cloaked ship armed with multiple Genesis torpedoes. It's supposed to be an instant terraforming device, but the longevity of the terraformed worlds is measured in days. It still makes for a very adept planet killer. So I'm guessing the treaty prevents the Federation from having cloaking devices and prevents the Romulans from researching things like the Genesis device.
Stealth in space doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough to do the job. An example of that is in the The Expanse, where a group of terrorists made small asteroids hard to detect by coating them with stolen radar absorbing material, and then launching those asteroids toward Earth with as much velocity as they could impart to them. The first three of those did reach their target and caused widespread damage before Earth defenses learned how to detect and destroy the ones coming after them.
@@Archgeek0 In that setting there are (at least) thousands of privately owned torchships burning around the system; the opening sequence of the show depicts a freighter capturing ice from near Saturn, which it hauls to Ceres in the asteroid belt to supply the inhabitants with water and air. IIRC the stealth rocks were slung from a similar freighter on a fairly normal course, so they weren't so much "launching" as simply "undocking."
10:06 America made nuclear bombs before Germany even though we were reasonably similar in technological progress my point is in arms race situation it is reasonable to assume that one country or race we have the technology before the others and be able to use that technology to devastating effect
The USA only held the monopoly on nuclear weapons for 4 years, though. There is no reason to assume a permanent technology advantage by one country, or a new game-changing superweapon every few years.
This is the reason why the Vulcans are not giving us any help. Becuase we are dumb like this, tit for tat, I will be surprised if our species makes it past this whole Rona mess.
@@blkgardner that was my point is if you have two reasonably similar opponents in an arms race one of them's going to get the bigger gun first and use it then the other will figure out how to make one but will only one has that weapon it is devastating
@@snikrepak what do you mean "makes it through this rona mess",tf has done to us?, economic damage?? that was self inflicted, death toll??? practically nonexistent/not worth mentioning even in passing, if anything thanks to leakyvx phenomenon, we have loads more variants now than we started with, and govs had the audacity to blame this on those who didnt take the weird juice.
I am not sure I agree with your opening statement about the only horizon to hide behind in space is a black hole's... even now- we are looking at regions near the event horizon and seeing details that come from behind the black hole, so it stands to reason that in the future, all sides of the universe surrounding a black hole can be seen if you know where to look, and if you have a great amount of resolution, and the right software, then rebuilding the map around a black hole will be as simple as the click of a button. A base near a black hole could have the best surveillance as it can just point a telescope at the black hole to view all directions around them at once!
Best bet would be hide your ship or ships inside an asteroid with engines off just life support- and let the asteroids coast deep into the enemy system under their own steam on a harmless seeming trajectory around the sun but one that brought you near your target world. They really wouldnt stand out much - even if they are spotted they'd just be ignored. So its more stealth by deception.
Amen! I'm opposed to the prime directive as well. I watched Apollo 17 take off from the banana river, and it lit up the sky brighter than the noonday sun. Roosters started crowing!
A civilization with any serious space presence is going to have a massive monitoring system as a matter of course simply to make sure their space-borne infrastructure doesn't get smashed up by random debris. Even if they have every mote of dust tagged, tracked and predicted for millions of years into the future, they're still going to keep a tight watch for random objects coming in from outside. We know these aren't all that uncommon as we've detected at least two in the last four years, and we don't have the infrastructure to detect small stuff that's a serious hazard to space infrastructure but harmless to a planet with an appreciable atmosphere.
I think most of this topic strongly depends on the diference between stealth and invisibility. I can't remember any invisible animal in real live (considering the size scale relevant to the animal) but have the idea that many of them are good in stealth and camuflagem. They achieve that by using the bling spots of those they are hiding from, they look like something else and choose to be where the adversaries are not paying attention. As long as your adversary's perception is not flawless you will have ways to use the imperfections in it. If you know enough about him, and if hide is important enough to bother. One way to obtain stealth at any technological level often mentioned, and acknowledged here, that fiction authors often use in sci-fi, and just a little less often in fantasy, is some magical technology sometimes called "bribery". You just pay the eyes of your adversary to not see you, and make your living as an honest smuggler/terrorist mostly without problems.
Awesome, Isaac! Per your request, Stealth in space: *Temporarily* the most efficient heat sink possible would give a certain limited time during which the ship need not radiate. Use energy to cool the whole ship to invisibility, go minimal energy, only life support for central bridge, and use heat sink to keep stealthy (frozen hydrogen with boil off caught in a bag or used as a thruster?) Disguise yourself as a boulder and tumble towards L4. Sharp right, bombs away and good luck. :)
How about some sort of full-spectrum light-field display style coating, keeping the ship essentially close to fully transparent to EM; and using lasers to eject the heat produced inside, but used as a form of propulsion, and not straight on-axis with your intended thrust direction, but with true random (perhaps selected via quantum RNG?) directions in a hollow cone around the desired thrust direction, so even if some detector does fall in the narrow beam of the laser, it will only at most get a direction that does not point to where you're going? (and if necessary, also combine true random pulse intensities as well to further challenge distance calculations as well)
You say there's no horizon, but in a planetary system there are many small spherical ones. Quite useful against a point detector. Hiding on the other side of the horizon is in fact the same thing as hiding behind the planet.
In Banks' novel Excession, the Culture mothballs some warships in an asteroid and gives it a shove on a circuitous route towards Affronter space, which wasn't a bad idea, but it gets betrayed by a traitorous ship that leads the Affront right to it. Just like you said, all these expensive plans can be foiled by an inexpensive turncoat or sympathiser.
True. Interestingly, alot of “stealth” in the Culture Universe is misdirection. For example, ships pretending to be a different, weaker and slower class, and taking the opponent by surprise e.g. the Sleeper Service.
@@mabus4910 And didn't the Abominator-class in Surface Detail pretend to be a rickety old Torturer-class back from the Idiran war? I had forgotten about these things
@@1KosovoJeSrbija1 Not familiar with the story. But as long as the object is part of the system, it effects the movement of other object within the system. Given your technology advanced to interstellar travel levels, the scan will be quick and sensitive enough to spot any cloaked object. Unless their technology advanced enough to cloak mass. But then what are they affraid of?
There was an anime called Starship Operators that is known for portraying space warfare more realistically (laser blasts are only detected after they hit, battles are fought far beyond visual range, etc). In one episode, the protagonists' ship goes up against a "space submarine" that is almost impossible to detect using conventional detection methods because it is visually camouflaged to blend in with the stellar background and coasts on inertia to get in optimal striking distance. The crew come up with a clever (though expensive) method of detecting the ship by firing a spread of torpedoes then detonating them at varying distances and having their onboard observatory spot the ship's silhouette against the flashes of the torpedo explosions with their high-powered telescope.
I think elite dangerous does a good job at showing how heat builds up in a vacuum. If you enter silent running and you don’t have heatsinks, you will reach critical hull temperature in seconds.
Here's a stealth method: a literal fog of war. Flood space with opaque particulates. I don't know how much you'd need, but in theory you could essentially turn space warfare into submarine warfare. It is two-way, but the underdog could use it for asymmetric warfare, and even one of two equally matched foes might find fog useful in specific operations.
You'd also need to up-armor the spacecraft to keep them from getting sandblasted down to their structural supports. Even a paintchip at orbital velocities can crack a reinforced windshield.
Hmmm. You'd need *a lot* of particles to cover a sizable volume. But if you happened across while someone was in mid-starlifting, that might give you what you need. cf: the "Storm Furies" rpg.
Except that the sheer size of space allows so much space to hide, that it works as stealth itself. Just like WWII warships did hide in the (comparatively small) vasteness of the oceans. Just think of the japanese recon plane, that flew over the entire US fleet at Midway, without noticing it.
Regarding the beginning, I think that an advanced space military would want to use stealth even if they could obliterate their enemy without. By using stealth, you are better equipped to gather intel. That civilization you're attacking could have technology that would benefit your civilization.
I think the best "stealth" is to "hide in plain sight". That is to appear to whatever you wish to hide from as something it expects to see. It's surprising just how much detail can be hidden by a previously established prejudice. That, however, isn't something that can be accomplished by some technology. It requires hard work and preparation.
"sir that asteroid has an odd angle of entry into Mars orbit" "how far outside the norm? roll the tap back" "oh, it was a trans-Neptunian object a few decades ago"
eg. 9:00 -10:00 -ish. If the enemy can detect your ship at like a 1 light hour away (or better, like 1 light day away), it means that IF you had the engines on at 1 hour ago, the enemy WILL see you & there is NOTHING you can do about it.
In space, not only can no one hear you scream but you can't hide either without Clark Tech. Still stories and games using stealth are still good fun to read and play.
Not to mention quantum metrology, which can detect just a few entangled photons bouncing back from your radar system, unambiguously, even in a noisy background because the noise isn't entangled with the photons you produce.
23:00 At this point I remembered a story in which the protagonist had a choice between using something to spy on a planet that was either straight line and hard to detect or something called the Bendix Light Curve which could be seen but looking back through it they thought that you were way over there.
As someone who's been toying around with ideas for Das Boot in SPACE for a few years now. Seeing this title... I am getting my notebook primed and ready.
LOL! I slipped by my roommate Isaac and got my coffee. I avoided the horizon. I thought a lot about what you said about technology so advanced that it is inextinguishable from magic. So if I went back to the past and yet had my cell phone service, then I could be an expert at growing crops and an irrigation expert. To have the knowledge that we have at our fingertips now should have made us all into super humans, yet look at us now. We seem to still be weak. After listening to this stream, I have re-thought my place in this world. The deep thinking that I'm hearing has changed my life.
I read not too long ago about spiders that can travel through the air using the earths electric field, so if that's possible, maybe one way ships can get around is in the presence of a strong enough electromagnetic field, which seems like a stealthier way of travelling to me. You can also zip through gravitational corridors and slingshot around planets without using any extra propulsion and there are probably tons of other techniques we haven't even discovered.
I remember an episode where you described a Flatlander scenario where a person in our 3D universe reaches into Flatland and picks up a flatlander into the 3rd dimension, then puts the Flatlander back down into Flatland, and from the Flatlanders perspective, he disappeared from one position in Flatland, traveled in some psychodelic dimension for a bit, then reappeared in Flatland in a locked room that should have been impossible to get into. Wouldn't that be the ultimate stealth way to travel? Leave your trail in a higher dimension? Then reenter this "plane"(?) at any point in space, maybe even time, you want.
What about decoys? say thousands of little hot "sparks" that shine as bright as your ship, but in order to engage the ship you'd need to sift through all the "sparks"
All of the "stealth in space" variations I came up with were in the active/subversive category. Paying someone to set noise levels on certain satellites in such a way your exact drive signature is ignored by the program. Knowing exactly where they are, and what they are looking at and skirt them, trick them... Literally the more one knows about the topic, the less likely it is to come up with something.
I've read a sci-fi story where the shields work by manipulating and distributing energy with such control that it's possible to use them to prevent _any_ waste energy from escaping That's used for stealth, though it does also result in the ship continuously heating up as the energy has no where to go, potentially cooking the crew alive if stealthed for too long
I've always suspected that high level gravity manipulation would be the clarktech you'd use for stealth. You could probably get energy to effectively orbit your hull if it was strong enough, and either way, falling twords your course at least removes your propulsion energy fir the most part
One way to achieve effective stealth would be to use your own post scarcity fusion powered automated economy to produce billions of decoy drones. Both your ships and drones would designed to produce similar emissions, with the ships being intentionally quiet (at least when the want to be stealthy) and the drones intentionally loud. The drones could also deploy large balloon or sail like structures to appear large on active scans. You wouldn't need to achieve a perfect deception. Just enough confusion that it would be impractical for the enemy to identify all of your drones, or so expensive for them that it would be a win for you in terms of resources allocated.
Not if your enemy uses a cloud of shrapnel, since shrapnel is cheaper than drones. So is electromagnetic noise, which remote controlled drones are horribly vulnerable to, due to the density of data in transmissions needed to control them. Simple jamming can render billions of drones useless that way, and worse, they might be hacked. Ah, but what if they're robots? Well, you kind of have the same problem, as blinding sensors is easier and cheaper than spamming self-propelled decoys. Robots are also vulnerable to microwave radiation that damages delicate control electronics and causes shorts, EMP, etc, all cheaper than robots. If they are somehow proof against all that, there's still the shrapnel cloud flying into a bunch of blinded automatons.
at that point you can just go with canister shot RKM's that explode into a debri cloud to hit many objects at once. if you can send so many "decoys" you may as well just use RKM's which are pretty cheap & use the same canister shot approach to overwhelm their weapons and that's not stealth. that's a mixture of deception & brute force. ur still visible to their detectors
@@arcdecibel9986 I'm thinking of these as a strategic rather than tactical system. You'd deploy them independently, well before a war, and have them spread all over, covering a whole solar system or more. Even if you converted a whole star into shrapnal, you would still be lucky to get even a handful of hits. Space is BIG. These also aren't dollar store drones either. They're only cheap and disposable relative to a full on warship. They'd be shielded to some extent against radiation, so you'd need a focused beam to kill them, which they can easily avoid just by firing their engines randomly every so often. You'd have to go out and kill them with your own drones, and kill drones are necasarily a lot more complex and expensive than decoy drones. They'd also probably be autonomous from the start, since their job is incredibly simple. The don't need to be in any particular place either, so even if the enemy could somehow blind them at such huge distances, they can just keep moving around on blind reconing. As long as they're somewhere in the solar system they can do their job.
@@virutech32 Well yes, stealth is kind of pointless when you can just launch RKMs at everything. I'm just saying this is how you could do it, if for some reason you wanted to. Maybe there's a MAD type situation with RKMs or something but a "conventional" war is happening, or maybe some conflict smaller than a full on war but still involving shooting. I did call it "effective stealth". You're not invisible, but there are so many decoys that no-one knows where you are until they get some platform close enough to distinguish you from the decoys, or until you decide to light off your drive at a high power setting.
@@TonboIV sure but if ur in a position where you can just waltz an entire swarm into the enemy's orbit u aren't using stealth. clearly u aren't at war & they aren't trying to actually find you. at that point u just stow away on someone elses ship. if you are at war, & even if you weren't, if u send a big enough swarm of ships to overwhelm their sensor networks the enemy will have a very good excuse to open fire at all of your ships. there's no way to avoid it since the enemy can just say that their sensors weren't good enough to tell apart decoys & they can claim the honestly though those were all warships anyways that's not effective stealth that's just a trditional massed attack. stealth means you are not being detected beyond certain ranges. stealth refers to the difficulty of being detected not identified.
I'm writing the 1st part of this before watching the episode. Okay, a parabolic reflector, with the outside super absorptive and refrigerated to the cosmic IR background level, with the ship at the focus. This would take filling out a swarm of surveillance devices filling out the volume of the solar system you want to protect. I think that's pretty good, and that doesn't rely on Clarketech. Also, it's a dirty trick to exclude hacking., re: a parabolic reflector stealth ship. A ship that could emit only across a narrow arc would benefit tremendously from some judicious hacking of just a few such enemy surveillance stations. Yes, stealth ships will be difficult. This is precisely why they will have tactical value at some point: It will be so difficult, no one will expect it. 2nd Part: Okay, so Issac is appealing to the scale of Kardashev 2 Cvilizations. The thing about this, is that the odds of civilizations on such scales would be completely unified is very, very small. As far as near peer opponents go, it will most likely be different factions within the same K2 civilization. This means that stealth without some kind of hacking and skullduggery wouldn't work, but the likelihood of limited stealth *combined* with hacking and skullduggery would be *very* likely! 3rd part to follow:... Stealth ships would use mass drivers and would not maneuver very much. Again, this would fit in very well with conflicts between factions within a K2 civilization.
I think one of the most practical immediate term prospects might be using very cold helium as exhaust and coating your ship in liquid helium. That way the exhaust plume and the ship itself both have the thermal signature of the cosmic microwave background. Though I guess the problem becomes how to dissipate heat when you're colder or equal in termperature to your environment, and how to get Helium to move at extremely high mach numbers to get a reasonable ISP, seeing as gaseous helium at 2.7 Kelvin has a soundspeed of like 200 mph.
@Isaac I think civilizations in a galaxy will be at diverse levels of technology. So although some of your space faring competitors will see through your stealth moves, many others will not. And you won’t know this ahead of time unless you’ve collected intel. I do get your point that visibility of a rocket flame is fare more noticeable than movies let on. And that sneaking up on a K2 civilization would be extremely difficult (you outlined several very good reasons why). I like your discussion on how active sensors in space would work. That’s always been a mysterious topic until now.
Well, it's one reason why in sci fi writing sometimes it really is desirable to have a world with its own handwavey super-physics, or, for instance, reasons why the antagonists just aren't looking that hard either, (like, in Firefly, and its very handwavey physics, the big bad gummint is *also* sneaking around a whole lot so doesn't seem to want even too many of their *own* people to be able to know everything about their movements, so you can still have lots of sneaking around. )
eg: 16:00 - 18:00 -ish. What if when you leave your system, pick up an asteroid, accelerate it towards the target opponent, land on the asteroid, dig in the ship into the asteroid so it is physically camouflaged? (then set an alarm on your hibernation pod). So all the enemy sees is a "normal"(?) asteroid moving towards their system, that "happens" to come from an opponents territory, but it isn't going to hit any planets* (*Meh! might as well send a few PetaWat+ beams at it anyway, it DOES come from an enemy territory anyway.)
While I love the roci, it has no hull, no shields, no gravity plating to stop the sheer acceleration of the ship turn you into hamburger meat, radiation shielding and a ton of other things. Not to mention no portholes or even a canopy to see out. Honestly fighting in the Rocci is the most ballsy way I have ever seen, Teflon coated rounds punching holes the size of canned beans past your legs, head, arms... Not to mention the rail guns and future tech we will invent. Conventional munitions like bullet and cartridge types, work in space, but becuase of how they work, it would be a problem all the time cleaning barrels and maintenance would suck, a high energy particles beam would work much better, and no need for extra space and crew to fire and maintain it.
I'm fairly sure Douglas Adams had a fairly good idea for a stealth system in his S.E.P. (Someone Else's Problem) field. If everything that perceives the object covered by an S.E.P. field believes that it is someone else's problem that object is effectively invisible. It may not be true stealth but it is the most reasonable solution.
Damn, beat me to it. Its the most funny solution, realistic? Well, depends. The only realistic solution i can think of, is really just a disguise with extra steps, custom tailored to look like something really nobody wants to deal with. Like a type of traveler that is a legal grey area where various agencies keep pushing the envelope to others about whos duty it is to deal with it. Or something nasty nobody wants to touch, and checking closely would mean its their responsibility to take them in, like refugee convoys or something.
@@_Muzolf I'm guessing you're from Z Z plural Z Alpha... So I hope you know where your towel is ;) Honestly, Stealth tech is always only as good as the detectors... so logically the best stealth is one that people look at and go... probably a bird.. or a blip or not my business. Most of the best workarounds depend on someone just not caring... just look at computer security. So all your disguises would be valid... a trojan if you will. XD
@@styxdragoncharon4003 Ha, i wish, its just the initials of my actual name. There are no space birds i am afraid, not even space ducks. So hiding your power level will not help much either. But other then that, i absolutely agree. Best is to work with what you got, which is probably civilian traffic, trash and rocks. Just don`t count on lazyness too much. For every ten radar operators who dismiss your spy ships as more debree, there is a conspiracy nut who thinks every debree is alien spies, and there is nothing worst then your billion credits spy operation getting busted because you gave the nutjobs something they never had before, evidence they could show someone.
@@_Muzolf Z Z plural Z Alpha is where Earth exists in Douglas Adams books (so I assume you're from there)... and never discount space ducks. There is a reason why I don't develop stealth tech... I'm too lazy to get the degrees necessary to do the work. I do fix computers and I could go on for hours on the dumb things people do with those not realizing how dumb it is...
In Project Hail Mary, the Hail Mary ship emits some enormous amount of infrared (like becomes the brightest object other than the sun) as it accelerates to relativistic speed and that really struck home about how bright a speedy ship would be. Really interesting push back against the norm in this video and by Andy Weir.
The best way for a spaceship to achieve stealthiness is to carry around a clipboard and look confident.
@Joe Shumo I've never worked security and I know better than that. Always, ALWAYS check, double check, cross-check and double cross-check anyone who wants to look at anything you keep secured for any reason. And even then, they could just be casing the joint for a later pen test.
Or and empty Coffee carafe, nobody bothers the guy making Coffee... or delivering Pizza.
@@ww8251 A thing like being the guy making coffee or delivering pizza either works flawlessly or gets you caught instantly. That's because it's meant to be someone doing something that nobody would want to stop, but it might be that nobody would ever be allowed to do that where you are. (For instance, it would absolutely not work for getting into any sort of proper archival storage.)
Unironically true. A ship fitted with (fake) maintenance equipment and cargo containers would likely go unnoticed until it opens one of its containers and boom, it's full of missiles.
@@evensgrey Unfortunately you and I are in the minority on this one ;)
The best stealth is honesty. The ship is exactly what it says it is, its cargo manifest and passenger list are accurate, it's not deviating from its properly-filed flight plan, and the crew has no ulterior motive or information that could give anything away. But...
A fingertip-sized rock (concealing a tiny solar-powered snooping device) fell off the ship at specific point in its trajectory, and coasted off towards its target, to be retrieved months or years later, by an entirely different ship.
A pin-sized card carrying terabytes of very illegal data is suspended in a grimy grease smear behind a life support hose, waiting to be retrieved by a cleaning robot in the hangar.
A chip full of digital minds designed for covert software intrusion was wired into a circuit board in the ship's refueling system, waiting to be activated by an unsuspecting dockworker.
Malware in the ship's guidance computer is waiting to spin the ship's main engine exhaust towards an unsuspecting habitat, as soon as it gets close enough.
As someone studying CyberSecurity, this is 100% my fear of what will happen when we live in space... There's no livable atmosphere to fall back on if our tech fails
In short, deception > stealth in space.
@@MiningwithPudding well... yes, but assuming you're not stupidly automated and centralized, it's not an issue. For instance, outside doors should only open with a local confirmation. There should be multiple pressure hulls between the exterior and the living space. Each living space should have it's own, locally controlled, life support systems, and there should be emergency pressure cabins with it's own life support system and multiple EVA suits inside. If, somehow, someone manages to kill main life support AND depressurize the habitat, you just fall back on your local support shelter (remember, it will take time for all of the atmosphere to evacuate the habitat) throw on your EVA suits, shut the doors and open the pressurized oxygen bottles. Then you can fix the life support system in shirt sleeves.
Torching a space habitat with a spaceship drive… where have i heared that before?🤔
Something about a glitterband…
Of course, this all relies on some random ship just happening to find and pick up a tiny rock in the middle of space...
Issac - "Sometimes you want the enemy to know what you are doing."
Reminds me of Dr. Strangelove - "The Whole Point of the Doomsday Machine is Lost if You Keep it a Secret!" dialog.
Agreed. They HAVE to know your super weapons exist in order to fear them. If they don't fear you because they don't know you can destroy them, then they will not capitulate to your demands. Sure, a surprise nuking sounds fun. However, if they knew you had nukes, you probably could have saved your plutonium for more important targets that still refuse to "see reason." That sort of thing.
"WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL THE WORLD, EH?"
@@laikkelynneross2800 I was playing around with a story idea of a power faking a new super weapon to frighten an enemy only to inspire them to actually make one themselves, possibily with the twist of that being the intention because stealing the plans would be faster and cheaper than doing it themselves.
shame nobody told the Soviets...i.e. Perimeter
Gentlemen, you can't fight here! This is the War Room!
Cartoons have taught us that anyone trying to approach stealthily is always accompanied with 'stealthy, sneaky, approach music'. Our detectors need only listen out for that music and they're busted.
Thank you for brightening up my day with your comment. I spit my drink out reading it.
Even so, we should still let the inconspicuous man with a mustache and thick glasses by. He's only here to perform routine maintenance on the habitats.
"I'm trying to be stealthy sir, but the clap of my ass cheeks keeps alerting the guards." -Snake, probably.
Don't forget the gold standard
The spaceship approach with a bush costume and tip toe piano key combo
@@Valkyrie0010Na. He wears form compression suits for just that problem.
A couple things that I think are not stressed enough in most discussions of "stealth":
1. You do not need "stealth" in all directions to be useful in most situations. You only need to reduce your signature in the direction of the detectors you want to elude. You can be bright as a flare at other angles if there are no adversary detectors in that direction.
2. Your stealth does need to render you completely invisible to be useful, only lower your signature enough that you are not noticed before you get "close enough". This could be close enough for your spy sensors, close enough to launch an attack, or close enough that the adversary cannot launch an effective intercept before you move out their engagement envelope.
I keep seeing these "there's no stealth in space" discussions that all depend on lines of reasoning that would also negate stealth in air combat.
- Your enemy has satellites that can see everything
- Your heat signature is bright enough to be detected from millions of kilometers
- Active sensors can pick up scattered returns
- You still can't hide from a visual search
All of which basically ignores the entire point of stealth aircraft. They aren't supposed to be undetectable, they're supposed to be just hard enough to detect that by the time you actually see them they're already in a good firing position, ready to kill you. Modern submarines and stealth aircraft work exactly this way: you can't actually "hide" a submarine from from any decently modern sonar, but you CAN avoid being noticed long enough to get into torpedo range. Ballistic missile subs have it even easier: American surveillance systems could absolutely locate every Soviet submarine in the Atlantic, but not all of them at once, and not at all times, and which means there's no guarantee that you know where all of them are. This is also the theory behind road mobile ICBMs: your satellites can probably locate them, given enough time, but if one of them is getting ready to launch, that's time you don't really have.
Basically: stealth isn't invisibility. Stealth is camouflage. The goal isn't to avoid detection, just to DELAY detection until it doesn't matter anymore.
Another role of stealth, particularly stealth in space, could be to build a relatively small number of stealth ships, but by doing so force your opponent to expend vastly more resources on that detection grid
@@davispeterson1876 Any battle strategy that depends on your enemy reacting in a highly specific way -- or making a mistake at that -- is a bad strategy. This is an excellent example: your enemy might not bother with an expensive detection grid and instead employ some kind of automatic hair trigger response ensuring total destruction on detection. A planetary "trespassers will be shot on site" policy would reflect a belief that the failure of a spacecraft to announce its presence with a transponder or filing of a flight plan is evidence of criminal if not destructive intentions, and then your stealth ships become much riskier to use in peacetime.
@@newtypealpha ok but in order to do any of the things you suggest they would still have to build some form of detection network. The point is that you can make a couple stealth ships, and your opposition would need to build a sensor network around every point they want to defend from those ships. Even if the ships can't penetrate the sensors, they've already forced the enemy to expend far more resources than you have. And if they DON'T build the sensors, then you have a small flottilla of stealth warships that your opposition didn't invest in a proper counter for. So either way you come out on top. The correct counter of course would be for your opponent to build both the sensors and stealth ships of their own in order to force you to build sensors as well, so this strategy would only really be useful if you have significantly fewer assets to defend (or if those assets are much more concentrated) than your opponent. Nonetheless there is a clear niche for stealth warships in at least the early stages of space warfare, before we get to the point where we can cheaply saturate the entire solar system in observation satellites
@@davispeterson1876 Unless your enemy is kind pf pacifist commune that doesn't normally even maintain a professional military, they wouldn't have to build anything they weren't going to build in the first place. You might as well be saying "The advantage of building fighter planes is forcing your enemy to spend a lot of money on anti-aircraft missiles." Which, in a world where air power EXISTS, is a weird thing for them not to be doing already.
The bigger point is that stealth detection systems are far, FAR cheaper than the stealth weapons they fight. A fleet of ultra quiet nuclear submarines would (and eventually did) cost the USSR half a trillion dollars to build and maintain over the life of the cold war. SOSUS only cost $16 billion over that same time period. Same thing in air power: $150 million dollar stealth fighter can still be detected by a $2 million radar and shot down by a $1.5 million missile.
If you have the kinds of enemies for whom poverty is their achilles heel, you should probably step back and rethink your life.
@@davispeterson1876 And the far MORE important point is that ordinary traffic control sensors would be more than adequate to track stealth ships. If your enemy can't afford to even monitor COMMERCIAL traffic in the skies above his planet, then the stealth ships are a waste of YOUR money, not his.
A stealthy smuggling ship is an important plot point in a story I'm working on, so this was great info. Thanks!
I wrote everything i can suggest , don't let my comment sink if you like it.
We don't yet know if planet 9 exists or not, so one does not need much Stealth, to sneak up on us.
@@mugin11223344 What?
@@quantum_chezburger2279 ??
@@mugin11223344 we are pretty sure planet 9 doesn't exist.
HAN: "Well, if they follow standard Imperial procedure, they'll dump their garbage before they go to light-speed, then we just float away."
LEIA: "With the rest of the garbage"
Funny thing is, empire never used that procedure from that on
@@АйбулатИсхаков We saw an Imperial ship go to lightspeed after that? Or before that, for that matter? (Not that you'd actually DO that, anyway. The equipment is worthless, but the MATERIALS are not, and doing that in inhabited systems, which they would visit frequently, would cost more than transferring it in dock because somebody would have to go collect it with a specialized ship.)
One my favorite episodes thus far and one that finely distinguish between no stealth in space and "no stealth in space" as it did provide many possible ways in which one can reduce its detection signature, among which was my favorite, that being using stars to hide your burns. What i'd like to address is that in the past, even now, and most likely in the future, stealth doesn't mean you won't get detected eventually, just that that detection might be too late or late enough for you to achieve some sort of advantage over the opposition.
On a separate note, just as two boxers, of a same build, same experience and same "skill" don't always end up in a stalemate, neither do two civilizations with similar levels of economic and technological development end up in one too. Not to mention that the race for better defenses to overcome current offenses and vice versa, extends to detections as well. So though maybe long term, the ability to stay hidden levels off to the ability to detect someone, it's possible to reach local "dips" and "peaks" that prevail one side or the other, but as the video mentions, that is not the scope of this presentation.
Exactly, unless both sides reach their absolute peak of technology there could always be one that temporary gains enough of an edge in technolgy to win the conflict.
Great episode. Clearly the best evidence that stealth in space *is* possible is the fact that we haven't yet detected anything stealthy in space.
Nice to see some people still have critical thinking.
would you like to buy some of my very effective alien repellent ?
That's not how science works. We can't say it isn't possible, but based on all of the evidence we have, it is likely not possible; at least given our current understanding of physics. That's how science works.
Thanks so much for this Isaac! I'm currently lorecrafting and have always deemed a spaceborne people to be so adept at detecting miniscule energy emissions that it's basically pointless to try to avoid any form of detection, much less visual detection.
So every spacecraft is adorned with decorative regalia or vivid markings, as a warning.
Your video has validated my decision somewhat.
Yeah I've wondered about that for spaceships down the road, if they might decide to go the peacock/blowfish type strategies if the chameleon one isn't viable. Look bigger, look meaner, or look cooler. :)
@@isaacarthurSFIA indeed! Gives great validation for awesome sci fi designs a la the artist Moebius for Jodorowsky's Dune.
@Riki 9653
You still have a lot of heat to hide or trick them into explaining away.
@@calvingreene90 The trick would seem to get them not to look.
@@DocFlamingo
If you can do that your invasion has already succeeded.
The most plausible one achievable with current tech (the Hydrogen Steamer and ATOMSS: the Advanced Triple Observability Mode Stealth Steamer proposed by Matter Beam of ToughSF blog) is to cool one side of the hull with liquid helium to match CMB temperature and radiate heat to the other side. Propulsion is done by expanding the exhaust gasses to very cold temperatures and near vacuum pressure as well. Though this type of stealth is very directional and time limited.
Cameras and projectors.
This reminds me of the "cold black mirror" in Anathem.
One could extend this further to surround the vessel in a modular cryo-shell, then carefully vecotor the heat along a more narrow cone. This would interfere with the already significant problem of radiant cooling. It might require a kind of sub-style "silent running" albeit one based on energy and heat rather than noise. The crew might be walking around in low lighting, eating cold food, with some hibernating, just to save on energy.
@@amyfox3877 The effectiveness of any heat radiator is directly proportional to how much of the "sky" is can radiate into. The narrower you try to make the emission cone, the less efficient it will be. And any ship with crew will need to keep enough power going for life support that turning down the lights isn't going to make a damn bit of difference.
@@keith6706 This is years old, I know, but the cool thing about the ATOMSS stealth design is (iirc) the propulsion system is a nuclear thermal rocket fueled by the liquid hydrogen/helium transferring heat from the hull, so the coolant doubles as fuel and the rocket has a long expansion nozzle (either curved or shuttered with pulsed operation) so the exhaust cools before leaving the ship. The result is theoretically perfect stealth. At a certain range, no matter what you do you'll be detectable from things like radar, but it's only a couple thousand kilometers, which is practically right on top of you in space.
One thing worth addressing: being difficult to *detect* and difficult to *track* are quite different things. It's perfectly possible to detect a fighter dropping flares but tracking it is very hard because you'll get distracted by the flares.
Same goes for being difficult to *identify* which is a more accurate description for what an craft trying to hide in plain sight among a crowd of objects the adversary wont consider a threat. In that case evading detection is not really the goal as you are not trying to hide the fact that your signature exists but rather alter it such that they fail to identify it as a threat. That is to say basically it is not an attack on their detection system but their IFF system trying to manipulate the latter into flagging a hostile object as something else ie a friendly or a neutral natural object. It is the trojan horse strategy disguise your attack as anything but an attack until it is too late.
I'm dismayed at how often 'drawing fire' seems to make someone running out into the range of an accurate weapon invincible or hard to hit. I mean just because a friend is firing a few bullets from a place of cover in no way stops a protagonist lying prone with a good rifle from taking out any running attacker with ease.
@@seraphina985 The phony IFF beacon gimmick will probably never work again. These were feasible in the days when IFF beacons were purely analog affairs, but modern ones are digital and can incorporate powerful encryption.
@@evensgrey if it was that simple we wouldn't need half the cybersecurity systems we do, it doesn't eliminate the option, just changes the parameters
@@James-ep2bx You appear to have entirely misunderstood. The cybersecurity systems make faking an IFF beacon entirely impractical. You'd have to defeat the encryption used, and it is not unreasonably difficult to make the expectation for the time to brute force a key longer than the expected lifespan of the universe if you could turn all the matter in the universe into supercomputers to work on this one problem. (Can you get lucky? Sure, you might get lucky and have short times to a few keys, but the expectation time is a statistical property of the problem, and that's how long you expect it to take on average to brute force any given key. And you can change the encryption keys in a military IFF system as often as you want.)
So what I'm getting from this isn't so much "there's no stealth in space" so much as "there's no perfect stealth in space." Sure, no matter what you do you COULD be detected but unless you are entering a fully developed system with a massive detection grid in constant action surveying the entire sky there are all manner of things you could do to simply not draw any attention to yourself. Fair to say?
Sounds about right. The best way to sneak into a place you don't belong is just to act like you do belong.
In Star Wars terms, "Fly casual!"
That's always been my read on stealth in space. There's no way to avoid being seen, but that doesn't mean you will be noticed.
There are roundabout ways, but all of them will fail with decreasing distance. For example, you could mount a huge array on your ship that cools down its skin to 2 Kelvin (background radiation) and dumps the heat in a direction where the enemy has no eyes using a shaped radiator. However, once you are close enough to your target you will be detected in one of two ways:
1. you go past one of their eyes (EG: you are approaching the Earth in stealth mode, redirecting your heat away from it. You pass the Moon. The terran moon base can now see your heat and warns Earth)
2. they see you directly through sheer proximity and a good telescope
You don't need a "fully developed system" or a "massive detection grid". We could deploy a highly effective space detection system _now_ that would cover a large position of the solar system, but don't simply because it would cost too much for something that pretty much doesn't exist, ie a hostile force you'd want to detect. None of the assorted detection methods to detect spacecraft is necessarily technologically more advanced than what we have available now, we just don't have the means to cheaply put them in position.
To give a simple example, say you have a sensor platform consisting of a wide-field IR telescope, a narrow-field higher resolution IR telescope, and visual telescope, along with the required power systems, communications, and so on. Or three satellites in formation instead of a single platform, whatever. The wide-field IR completes a full-sphere scan once every few hours, say six hours for a full scan, which is entirely doable. If the computer identifies an IR source that isn't in the catalogue of known objects, you point the narrow-field and visual telescopes at it and start looking at it more intently. Now put, say, a constellation of six of these sensor platforms 2 AUs out from the sun, in various orbits from near polar to closer to the ecliptic. This gives you a full scan, getting the most of the space in a sphere around the sun, on average once an hour (if you time the scans appropriately). If one sensor platform gets a hit, others can use their telescopes to take a peek as well, which vastly diminishes the ability of someone trying to hide.
Here's the bonus: set up your constellation effectively and you potentially have the equivalent of a telescope with a primary diameter of up to 4 AUs which gives you theoretically utterly absurd resolution with interferometry, limited only by how many photons you collect.
Again, none of this is technically outside our capabilities now, we just don't have the means to deploy it cost-effectively.
But, here's the thing, and it's an important one: if the system you're approaching doesn't have the tech to deploy s few of these sensor platforms, why are you even bothering to hide in the first place? If they can't afford or able to throw up what, for your tech level, are a few basic satellites (which have additional obvious secondary uses such as looking for potential impactors that could threaten the planet), while you're casually puttering around solar systems, why are you bothering to hide? it's not like they'll be able to do anything about it.
Omuamua (sp?) was a rock with unusual characteristics... got spotted within days of its close flyby of the solar system and its course projected. The question is really not, can you stealth in space, the question is, how far out before that stealth gets noticed. If you wanna just flit about sure, stealth, but the big issue... once you go anywhere that matters, stealth is off the table. You will be noticed. The options at that point become, can do a reasonably good job at being noticed but appearing to be something else.
I Guarantee if Omuamua (sp?) was on a direct course towards earth or its course would bring it to earth instead of away from us, we'd have been all up its grill looking for alot more detail... and if it was slowing down or adjusting course.. dead giveaway.
Great video, the one exception to the equal technology caveat is a temporary breakthrough. Similar to modern stealth aircraft if you develop a technology that enables stealth, you can hide it to maintain a monopoly on the detectors for a few years while still being at roughly equal technology levels as your opponent.
The best stealth might probably require a better distraction. Keep them watching something else, or blend into a crowd. It might be ridiculous to think about the last part without there being crowds of spaceships
It's hard to blend into a crowd when traffic control is probably going to require every vessel to carry an active identification beacon. That's not a matter of surveillance, either, active beacons are going to be necessary just to keep track of all the moving ships. While collisions in free space are vanishingly unlikely, a ship will almost always be going between two minimally mobile installations, and there is almost certainly going to be enough traffic around a lot of them to make collisions likely.
@@evensgrey this is true.
@@evensgrey Don't forget the issues of very nasty exhaust products creating a hazard volume much larger then the physical volume of the ship producing it.
@@evensgreythis is true but it doesn’t entirely negate the natural stealth support a space faring civilization would provide. Every non military vessel having a required ID signal that they are transmitting still means that any sensor’s computer will have to sift through all of that data, cross referencing every IR signal with every ID signal, singling out the IR signals not transmitting a corresponding ID. That’s a lot of computation and that’s before considering things like false IDs, or if you manage to be able to reduce your IR signal by cooling your hull or something, which would require even more computation because now it has to also cross reference IR and ID signal data with reported destinations and use that to calculate every signal’s likelihood of being a false flag. Or in the case of cooking the bill, sensors now have to cross reference the light you’re blocking (which is already harder to detect and requires many calculations for sensor computers on its own) with the expected blocked light from every asteroid, debris field, or any other object that doesn’t emit a signal to detect, in order to single out your ship as something that shouldn’t be there.
This is all also assuming your civilization even has an ID system. It might not require one for the simple reason of piracy which becomes an issue if there is no central checkpoint all traffic must go through before leaving the planet, and if spaceships are like cars and the average person can get on and off planet as they please that would be impossible. So would policing the solar system so effectively that piracy wouldn’t be an issue. It would be a lot for a government to ask its citizens to just constantly transmit a beacon calling any unwanted attention your way if that’s a common issue, and even if a government did ask that in a situation like that civilians would just simply ignore it for their own safety. A much more likely system would look like a restriction on the sensitivity and range of civilian IR sensors (no point in not requiring an ID signal if the IR signal is just as easy for pirates to detect), and only require ships to transmit an ID specifically to a traffic control tower when trying to enter the flight space of space stations, atmospheric infrastructure, terrestrial cities, etc. There would probably also be a civilian ban or restrictions on any IR signal reducing technologies if that exists again to reduce piracy but also so that militaries have even a chance at detecting enemy vessels using tech like that because again that’s already an incredible amount of calculations.
Happy "Self-Sustaining-Nuclear-Fusion-Reactor-In-Space"Day!
It has been many satellites-in-orbits since I've heard that one.
Ssnfrisd?
I prefer big firey ball of death day...
Also long it stays about one A.U. away, I cool with it.
"1,700,000,000,000 days without a single accident or outage" -- Tbf, I could do that too if I was allowed 500,000km of shielding material around the active core, but . . . budget cuts"
I love how you never run out of material, and even though most of your topics are derived from science or science fiction, it remains fresh and alive, even if we are talking about the black coldness of space. ;) I just wanted to say thank you. I've been a follower for a number of years now and there is nothing like what you have going on. Keep up the good work!
EZ solution: Just fly into a black hole, they'll never detect you again.
18:45
I only recently became an Isaac Arthur fan, I can't believe I didn't find out about him before, all your videos are freaking AMAZING. Your WHOLE CHANNEL is binge watchable, dude. Wow. My new favourite content creator on YT.
There's nothing like SFIA fresh out of the oven!
The nice thing about SFIA is it takes a long time to go stale
If ever. 😀
The Normandy-class Stealth Reconnaissance Frigate from Mass effect does stealth really well.
In Mass effect space combat is often conducted beyond visual range. As a result, most ships don't need windows and the ones that do would normally have them sealed by shutters during combat. This means that the Normandy-class doesn't have to be concerned with visual detection and has no need for the clocking mechanisms used in IPs such as star trek.
Instead, the Normandy-class attempts to avoid electronic detection with its Internal Emissions Sink(IES) Stealth Systems. The objective of the IES is to hide the ship's heat signature. This makes it invisible to passive infrared sensors and on active Ladar and Radar, it would register as a derelict or asteroid.
The purpose of the Normandy-class is to monitor hostile systems and drop Infiltration teams on hostile worlds
The IES has 2 components.
The first is Lithium heat sinks built into the ship's hull and the second is its Tantalus Mass Effect Drive Core. The Tantalus uses Mass effect fields(Dark energy) to create mass concentrations that the Normandy-class "falls into" allowing it to fly without the use of it's thrusters.
Limitations
The IES has a limit to how long it can sink heat before u have essentially turned the ship into an incendiary granade. Several days passively drifting. 3 hours during flight.
The IES doesn't work with FTL travel as mass effect's version of FTL travel blueshift's the ships emissions. Pushing them into frequencies to high to sink. Every time the ship enters or exits FTL flight, it's like setting off a flare. This limits the range of the Normandy-class stealth capabilities.
The Normandy-class is also very expensive. The 130m frigates costs about the same as a 700m Heavy Cruiser each and u could build drive cores for 12 000 fighters for the same price as a single Tantalus Drive.
Was going to argue about excluding the stealth by metaphorical flashbang of overloading their sensors, but then you went and acknowledged it as one of the valid workarounds, people often forget stealth is simply about the otherside not seeing you, not not seeing anything, or you being unseen. So stunts like smoke screen, distractions, etc. are a factor
Problem is, you've just told everyone where you are. It's the equivalent of a submarine generating a huge amount of noise to overload nearby sensors, which may work on someone within a few thousand meters, but anyone further away (or with less sensitive instruments) have it easy. In the case of spacecraft, it just means they can use lower-resolution and weaker telescopes to follow you since you're advertising your position.
@@keith6706 no stealth is ever been perfect as it is, it's always been, and likely always will be, a matter of choosing the right option for the right situation, to assume otherwise is to have a faulty understanding of what stealth is
If there's a technology that allows you to remain unseen, Isaac hasn't seen it yet... Perhaps it's already working?
This always assumes moving, which makes sense when you want to attack an enemy, but what about just hiding your habitats, cylinders, etc.
Maybe you dont want to attack, maybe you just want to be left alone, "stationary" where you are.
Could you make an episode about "stationary" stealth in space?
This was covered in "hidden aliens" th-cam.com/video/tEBn8bc0k-I/w-d-xo.html
@@IcEcho oh nice, i'll have to check that one out then :)
@@Conqueror933 I believe there are a few more on that topic, but it was the first I could think of.
Just put the thing in a asteroid belt, or build it into a asteroid, you just need to make it look like a asteroid, however, it's a one time trick.
I like the way Expanse does it, Speed up to as fast as you need on the rigth trajectory, kill everything that makes heat or emits energy, and on the true stealth ships, coat it in basicallyt hat B2 paint and have insanely big internal heat sinks
The heat has to go somewhere and the only somewhere is out. Now if you could come up with a place to put it internally you could get around that. Say a material with an astronomical heat capacity or enthalpy that could store heat for the duration stealth was needed.
@@bentuovila5296 usually yeah, the expanse ships either dump as much as they can before, dump/store atmo/ or have big fuckin heat sinks while they coast.
This kind of thing is why my favoured story stealth method would be tucking into a form of subspace bubble and have it be more like a 3D submarine to surface ship search and destroy. And if you have 'frequencies' involved then you could have an equivalent of 'depth charges' looking to ping off them and hit them to get a return... But that is just me :P
I like that. Like imagine using hyperspace to travel at FTL, but also to escape normal methods of detection, sinking deeper in 4d with the dangers it might entail or even travel across some particular currents where hyperspace guard ships aren’t common.
Watch Space Battleship Yamato 2199 they have a battle with a ship that is just like a sub in sub space forget which episode. Found the original Star Blazers version th-cam.com/video/WPLHJcIs3Is/w-d-xo.html
Forming a spacetime bubble would probably emit gravity waves that a LIGO style detector would pick up.
The novel Here Be Dragons had an excellent method of stealth, at least in-system. They had a reactionless drive, though an extremely weak one. The ship would make a burn, expecting to coast for months, but they had a few newtons of force pushing them to a different vector the whole time. By the time their foe (who assumed they were primitive and only bothered to track their ship by its exhaust plumes) looked for them, they were tens of thousands of kilometers away from the predicted path, and successfully evaded the intercepting fleet.
You see I know about this already through the spacecraft known as Prowlers in Halo. They do not use a cloaking shield or anything, you don’t really need that. What they do instead is they give off as little heat as possible. Prowlers are actually so good at this job that they are better than Covenant stealth craft, which are you know, honed over thousands of years of improvement. A little fun fact is that if exiting Slipspace, the ejection of all nuclear warheads and mines is required for full stealth because Cherenkov Radiation is given off when nuclear weapons exit Slipspace.
Yeah, one thing most pro-stealthists forget is that _my_ stealthy automated sensors are much harder to detect than _their_ stealthy manned ship.
Weird that this video isn't just a minute long with one phrase "stealth in space is impossible!" =)
:) I can do that in well under a minute - but everyone's been asking me for to deep dive the reasons why and possible workarounds for years.
Hello fellow SpaceBattler.
@Roger Brown One method involves the carefully timed release of an Isaac Arthur video.
It could help if you hide in a hole in an asteroid, provided of course that there is no giant space creature that wants to eat you also living in that hole. Caveat Emptor. - Don't go into a cave unless its empty.
Being stealth from a properly fortified and developed planet does sound near impossible. But in the event you’re trying to remain undetected from a lone starship or relatively closely packed fleet, you can use directionality much more to your favour. So long as you ensure the front of your spacecraft is conical and very reflective, possibly just made of multiple layers of spaced foil like the back of the JWST, you could reflect all thermal emissions away from the enemy, and all optical and radio signals transmitted at you wouldn’t be sent back anywhere near the enemy ship. Cold gas thrusters could probably provide a reasonable measure of stealthy propulsion, and of course very directional photon drives or particle beams could be ideal for this. As for occlusion, you’d just need to ensure that your optical footprint is comparable in angular size to other stray objects, be they space debris or naturally occurring asteroids. A plume of gas coming out of your spacecraft could be difficult to detect if you were mimicking or hiding behind a comet, and warmish planetary atmospheres or stellar winds could mask emissions from warmer engines. In all these instances you wouldn’t be accelerating very fast if at all, you’d be more likely sitting around while listening for enemy comms, biding your time and sending laser comms back to your own fleet.
When your distance to the enemy fleet is closer than the enemy fleet is wide, you’re going to have a hard time hiding your position and shape but disguising your vessel as a comet or other debris could still be fruitful, especially if it is just travelling in an orbit with only a little computer inside taking up power. You could use up more power if you connected or bored a parabolic heat reflector to the back side of the comet. That way you could even run refrigeration to pull the comet’s temperature below what it would naturally be, and this could work relatively close to the enemy. Of course, the fleet might get suspicious if a different piece of debris orbits past them such that they can always directly see at least one at any time, so best hide a tree in a forest. Hiding unwanted radio emissions might get very difficult at close distances, but only for a sensor designed to give off very little unwanted emissions itself. The closer you are to the enemy fleet, the more you’ll be able to hide your signature amongst that fleet. The same applies to gaseous emissions too, a fleet performing complicated manoeuvres would likely leave a cloud of spent propellant around itself, which will also serve to mask thermal emissions.
An extreme scenario may be flying inside a protoplanetary disc or supernova remnant or other very messy part of space, where stealth could be exceedingly easy. In proximity to a pulsar or other very strong magnetic field radio emissions would be very difficult to detect, and close to any old star thermal emissions would be hart to spot also.
And how do you know they haven't deployed sensor platforms doing the exact same thing as your ships and that they've been watching since you cruised by an undetected picket that now has a clear line of sight up you fleet's skirt?
@@keith6706 It's a function of time, have your stealthy microdrones been watching them long enough to see their stealthy microdrones manouver into place, or vice versa
I'm struck on how similar starship combat is to modern submarine combat. Directionality and target geometry are critical.
Letting an alien know you just detected it a light year away has a quality all its own.
Also, even if you can hide all of the light/heat your ship emits your enemy can detect you by looking for areas that are too cold/quiet relative to the area around them.
(For example, let's say there was an assassin that had a spell that could hide all of the sounds they make when they enter your detection field. If you listen for the sound you won't find them but if you listen for the spot that is completely silent regardless of the ambient noise around it then you will find the assassin easily. Needless to say, I got this idea from a manga with magic in it. but the point remains the same.)
If your ship makes even the tiniest difference in light/heat/gravity etc. between it and the surrounding area you can be easily detected.
Your assassin example illustrates the problem with this thinking. The only way to locate the quiet spot in a noisy room would be to walk around the room until you find an area where the ambient noise level drops. At which point you have just placed yourself within stabbing distance of an assassin. 🤷🏾♂️
How close do you have to be to detect that kind of variation against the thermal background? If that distance is less than the effective range of your enemy's weapons, the answer is "too close."
The title gives me Mass Effect flashbacks. Guess it's time to reinstall the trilogy, Normandy is waiting.
I love the level of thought in the world building of that universe
Absolutely amazing work as always Issac 😊
Infrared stealth is easy to achieve, and sustain, with current tech given a few particular conditions. It requires that the observer is looking at you from exactly one angle, that you are not under acceleration, and you know what the angle is. You run a power plant, use heat pumps to cool your hull on the side facing the observer, and keep the body of your ship between the observer and your heat radiator fins. You probably don't want to go all the way to 'invisibility' and the CMB background temperature - do that and your enemy's radar will detect an asteroid much too cold for its location. Instead you'd want 'camouflage' at the temperatures a local asteroid would achieve.
What about ships on the extremely small scale in terms of size? Like something the size of a grain of sand, or even smaller, piloted either by an AI or a digital consciousness. Could scanning technology really get to the point where it could detect the heat emissions of something the size of a blood vessel?
anything that small would have to have an external power supply, which suggests its being beamed power with a laser or whatever. and that laser could be detected, even if the microchipship can't.
@@lucky-segfault That actually depends.
I can see two options here:
1) The microships got up to insane speed before entering detection range.
2) They use a Sc-Fi energy source that is used to propel their tiny mass forward.
To be fair, advanced detection methods tend to be surprisgnly good at picking up small stuff.
@@peterpan4038 maybe, but whatever hardware is on the microchip is gonna need at least some power to continue working, even if it's just listening to radio signals and saving the interesting stuff for later recovery after it's passed thought the system. and there's not much room for a power supply in a grain of sand
With smaller ships you need less energy to change its course, but I think not for active scans. If you sent something the size and mass of a pinhead into the inner solar system, had it do passive scans (EM imagining, radio and laser intercepts). and then continuing on its orbit to a quieter place in the star system, I think it'd be pretty stealthy. It's still working uphill -- whatever is being scanned doesn't have to be shy about the power it puts into active scans.
@@lucky-segfault Not to mention that to merely observe your surroundings in any detail, you have to have a receiving array that's meaningfully larger than the wavelength (electromagnetic or gravitational) of what you are trying to detect...
Unless you're an inert hypervelocity kill projectile that's already been aimed and fired by something else, it's not very helpful to be 'unseen,' if you can't 'see,' either.
Elite dangerous allows a Pilot to turn off practically everything and run hidden to sneak into stations, but it builds heat and compromise the ship. It is still possible to get detected with a bit of bad luck.
My favourite "plausible" stealth in space ideas are:
-control of your electromagnetic emissions - directing heat away from known detectors, or focusing specific beams of tuned frequencies of light at detectors to avoid being detected as a "shadow" where light is expected (the latter point mentioned in the video).
-decoy/overload - instead of being invisible, be so excessively visible they can't pinpoint your exact location as a target. Scattered reflectors or light/heat sources that draw attention away from your real ship can divert enemy attention. If you have a swarm of bright attention-grabbing objects that you appear to just be one among many of, and the rest are harmless, you might be able to get through without being looked at closely enough to notice there's one that doesn't quite match. If your ship has a large "signature" marking its location, but could be at a random point within a much larger space than it takes up, enemy fire could easily miss, and that potentially risks hitting their own detection systems and making such detection even less accurate than it already was.
-Relativistic speed - quite simply, the closer you are to lightspeed, the less warning any potential detection provides. This is primarily how projectiles would achieve "stealth" not ships. If you're moving too fast to be seen coming, then it doesn't matter how agile the enemy is. If you're detected when you're 1 light second from a target, but you're travelling at 90% of lightspeed, by the time they realise you're coming, they have 0.1s to avoid the impact.
My in universe stealth ships are only a prototype class. They use a metamaterial hull that can change the spectrum it emits by lessening certain frequencies and adding that energy to others. There is a net loss in the amount of energy, as the material absorbs some. This is pulled out of it by internal heat sinks, usually the water reserves, but that can only soak up so much. This shifts their radiation spectrum away from all of the common ship "signatures" as well as going away from what normal sensors are tuned to detect. Its both harder to see, and takes more processing power to figure out what it is.
This isn't true stealth, it's closer to dazzling camouflage, looking so confusing to detection systems that it takes a while to figure out what they're looking at. This is generally enough time for a stealth ship to shoot first, and if that's a "dumb projectile" like a railgun bolt, it will hit. Those types of impacts are generally instant kills. In one side, out the other, with plenty of spalling in the middle.
Thing are also hidden more crudely inside a drive plume. By decelerating with the main engines straight at your opponent, your massively bright drive can blow out the very sensitive detection grid, like taking a picture of the sun. You can hide a less bright projectile you shot ahead of yourself in the over saturated sensor region. A hail of PDC fire generally isn't a threat at longer ranges as they don't stay on one target long enough to bore through the whole hull, but setting them to fire for a few seconds during the burn in will do some serious damage when they hit and the little clumps of iron will be hard to spot in the drive plume. Railgun bolts and missiles can also be hidden rather well. Of course, you are a very bright target basically asking to be run through with a railgun bolt, but sometimes crazy and stupid works.
On Star Trek's Treaty of Algeron... It was signed in 2311. The Federation tested the Genesis torpedo in 2284. Imagine a cloaked ship armed with multiple Genesis torpedoes.
It's supposed to be an instant terraforming device, but the longevity of the terraformed worlds is measured in days. It still makes for a very adept planet killer.
So I'm guessing the treaty prevents the Federation from having cloaking devices and prevents the Romulans from researching things like the Genesis device.
Stealth in space doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough to do the job. An example of that is in the The Expanse, where a group of terrorists made small asteroids hard to detect by coating them with stolen radar absorbing material, and then launching those asteroids toward Earth with as much velocity as they could impart to them. The first three of those did reach their target and caused widespread damage before Earth defenses learned how to detect and destroy the ones coming after them.
The question that invokes is... how'd the gleaming beacons of those launches not get detected?
@@Archgeek0 In that setting there are (at least) thousands of privately owned torchships burning around the system; the opening sequence of the show depicts a freighter capturing ice from near Saturn, which it hauls to Ceres in the asteroid belt to supply the inhabitants with water and air. IIRC the stealth rocks were slung from a similar freighter on a fairly normal course, so they weren't so much "launching" as simply "undocking."
10:06 America made nuclear bombs before Germany even though we were reasonably similar in technological progress my point is in arms race situation it is reasonable to assume that one country or race we have the technology before the others and be able to use that technology to devastating effect
The USA only held the monopoly on nuclear weapons for 4 years, though. There is no reason to assume a permanent technology advantage by one country, or a new game-changing superweapon every few years.
This is the reason why the Vulcans are not giving us any help. Becuase we are dumb like this, tit for tat, I will be surprised if our species makes it past this whole Rona mess.
@@blkgardner that was my point is if you have two reasonably similar opponents in an arms race one of them's going to get the bigger gun first and use it then the other will figure out how to make one but will only one has that weapon it is devastating
@@snikrepak what do you mean "makes it through this rona mess",tf has done to us?, economic damage?? that was self inflicted, death toll??? practically nonexistent/not worth mentioning even in passing, if anything thanks to leakyvx phenomenon, we have loads more variants now than we started with, and govs had the audacity to blame this on those who didnt take the weird juice.
I am not sure I agree with your opening statement about the only horizon to hide behind in space is a black hole's... even now- we are looking at regions near the event horizon and seeing details that come from behind the black hole, so it stands to reason that in the future, all sides of the universe surrounding a black hole can be seen if you know where to look, and if you have a great amount of resolution, and the right software, then rebuilding the map around a black hole will be as simple as the click of a button. A base near a black hole could have the best surveillance as it can just point a telescope at the black hole to view all directions around them at once!
Best bet would be hide your ship or ships inside an asteroid with engines off just life support- and let the asteroids coast deep into the enemy system under their own steam on a harmless seeming trajectory around the sun but one that brought you near your target world.
They really wouldnt stand out much - even if they are spotted they'd just be ignored. So its more stealth by deception.
Amen! I'm opposed to the prime directive as well.
I watched Apollo 17 take off from the banana river, and it lit up the sky brighter than the noonday sun. Roosters started crowing!
A civilization with any serious space presence is going to have a massive monitoring system as a matter of course simply to make sure their space-borne infrastructure doesn't get smashed up by random debris. Even if they have every mote of dust tagged, tracked and predicted for millions of years into the future, they're still going to keep a tight watch for random objects coming in from outside. We know these aren't all that uncommon as we've detected at least two in the last four years, and we don't have the infrastructure to detect small stuff that's a serious hazard to space infrastructure but harmless to a planet with an appreciable atmosphere.
I think most of this topic strongly depends on the diference between stealth and invisibility. I can't remember any invisible animal in real live (considering the size scale relevant to the animal) but have the idea that many of them are good in stealth and camuflagem. They achieve that by using the bling spots of those they are hiding from, they look like something else and choose to be where the adversaries are not paying attention. As long as your adversary's perception is not flawless you will have ways to use the imperfections in it. If you know enough about him, and if hide is important enough to bother.
One way to obtain stealth at any technological level often mentioned, and acknowledged here, that fiction authors often use in sci-fi, and just a little less often in fantasy, is some magical technology sometimes called "bribery". You just pay the eyes of your adversary to not see you, and make your living as an honest smuggler/terrorist mostly without problems.
Awesome, Isaac! Per your request, Stealth in space: *Temporarily* the most efficient heat sink possible would give a certain limited time during which the ship need not radiate. Use energy to cool the whole ship to invisibility, go minimal energy, only life support for central bridge, and use heat sink to keep stealthy (frozen hydrogen with boil off caught in a bag or used as a thruster?) Disguise yourself as a boulder and tumble towards L4. Sharp right, bombs away and good luck. :)
How about some sort of full-spectrum light-field display style coating, keeping the ship essentially close to fully transparent to EM; and using lasers to eject the heat produced inside, but used as a form of propulsion, and not straight on-axis with your intended thrust direction, but with true random (perhaps selected via quantum RNG?) directions in a hollow cone around the desired thrust direction, so even if some detector does fall in the narrow beam of the laser, it will only at most get a direction that does not point to where you're going? (and if necessary, also combine true random pulse intensities as well to further challenge distance calculations as well)
You say there's no horizon, but in a planetary system there are many small spherical ones. Quite useful against a point detector.
Hiding on the other side of the horizon is in fact the same thing as hiding behind the planet.
In Banks' novel Excession, the Culture mothballs some warships in an asteroid and gives it a shove on a circuitous route towards Affronter space, which wasn't a bad idea, but it gets betrayed by a traitorous ship that leads the Affront right to it. Just like you said, all these expensive plans can be foiled by an inexpensive turncoat or sympathiser.
True. Interestingly, alot of “stealth” in the Culture Universe is misdirection. For example, ships pretending to be a different, weaker and slower class, and taking the opponent by surprise e.g. the Sleeper Service.
@@mabus4910 And didn't the Abominator-class in Surface Detail pretend to be a rickety old Torturer-class back from the Idiran war? I had forgotten about these things
@@hovant6666 The "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints" yes.
"You know it's just our heat emissions that are hidden, they could look out a window and see us coming."
I remember an episode of blakes 7 where an entire planet was cloaked and the only way to find it was literally running into the cloaking bubble.
How about studying the movement of the other objects of that solar system? Something that worked for us already?
@@marrs1013 I think it might have been near the edge of the galaxy so no one cared to look that closely.
@@1KosovoJeSrbija1
Not familiar with the story. But as long as the object is part of the system, it effects the movement of other object within the system. Given your technology advanced to interstellar travel levels, the scan will be quick and sensitive enough to spot any cloaked object. Unless their technology advanced enough to cloak mass. But then what are they affraid of?
@@marrs1013 yea I don't think the people who wrote this show know how exoplanets are detected. But in any case you're right.
@Lawofimprobability Oh yea forgot to take into account that the show is from the late 70s
There was an anime called Starship Operators that is known for portraying space warfare more realistically (laser blasts are only detected after they hit, battles are fought far beyond visual range, etc).
In one episode, the protagonists' ship goes up against a "space submarine" that is almost impossible to detect using conventional detection methods because it is visually camouflaged to blend in with the stellar background and coasts on inertia to get in optimal striking distance.
The crew come up with a clever (though expensive) method of detecting the ship by firing a spread of torpedoes then detonating them at varying distances and having their onboard observatory spot the ship's silhouette against the flashes of the torpedo explosions with their high-powered telescope.
I think elite dangerous does a good job at showing how heat builds up in a vacuum. If you enter silent running and you don’t have heatsinks, you will reach critical hull temperature in seconds.
Seconds? I decided to drop my beluga into a star, it took over half an hour to get destroyed.
Here's a stealth method: a literal fog of war. Flood space with opaque particulates. I don't know how much you'd need, but in theory you could essentially turn space warfare into submarine warfare. It is two-way, but the underdog could use it for asymmetric warfare, and even one of two equally matched foes might find fog useful in specific operations.
You'd also need to up-armor the spacecraft to keep them from getting sandblasted down to their structural supports. Even a paintchip at orbital velocities can crack a reinforced windshield.
Hmmm. You'd need *a lot* of particles to cover a sizable volume. But if you happened across while someone was in mid-starlifting, that might give you what you need. cf: the "Storm Furies" rpg.
I listen to you every night while I fall asleep. Love your Channel!
Except that the sheer size of space allows so much space to hide, that it works as stealth itself. Just like WWII warships did hide in the (comparatively small) vasteness of the oceans. Just think of the japanese recon plane, that flew over the entire US fleet at Midway, without noticing it.
Awesome video and love the explanation between SF and space opera.
I love your videos and have been watching them for years
14:07 I propose we call this the Thermonuclear Flashlight. 😂
This makes me think of how cyber security would operate if clark tech existed. This was a great eye opening episode that has paradoxical moments
Am really interested to know if Issac has ever delved into the world of EVE Online? Anyone have any info?
Monty Python's Flying Circus had an informative documentary called "How Not To Be Seen".
Regarding the beginning, I think that an advanced space military would want to use stealth even if they could obliterate their enemy without.
By using stealth, you are better equipped to gather intel. That civilization you're attacking could have technology that would benefit your civilization.
I think the best "stealth" is to "hide in plain sight". That is to appear to whatever you wish to hide from as something it expects to see. It's surprising just how much detail can be hidden by a previously established prejudice. That, however, isn't something that can be accomplished by some technology. It requires hard work and preparation.
"sir that asteroid has an odd angle of entry into Mars orbit"
"how far outside the norm? roll the tap back"
"oh, it was a trans-Neptunian object a few decades ago"
The only source for true stealth in space is to paint your ship purple. It is the sneakiest color after all
What's the context on this?
Adjutant: "Admiral, there is a giant space-going bruise approaching the defense perimeter! What shall we do?" Admiral: "Fire all ice packs!"
@@quantum_chezburger2279 warhammer 40k orks
eg. 9:00 -10:00 -ish.
If the enemy can detect your ship at like a 1 light hour away (or better, like 1 light day away), it means that IF you had the engines on at 1 hour ago, the enemy WILL see you & there is NOTHING you can do about it.
In space, not only can no one hear you scream but you can't hide either without Clark Tech. Still stories and games using stealth are still good fun to read and play.
Not to mention quantum metrology, which can detect just a few entangled photons bouncing back from your radar system, unambiguously, even in a noisy background because the noise isn't entangled with the photons you produce.
23:00 At this point I remembered a story in which the protagonist had a choice between using something to spy on a planet that was either straight line and hard to detect or something called the Bendix Light Curve which could be seen but looking back through it they thought that you were way over there.
Thanks for mentioning the issue of the defender’s resource limit.
second episode this week, I am blessed
As someone who's been toying around with ideas for Das Boot in SPACE for a few years now. Seeing this title... I am getting my notebook primed and ready.
No mention of the stealth ships in the expanse series?
LOL! I slipped by my roommate Isaac and got my coffee. I avoided the horizon. I thought a lot about what you said about technology so advanced that it is inextinguishable from magic. So if I went back to the past and yet had my cell phone service, then I could be an expert at growing crops and an irrigation expert. To have the knowledge that we have at our fingertips now should have made us all into super humans, yet look at us now. We seem to still be weak. After listening to this stream, I have re-thought my place in this world. The deep thinking that I'm hearing has changed my life.
16:50
well, in theory, for on earth visual camouflage you could make something similar to a screen where every single pixel is a projector in turn
I read not too long ago about spiders that can travel through the air using the earths electric field, so if that's possible, maybe one way ships can get around is in the presence of a strong enough electromagnetic field, which seems like a stealthier way of travelling to me. You can also zip through gravitational corridors and slingshot around planets without using any extra propulsion and there are probably tons of other techniques we haven't even discovered.
I remember an episode where you described a Flatlander scenario where a person in our 3D universe reaches into Flatland and picks up a flatlander into the 3rd dimension, then puts the Flatlander back down into Flatland, and from the Flatlanders perspective, he disappeared from one position in Flatland, traveled in some psychodelic dimension for a bit, then reappeared in Flatland in a locked room that should have been impossible to get into.
Wouldn't that be the ultimate stealth way to travel? Leave your trail in a higher dimension? Then reenter this "plane"(?) at any point in space, maybe even time, you want.
What about decoys? say thousands of little hot "sparks" that shine as bright as your ship, but in order to engage the ship you'd need to sift through all the "sparks"
in today's terms, that's what we call chaff and flares.
Should have seen this episode coming.
23:20 "it's an older code but it checks out...."
All of the "stealth in space" variations I came up with were in the active/subversive category.
Paying someone to set noise levels on certain satellites in such a way your exact drive signature is ignored by the program. Knowing exactly where they are, and what they are looking at and skirt them, trick them...
Literally the more one knows about the topic, the less likely it is to come up with something.
I've read a sci-fi story where the shields work by manipulating and distributing energy with such control that it's possible to use them to prevent _any_ waste energy from escaping
That's used for stealth, though it does also result in the ship continuously heating up as the energy has no where to go, potentially cooking the crew alive if stealthed for too long
I've always suspected that high level gravity manipulation would be the clarktech you'd use for stealth. You could probably get energy to effectively orbit your hull if it was strong enough, and either way, falling twords your course at least removes your propulsion energy fir the most part
One way to achieve effective stealth would be to use your own post scarcity fusion powered automated economy to produce billions of decoy drones. Both your ships and drones would designed to produce similar emissions, with the ships being intentionally quiet (at least when the want to be stealthy) and the drones intentionally loud. The drones could also deploy large balloon or sail like structures to appear large on active scans. You wouldn't need to achieve a perfect deception. Just enough confusion that it would be impractical for the enemy to identify all of your drones, or so expensive for them that it would be a win for you in terms of resources allocated.
Not if your enemy uses a cloud of shrapnel, since shrapnel is cheaper than drones. So is electromagnetic noise, which remote controlled drones are horribly vulnerable to, due to the density of data in transmissions needed to control them. Simple jamming can render billions of drones useless that way, and worse, they might be hacked.
Ah, but what if they're robots? Well, you kind of have the same problem, as blinding sensors is easier and cheaper than spamming self-propelled decoys. Robots are also vulnerable to microwave radiation that damages delicate control electronics and causes shorts, EMP, etc, all cheaper than robots. If they are somehow proof against all that, there's still the shrapnel cloud flying into a bunch of blinded automatons.
at that point you can just go with canister shot RKM's that explode into a debri cloud to hit many objects at once. if you can send so many "decoys" you may as well just use RKM's which are pretty cheap & use the same canister shot approach to overwhelm their weapons
and that's not stealth. that's a mixture of deception & brute force. ur still visible to their detectors
@@arcdecibel9986 I'm thinking of these as a strategic rather than tactical system. You'd deploy them independently, well before a war, and have them spread all over, covering a whole solar system or more. Even if you converted a whole star into shrapnal, you would still be lucky to get even a handful of hits. Space is BIG. These also aren't dollar store drones either. They're only cheap and disposable relative to a full on warship. They'd be shielded to some extent against radiation, so you'd need a focused beam to kill them, which they can easily avoid just by firing their engines randomly every so often. You'd have to go out and kill them with your own drones, and kill drones are necasarily a lot more complex and expensive than decoy drones. They'd also probably be autonomous from the start, since their job is incredibly simple. The don't need to be in any particular place either, so even if the enemy could somehow blind them at such huge distances, they can just keep moving around on blind reconing. As long as they're somewhere in the solar system they can do their job.
@@virutech32 Well yes, stealth is kind of pointless when you can just launch RKMs at everything. I'm just saying this is how you could do it, if for some reason you wanted to. Maybe there's a MAD type situation with RKMs or something but a "conventional" war is happening, or maybe some conflict smaller than a full on war but still involving shooting.
I did call it "effective stealth". You're not invisible, but there are so many decoys that no-one knows where you are until they get some platform close enough to distinguish you from the decoys, or until you decide to light off your drive at a high power setting.
@@TonboIV sure but if ur in a position where you can just waltz an entire swarm into the enemy's orbit u aren't using stealth. clearly u aren't at war & they aren't trying to actually find you. at that point u just stow away on someone elses ship.
if you are at war, & even if you weren't, if u send a big enough swarm of ships to overwhelm their sensor networks the enemy will have a very good excuse to open fire at all of your ships. there's no way to avoid it since the enemy can just say that their sensors weren't good enough to tell apart decoys & they can claim the honestly though those were all warships
anyways that's not effective stealth that's just a trditional massed attack. stealth means you are not being detected beyond certain ranges. stealth refers to the difficulty of being detected not identified.
I'm writing the 1st part of this before watching the episode. Okay, a parabolic reflector, with the outside super absorptive and refrigerated to the cosmic IR background level, with the ship at the focus. This would take filling out a swarm of surveillance devices filling out the volume of the solar system you want to protect. I think that's pretty good, and that doesn't rely on Clarketech. Also, it's a dirty trick to exclude hacking., re: a parabolic reflector stealth ship. A ship that could emit only across a narrow arc would benefit tremendously from some judicious hacking of just a few such enemy surveillance stations. Yes, stealth ships will be difficult. This is precisely why they will have tactical value at some point: It will be so difficult, no one will expect it. 2nd Part: Okay, so Issac is appealing to the scale of Kardashev 2 Cvilizations. The thing about this, is that the odds of civilizations on such scales would be completely unified is very, very small. As far as near peer opponents go, it will most likely be different factions within the same K2 civilization. This means that stealth without some kind of hacking and skullduggery wouldn't work, but the likelihood of limited stealth *combined* with hacking and skullduggery would be *very* likely! 3rd part to follow:... Stealth ships would use mass drivers and would not maneuver very much. Again, this would fit in very well with conflicts between factions within a K2 civilization.
I think one of the most practical immediate term prospects might be using very cold helium as exhaust and coating your ship in liquid helium. That way the exhaust plume and the ship itself both have the thermal signature of the cosmic microwave background. Though I guess the problem becomes how to dissipate heat when you're colder or equal in termperature to your environment, and how to get Helium to move at extremely high mach numbers to get a reasonable ISP, seeing as gaseous helium at 2.7 Kelvin has a soundspeed of like 200 mph.
@Isaac I think civilizations in a galaxy will be at diverse levels of technology. So although some of your space faring competitors will see through your stealth moves, many others will not. And you won’t know this ahead of time unless you’ve collected intel.
I do get your point that visibility of a rocket flame is fare more noticeable than movies let on. And that sneaking up on a K2 civilization would be extremely difficult (you outlined several very good reasons why). I like your discussion on how active sensors in space would work. That’s always been a mysterious topic until now.
Hey, so what qualifies as a "tight turn" at tens of km/second?
Well, it's one reason why in sci fi writing sometimes it really is desirable to have a world with its own handwavey super-physics, or, for instance, reasons why the antagonists just aren't looking that hard either, (like, in Firefly, and its very handwavey physics, the big bad gummint is *also* sneaking around a whole lot so doesn't seem to want even too many of their *own* people to be able to know everything about their movements, so you can still have lots of sneaking around. )
eg: 16:00 - 18:00 -ish.
What if when you leave your system, pick up an asteroid, accelerate it towards the target opponent, land on the asteroid, dig in the ship into the asteroid so it is physically camouflaged? (then set an alarm on your hibernation pod). So all the enemy sees is a "normal"(?) asteroid moving towards their system, that "happens" to come from an opponents territory, but it isn't going to hit any planets*
(*Meh! might as well send a few PetaWat+ beams at it anyway, it DOES come from an enemy territory anyway.)
the most elegant way is the SEP field from the hitchhiker's guide :D
Nothing the roci can't handle :)
While I love the roci, it has no hull, no shields, no gravity plating to stop the sheer acceleration of the ship turn you into hamburger meat, radiation shielding and a ton of other things. Not to mention no portholes or even a canopy to see out. Honestly fighting in the Rocci is the most ballsy way I have ever seen, Teflon coated rounds punching holes the size of canned beans past your legs, head, arms... Not to mention the rail guns and future tech we will invent. Conventional munitions like bullet and cartridge types, work in space, but becuase of how they work, it would be a problem all the time cleaning barrels and maintenance would suck, a high energy particles beam would work much better, and no need for extra space and crew to fire and maintain it.
I was going to build some stealth spacewships--but then things got really crazy at work.
The best stealth trick is arriving just seconds after your signal does
I'm fairly sure Douglas Adams had a fairly good idea for a stealth system in his S.E.P. (Someone Else's Problem) field. If everything that perceives the object covered by an S.E.P. field believes that it is someone else's problem that object is effectively invisible. It may not be true stealth but it is the most reasonable solution.
Damn, beat me to it.
Its the most funny solution, realistic? Well, depends. The only realistic solution i can think of, is really just a disguise with extra steps, custom tailored to look like something really nobody wants to deal with. Like a type of traveler that is a legal grey area where various agencies keep pushing the envelope to others about whos duty it is to deal with it. Or something nasty nobody wants to touch, and checking closely would mean its their responsibility to take them in, like refugee convoys or something.
@@_Muzolf I'm guessing you're from Z Z plural Z Alpha... So I hope you know where your towel is ;)
Honestly, Stealth tech is always only as good as the detectors... so logically the best stealth is one that people look at and go... probably a bird.. or a blip or not my business. Most of the best workarounds depend on someone just not caring... just look at computer security. So all your disguises would be valid... a trojan if you will. XD
@@styxdragoncharon4003 Ha, i wish, its just the initials of my actual name.
There are no space birds i am afraid, not even space ducks. So hiding your power level will not help much either.
But other then that, i absolutely agree. Best is to work with what you got, which is probably civilian traffic, trash and rocks. Just don`t count on lazyness too much. For every ten radar operators who dismiss your spy ships as more debree, there is a conspiracy nut who thinks every debree is alien spies, and there is nothing worst then your billion credits spy operation getting busted because you gave the nutjobs something they never had before, evidence they could show someone.
@@_Muzolf Z Z plural Z Alpha is where Earth exists in Douglas Adams books (so I assume you're from there)... and never discount space ducks.
There is a reason why I don't develop stealth tech... I'm too lazy to get the degrees necessary to do the work. I do fix computers and I could go on for hours on the dumb things people do with those not realizing how dumb it is...
In Project Hail Mary, the Hail
Mary ship emits some enormous amount of infrared (like becomes the brightest object other than the sun) as it accelerates to relativistic speed and that really struck home about how bright a speedy ship would be. Really interesting push back against the norm in this video and by Andy Weir.