There is the general spoiler page for general questions.
I’m making this set of pages for more specific questions.
The rule is: do not ask or comment about a book until it has been at least a month in issue. I think that will make everybody happy re spoilers.
Ummm Maker Of Filo? (Pastry)
What do you think, is that “spacey” enough? *smile*
Mo Farah?
Inspired, truly inspired. 🙂
http://mofarahrunningawayfromthings.tumblr.com/
🙂
Just found this blog/site and just caught up on 14 pages of posts, and now my head is spinning. Some random thoughts that have occurred to me as I read:
– All wars, no matter what the pretext are based on resources: scarcity, acquisition of resources the other guy has and you do not, etc. Makes me wonder why there would be a war if human and hanan space did overlap. Unless humans start it. Would not surprise me a bit.
– Spacefaring diets. This occurred to me when watching Firefly too… The human body gets pretty out of whack without sufficient dietary fiber and the right balance of vitamins and minerals. There might be plenty of ways to synthesize protein but I can imagine all sorts of health woes without adequate fiber, supplements and nutrients. There should be quite the industry – on every station – of food production beyond fishcakes and algae and yeast. Or all the rejuve tech in the world will not help extend lives!
– Lifesupport. Being dead in the water without a working engine has got to be a spacer’s worst nightmare…. or is it? Wouldn’t the lifesupport (water, oxygen, other gasses needed to make up “air” ) be the highest priority either on a ship or on a station? I know that hydroponics to generate oxygen is an inefficient way to deal with lifesupport, but wouldn’t it work on a multi-level basis, dealing with food supply, trace element needs, psychological needs for living things, as well as generation of oxygen? Has this been rejected by authors because it’s just too dang inefficient when you run the numbers of cubic feet utilized versus ROI? I was thinking of all those empty cabins on Lucy/LeCygne and how they could be made into warm temp storage/transport space for low mass high value goods like live food plants, herbs, rarities like flowers or strawberries…
Maybe I’m just hungry.
‘All wars, no matter what the pretext are based on resources: scarcity, acquisition of resources the other guy has and you do not, etc.’
Although we humans think we are so above other forms of life on our planet, in practice we are replicating what goes on throughout the Animal Kingdom – though of course other animals do not have weapons of mass destruction and all the rest of it. It is all about our survival instinct and the survival of the fittest. The difference between us and other animals is that we have consciences, whereas other life forms do not…
(It is around 30 degrees here in London, so I’m apt to babble a bit at present.)
One of the most efficient growers is algae and cyanobacteria…it’s so fast you can literally watch it multiply, given any spectrum of light and warmth. Cyano produces oxygen; and if you have nanotech, you can literally pull the old alchemist’s trick and reassemble molecules into what you want: Star Trek’s energy inefficient cafeteria… could actually work. I’d prefer to bulk-produce raw materials for a synthesizer to put together: ie, enough calcium carbonate and enough amino acid and some h20 (more stable to store it that way, but getting hydrogen broken out of the o2 is an energy hog) —all the same, if you just pour the right stuff in at one end you can get pretty appetizing stuff out the other, complex sugars and proteins, etc. I play with a lot of this stuff just growing corals, which are extremely basic in structure, but which are really efficient at utilizing sugars from indwelling bacteria, sucking dissolved calcium and magnesium out of seawater, and eating just about anything small enough to get sucked into their little mouths— Machines or converters can be like that. Set them up to use a certain basic stuff for a certain basic output (in the case of the corals, more tissue and a calcium carbonate skeleton) from light/warmth and just about anything capable of being dissolved in water. Machines in a certain sense need not be gears. They can be tissue-like and self-replicating. But pretty yucky. One of the things the big ships haul about is chemicals. Lots of chemicals that can be turned into something else. Calcium would be a big one. Our muscles and our bones both need a lot of it. Sodium. Another big item. [It’s really amazing when dormant coral starts eating: I was lazing along putting a half a teaspoon of calcium a week into my tank to keep them happy, but when 6 to 9 coral polyps woke up and started sucking it out of the water, I went to half a teaspoon a day, to a teaspoon a day, to 3 teaspoons a day, and at 18.00 a jar, I rapidly decided there had to be a better way. [there is.] THose 9 heads filled my tank inside a couple of years and I’ve since traded off about as much as I still have in the tank.]
There are days when I want a machine that will produce Rainier cherries on request in January… along with anything else I ask for!
I was assuming that there was, in the not-detailed background operations of stations, a whole segment of the economy of generation of synthetic foodstuffs. But I recently re-read Cyteen and Merchanter’s Luck, and it seemed to me that natural and rare foods (oranges, coffee, chocolates, fruit) were still part (okay a small part, for a limited few) of the diet, and desirable. This made me think about both the economic aspects of food sources in a mostly space-based society. It just seems so costly not to mention dang difficult to transport fruit however many light-years. Chocolate is a different matter of course! If I was on a ship or on a station I’d have pots of herbs in my cabin growing in that gel medium instead of soil, and barter them for goodies! Where I’d get the seeds would be a good question, but seeds are lightweight and easy to transport.
Someday there will be really good synth…but Ari’s taste for synth cheese, acquired in childhood, is not shared by the general population.
Cyteen has areas that can be modified to create microclimates for certain sorts of agriculture, under the weathermakers, but the need to produce staples still overrides the use of much luxury production. They’re still expanding at an exponential rate, and agriculture is more geared to basics…yet. The very rich have these luxuries. Most people have no idea of anything but the synth version, but what they don’t know, they can’t want.
CJ, I’m wondering how you imagined “active scan” worked. I always assumed it was essentially RADAR.
Oh, long-scan? It’s part radar, part knowledge of ship capability, the closely guarded ‘ship cap’ which is subject to fine tuning—ie, what can you do without having your crew unconscious, how long *can* you trust your autopilot in this region, how crazy are you, what’s your history, who’s in command, and who’s at helm—none of which a ship advertises—plus knowledge of the starsystem, the position of rubblefields, and the colored ‘cones of probability’ that are a little like figuring where a hurricane’s going to be. When you fire, you fire at ‘estimated’ future location. The reason it isn’t radar per se is that the ships travel too fast, and the distances are too great. The other player is the system buoy, which continually provides (or lies about) the location of everything in the system, updated by the second, but which is time-lagged in delivery to YOU, and the fact that like pirates, the attackers may fly false flags, ie, give out the required identity squeal they’re to emit constantly, but give it out as if they’re a merchant; or just not squeal at all.
So long-scan is part guess, part science.
Got pretty much all of that from the stories. But if, fer instance, the buoy at Urtur has been shut-up, (Seen that! 😉 ) and, say, we need to get to Urtur Station? Charging in to an inknown situation at a respectable fraction of C might be a little too bold. It might seem the better part of valor would be to hit the vanes hard early and come to drift velocity for a look-see. We will only know approximately where we are in the jump range. We really need to be able to locate that #10 gas giant it orbits. We’d know where it should be from the system emphemeris. But to twist the Cheshire Cat’s tail, if we don’t know where we are we can’t chart a course for somewhere specific. Might help if’n we could see it. Star systems are large, but light is fast: 1AU in 8’20”! RADAR will locate solids: ships and rocks. Good thing to have. Not sure it reflects off gas giants though! 🙁
In short, it seems a little naive to depend entirely on system buoys. I’d want as much in-ship capability to ‘scope things out as it would be possible to have! Seems like they can dropping into Tripoint, ISTR.
The problem is the lag time in radar. You’ve got to ping it and still they and you have to be in range of the ping and the echo, even at light speed. Passive reception, ie, really good optics and computer analysis of areas for something shiny that shouldn’t be there, but as you point out, that’s a big slice to hunt in. OTOH, the extreme velocities do NOT allow freebies like quick course alteration, so if you can spot your track and predict whether or not they braked and how much, you could calculate where to lay fire. The ones that can shift vector at high vee are the knnn, and you have to ask what on earth sort of drive they’re using.
I’d guess Newton’s Third Law is just one more regulation that the knnn don’t understand or comply with. ☺
But the knnn aren’t ON earth, at least, not that we know. Maybe that big fuzzy mop I have is a knnn field agent in disguise, but I don’t detect any methane handling equipment. Maybe it’s funneling it out of my furnace and/or water heater gas lines. Anyway, do any of the methane breathers understand what the knnn have and how it works? If they’re curious, do they get in trouble with the knnn, such as maybe a tentacle-slap and told to back off or is there a more sinister punishment – taking a roller coaster ride with a knnn ship’s tractor beams holding you tightly?
Or if they’re ducking out of this universe.
Never mind the trade regulations.
Regarding cap: that’s the way it is within the books, at least. A more modern realization is that cap is *impossible* to conceal, which kicks one leg of the whole concept’s tripod out from under us. A passive reading of the temperature and spectra of the main engine’s output (something any stellar cartographer can do) will reveal exactly how “hard” one is pushing. Harder=hotter, obviously. Correlating that against observed acceleration will tell anyone with a working sense of math how much thrust your engines are developing to achieve said accel, and therefore what your ship’s weight is, to a fairly high degree of accuracy.
Yeah, “crazy” comes into play a little with exactly how many G’s one is willing to pull making a turn, but there are some clear if not absolute limits as to how hard one can push and still be functional, never mind combat-capable. I’m not sure it’s *that* significant of a factor.
“Cap is imposible to conceal”… except how do you know how much margin he’s carrying? How much cap isn’t he using? A tactically-minded skipper will work very, very hard to never push as hard as he can, in waiting for That Moment When It Really Matters. And, how do you know what his mass is right now?
Without those data, you are only guessing. Useful guessing, but guessing still. If them Bad Guys are firing inert projectiles, they have to be absolutely dead on to score a damage at all.
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CJ, I understand the up-front economic advantage of firing inerts as warshot missiles, but it seems to me that the same economics (how much volume/mass cap can you spare for the umpteen kajillion cannonballs or rods needed to actually damage someone) point one toward active-homing missiles–or, hmmm, how about passive-homing (on scan freqs). Yes, active homing advertises where you are (it is) and invites countermeasures, but still…? Maybe it’s old Navy pilot in me, but it sure seems that active-homing missiles with proximity warheads have their advantages.
Oh, and while we’re at it, kudos to you for chaff as a weapon, BTW!
Reading exhaust spectra tells you precisely how hot the engine is burning, i.e. how hard it’s pushing. Observation tells you how much “move” was derived from that amount of “push”. Power engineering specs (easy if you have an identical unit of your own for comparison, or get data from Earth) will tell you what the engine’s rated capacity is, what the theoretical maximums are (how “hot” it can get). Even with no specs, comparison of observed power (ratio of effort to result) between a carrier coming in to fuel up and after it’s loaded — the quantity and weight of all stores loaded will be known or can be assembled — will give you a pretty good idea what the ship’s power curve is, you can extrapolate up and down from there. It’s a lot of math, but that’s what computers are good for.
and how many g’s the ship is internally rigged to accommodate. Plus recall that a passive reading is some hours old, scattered by whatever particulate is in the way, that in-system engines do not ‘burn’ once inertial v is achieved and how much of the v is gotten rid of and when by which ship of several is up to the plan at the time. So it’s still spywork and guesswork.
If one bases their evaluation of capability on the engineering plant, then you must also incorporate the fire-control system, the weapons, range, etc., and there is no guarantee that what you think the enemy has for weapons is in truth what they can use. (archaic example, “Big Bertha” in WWI hitting Paris from 75 miles away. Sacre bleu!) They might have put a stationary object in your path without you knowing about it, and if you’re coming in anywhere close to C velocity, you won’t have time to maneuver away from it before you and it merge on a subatomic level. Even in modern warfare, such as we know it today, we still need to try to get as much information as we can on the opponents. After all, they might be getting arms supplied to them by a “neutral” third party country. Maybe that country has an advanced weapons technology industry and it’s impossible to get anywhere near any part of that industry to “spy” on them. Surprise is a very big factor in gaining the offensive momentum you need for warfare. If they surprise you with a new weapon, you are going to have to take time to figure out how to counter that weapon. That’s way above my head, I was in communications, figuring countermeasures is for the big boys with the gold stripes on their sleeves.
The squishy humans are probably the weakest link; aerobatic stunt pilots, and special-suit-wearing fighter jock can take roughtly 10G for fairly short periods of time. I’m assuming the ship fittings were designed for that, assuming worst-case. Improper maintenance and jury-rigging will reduce the amount of G-induced mechanical stress the fittings can tolerate before breaking loose. And I *know* that they don’t burn their mains like jet engines, but ANY burn will serve the purpose for a suitably-equipped observer. And a decel burn after turnover does have one’s engines conveniently pointed right a planetary/station base with full-spectrum scan capability and enormous computational power that could be brought to bear.
In active tactical combat, yes, the incomer is moving faster than its wavefront, you’ll find out where it is but too late to do anything about it. What I mean by “impossible stealth” is lurking in wait, at null points for example, or sneaking up on a planet. Simply having functioning life-support gives one a radiant signature equal to (according to someone who’s done the math) a 14th-magnitude star. Anomalies in the starfield or observable motion should be a cause for immediate alarm.
“In active tactical combat, yes, the incomer is moving faster than its wavefront, you’ll find out where it is but too late to do anything about it.” Nothing moves faster than light! But yes, having time to respond has always an issue, even in historical times. The kif threat to drop a rock on Anuurn was real. (Shades of “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”?)
(We didn’t see tactical conflicts using jumps in-system. I agree it’s not useful. If one is jumping deep into a system from outside, you’ll be blind to what’s waiting for you. And your wavefront will precede you at whatever fraction of C you still have. Both Chur and Dur Tahar setup drops out of jump firing, but they were firing blind. But this is beside the point of what sorts of long-range scan AUC ships may have.)
“Simply having functioning life-support gives one a radiant signature equal to (according to someone who’s done the math) a 14th-magnitude star.” Really? That seems a bit extreme. I don’t think the Apollo missions were that bright. 😉
“Anomalies in the starfield or observable motion should be a cause for immediate alarm.” Certainly, but the question is how, other than emissions, reflections, or in the case of really massive objects (anything at nearly C relative?) gravitational attraction?
A ship coming in from jump is aimed (if I understand correctly) more-or-less directly at the star; the deceleration burn will be the vector sum of something in that direction plus some burn to rendezvous with the planet or station of interest—not “conveniently pointed right a planetary/station base with full-spectrum scan capability”. Depending on your last jump point, the angle may be sufficient to be masked somewhat.
(Of course, any system will have scan stations—buoys, really—which will be actively-positioned in line with the known jump points. But there’s speed-of-light lag from those buoys to the inhabited parts of the system. Also, those are extremely vulnerable to hostile fire: just fire a grain of sand ahead of you before you dump v and the buoy will be a heap of rubble seconds after it sees you. The system will be warned you’re coming in, but not how big or how many you are.)
I think you’re wrong about the impossibility of hiding. Your radiation signature doesn’t have to be the same in all directions: a bit of IR-reflective foil and you’re not radiating in the direction of likely observers.
G tolerance is a function of duration as well. I does put a great strain on the heart. But then one supposes the knnn may not have hearts. But I’m not thinking of either combat situations nor non-anthropomorphic species.
If’n I were a AUC ships captain, I’d want RADAR or something equivalent, for situations where I’m not forced to be “lying doggo”, i.e. hiding, nor in a special hurry and I want to know what kinds of solid objects are around.
For example, Jupiter is 5.2AU from the Sun, so between 4.2-6.2 AU from Earth. A RADAR pulse from Earth to Jupiter takes 35-52min one way, call it an hour to an hour and a half round trip. But if all I was trying to do is “range” it, determine how far it is, that’s not an unreasonable amount of time. Though I have some doubts RADAR would reflect from Jupiter as it does from Mercury.
Seems to me RADAR would be an essential part of “scan”.
Oh, there is radar, and some of it is also on the deployed rider-ships, which provide a patchwork quilt of info, which may be in different velocity referents. The scan station on the carrier involves a lot of people watching a lot of screens with programs that are running probabilities as well as the incoming data from everything that’s transmitting or reflecting, (or not, and should be.) Radar will never lose its usefulness. Neither will human brains. Scan One sits atop this pyramid of information, but right underneath is another several very important people who are analyzing the analysis, and being very sure what they tell Scan One is the best info available. Scan One is also selecting which items to bring to Helm and the officer in charge.
I suppose under the rules of physics using laser pulses and timing how long it takes a telescope trained on the spot to detect the blip, “LIDAR”, amounts to the same thing as RADAR. Just different frequencies. I’m trying to think of other ways a ship might have for “long-range” sensing. Not too many I can think of. 😉 Less than a handful so far. Emissions, reflections of a different source, reflections from a shipboard source, unless it’s real massive, i.e. gravitational attraction.
Even LACK of emissions, ie, a shadow. It’s how planet-hunters detect a planet, if there’s a ‘cold’ object transiting a star or other source. Kepler (planet-hunter satellite), for instance, stares unblinkingly at a starfield, as a human can’t. When something anywhere blinks, something’s out there. OTOH, what Kepler sees now is a planet as it was when we were painting on cave walls.
One of the harder things to grasp is time-packets. You may have rider ships that were shed at certain v, and for them, time and the rate and scale of decision is one thing, and information received is compressed in the direction of motion; another set of ships shed at a different v have another reality. And the carrier has a third. The Hellburner project was not only the hardware, but about figuring out the human component, ie, how well does a human decide when faced with not only the physical stress, but the compression of reality…and should the rider ships be wholly roboticized or do humans still have a place in decisionmaking, and how crazy do you have to be?
How much of a shadow can a ship a few AU away cast against a nearby star? (How many light-years is the practical jump limit?)
The more I consider it, the more I think you might not have portrayed the Hellburner pilots as twitchy and jumpy enough for the job they’re doing. 🙂
The farthest planet yet detected is a Jupiter + size around a star 17000 ly away…that’s, re the scale of ‘shadow’ detected, pretty small, re, say, finding a ship occulting a batch of stars all at one go…ie, robots are real good at spotting a tiny blip in the numbers that we wouldn’t notice, primarily because we’re smart, and, like the Hellburner pilots, learn to ‘average’ out the noise, and ‘bots are stupid and just take it all in, no brain to appreciate the significance of the blip, just the facts, thank you, but good at what they do. If we noticed everything the way the ‘bots do, we’d be zooier THAN the rider pilots. 😉
But you’re right—as I see them, the breed is likely to be quite twitchy.
FWIW, there is an exoplanet database at:
http://exoplanet.eu/
AIUI, a ship dropping out of the interface out in the jump range its sudden presence in space-time throws a “signal” out ahead of it (having a senior moment coming up with a better word). That signal is traveling at C, but the ship is slower, even if it doesn’t dump. If it doesn’t dump its relativistic mass enhanced momentum doesn’t allow it to maneuver. So if it doesn’t dump it may be coming in before in-system can react, but it’s options for what it can do will be limited. It can’t maneuver.
It just occurred to me that depending on it’s relativistic mass, from off axis it could be detected by microlensing as it passes stars.
“IR-reflective foil” does damn-all good against the absolute zero background of space. You still radiate!
Paul, that was a typo, fingers outracing thoughts; I meant to say, at high-relativistic speeds, “when your real self follows the wavefront of your emergence…”
We’re also talking about stealthing starships with (presumably) terawatt-rated powerplants, not primitive tinfoil space lifeboats.
Okay, I found the text I once posted on the Shejidan forum. It was easier to find than the game rulebooks I originally cited this from, “Attack Vector Tactical” by Ad Astra Games. The game’s creator (Ken Burnside) strives for mathematical plausibility in Newtonian physics if not full rigorousness. It’s a fairly direct quote, with some paraphrase by myself.
***BEGIN QUOTE***
Space is vast, but mostly empty. Space is also dark and cold, the average background temperature of space is 2-5 Kelvin. Ships with habitable life support systems, even with the engines off, will have a surface temperature of 200-250 Kelvin (ice melts at 273 Kelvin). For a typical habitable section of a ship, the radiated heat signature is in the range of a few hundred kilowatts, which is generally detectable out to 30,000 km in under a day using a full spherical search pattern with a broad-field IR-band telescope with an aperture of 3 meters.
In addition to the waste heat generated by life support, a ship’s power generation systems generates heat. A perfect Carnot heat engine produces 2 watts of waste heat for every watt of electricity it produces, where waste heat dissipation is free (like in atmosphere). In space, waste heat has to be radiated. A single retractable 25m x 25m surface would radiate roughly 1600K from both sides, disposing of roughly 44 gigajoules of waste heat in 128 seconds, for a signature strength of roughly 340 megawatts, which is (easily) detectable with the aforementioned real-world equipment out to around 10 light-seconds.
A 5,000 ton ship using a reaction drive in cruise mode (0.5g accel), 340 gigawatt signature (about 2800 Kelvin) gives a 1-day spherical search pattern “guaranteed” detection radius of a bit over 1,000 light-seconds, i.e. about 2 AU. At that (low) thrust, it would take 10-16 weeks to cross 1 AU. During this time, one only has to look for a 14th-magnitude star with measureable proper motion. And of course, faster=hotter; a ship in combat thrust puts out drive signatures 10x as bright, and would be easily detectable at roughly triple the ranges listed above, around 6 AU.
***END QUOTE***
Ack, decimal point error. Cruise mode is roughly 5 *milligees*, not one-half G.
First off, without having checked your calculations, your radiant heat numbers seem high to me, just on the face of it. One might wonder what the IR signature of ISS Alpha is, how much thermal insulation it has, what the capacity of its radiators might be.
But, actually I wasn’t so much interested in detecting warships in conflict situations. What I’m interested in is what sorts of sensory instruments AUC ships have. For example, there are rocks out there which do not have huge IR signatures. For those, I would think RADAR would be the preferred system. When The Pride arrived at one of the stations in the disputed zone, it was noted that some ships had hot engine packs, some cold–meaning there is an IR filter available on the nav scope, without getting too fancy.
Trying to look at it from “first principles”, as I said, one can detect what something emits or reflects, but not much else. Some things might cause “interference” but I can’t work that into a useful sensor. If it’s really massive, then one can observe gravitational attraction. Of course, I’m trying to stay away from the Star Trek “ray of the week” sort of thing. 😉
AUC ships have all conventional detection methods available to us now (just probably in smaller and more compact packages — Moore’s Law), no magical technobabble superscience here! Okay, waveguide duct sizes won’t change from existing standards, that’s dictated by the physics of wavelength. RADAR and LIDAR are almost certainly primary systems. CJ strove for an almost submarine-combat atmosphere, ships using active and passive detection as tactically appropriate, and it works within the story (even if I’m shooting holes in certain elements of it right now).
ISS and modern-day stuff probably won’t have as big of a signature — remember, the example I gave was for a 5,000-ton STARSHIP. Smaller objects will obviously have smaller signatures. But given that 5.000 tons is a reasonable starting point for warships, I went with that.
Passive scan is not limited to direct emissions especially if one is particulary interested in very close objects or those with large relative motion, and has extremely sensitive instruments and boatloads of processing power. In that case, one could look for occultation of known emissions which should pick up black, reflective or emitting bodies; or the doppler-shifted solar spectrum produced by a reflective body in motion relative to the source and/or detector.
The new IR space telescopes demonstrate the advantages of multispectral capability. Having something along the lines of RADAR with tunable frequencies seems within a reasonable realm of speculation, and could be used to distinguish between material objects of different masses, down to dust, even gasses if you can hit an absorption band.