Honor Harrington/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 2 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.9.2
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** Thomas Theisman was just an ordinary naval officer who was put in a position, quite by chance, where he could fix his country. It's expressly stated many times that he never wanted to be involved with the dirty politics of Haven, which was mistaken as not caring about the state of Haven's politics.
* The prevalence of [[Stealth in Space]], particularly in the first two books, is bothersome. Yes, a ship that shuts down its impellers will not show up on your grav detectors. Yes, the radar blip from a ship looks the same as the radar blip from an asteroid. But a ship would also have to produce [https://web.archive.org/web/20120504132923/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php heat], and lots of it. It would shine like a beacon in the thermal infrared. Why don't any of the ultra-sophisticated sensor suites on Honorverse ships include plain old thermal detectors?
** If you've turned your engines off and and reduced all electronics emissions to minimal levels, it would be logical to turn any heat-sinks off as well. Since the engines are specifically stated to be in the middle of the ship, lost heat should be relatively low. The sunny side of an asteroid wouldn't be any hotter. Sure, the interior of the ship will warm somewhat, but it's a favourable trade-off in exchange for not getting killed.
*** The ship will still be at considerably more that the ambient temperature of the space around it and will show up. Also, turning off/disabling the heat-sinks would be a quick way to cook everybody aboard (the problem with modern spacecraft is dissipating heat, not keeping warm and they don't have mucking great fusion reactors).
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*** Not ''exactly'' because of that, though this has played its role. Remember, Oyster Bay had its own equivalent of Ford island radar station -- they ''did'' notice the "sensor ghost" that was one of the Mesan ships, but found nothing when they'd tried to investigate it. It's true that the impeller signatures are somewhat overfocused on even by the best of the best, but with their tech the EM emissions are much more difficult to track, and thus on the distances involved hardly anyone try, unless they have the compelling evidence that they ''should'', like hyper footprints or something. And because spider drive doesn't use Warshawski sails or impellers, the hyper footprint of such equipped ship is much weaker than usually, even if the active stealth isn't counted in.
** It is stated in Mission Of Honor that stealthed ships can emit their waste heat in a direction of their choice. If you are stealthing around the edge of the system then emitting your heat toward deep space would be a good idea for example.
*** That would probably work, if you knew where all of the enemy lookouts were. There's also the issue of radiator area, though, and the sad fact is that the narrower a cone you want to radiate your waste heat into, the [https://web.archive.org/web/20120504132923/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php#id--Why_Not?--Directional_Radiation bigger] the radiator needs to be.
*** Modern (2011) era telescopes will take about 4 hours to find something the size of an asteroid radiating the heat of over 200 Kelvins greater than background energy. If one was willing to double check with light speed sensors or say, use a FTL sensor net to take light speed readings, spotting anything where the crew wasn't submerged in liquid helium should be relatively straight forward 2000 years from now. Chalk it up to [[Hand Wave|Handwavium]] and [[MST3K Mantra|move on]].
*** If an active sidewall can stop a ''multi-gigawatt gamma-ray laser pulse'', then it obviously blocks waste heat emitted from the inside as well. Shazam, you are now emitting waste heat only at whereever you choose to open a sidewall port -- especially now that RMN ships have bow and stern sidewalls.
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