Stealth in Space: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''Stealthiness in space was a bit like playing hide-and-seek while naked in a brier patch: it could be done, but it was a thorny business that depended upon the fact that nobody would believe you were crazy enough to actually try to pull it off.''
|'''J. Daniel Sawyer''', ''Free Will and Other Compulsions''}}
Stealth, be it camouflage or outright [[Invisibility Cloak|invisibility]], is often a deciding factor in many forms of combat. In fiction, [[See the Whites of Their Eyes|this should apply to spaceship combat, too]].
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Stealth can also mean ''disguise'', camouflaging your warship as a mining scow or [[Futurama|delivery ship]] in a populated star system. It's also possible to play terrain games: you can always hide behind something big, if you have the proper velocity to hold that relative position. Or for a big enough object one could land on or even inside it.
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]]
* ''[[Starship Operators]]'' has a plausible example. The stealth ship moves by initial speed before the jump, and runs with most systems off to reduce emission. Having said that, it takes so long to close to engagement range that the ''Amaterasu'''s crew is able to find and pre-emptively destroy it.
** And the way it is found is by {{spoiler|the good old "looking out of the window" trick. But note that they used up almost their entire missile ammunition in storage to generate enough back lighting to see the stealth ship.}}
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** In ''The Empire Strikes Back'' Han managed to be stealthy in a low-tech manner. He docked to the back of a capital ship, where his hull and heat signature would easily be missed. When they jettisoned waste, which would have residual heat from being onboard, he drifted away in it under low power. [[Crazy Prepared|Boba was not fooled]].
*** One of the Imperial officers notes that it should be impossible for them to have just disappeared, as "no ship that size has a cloaking device". While not technically true as later [[Expanded Universe]] and ''[[Star Wars: The Clone Wars]]'' material would show, cloaking field generators that ''could'' be mounted on a Millennium Falcon-sized ship were extremely rare and highly classified.
** In ''[[Legacy of the Force]]'' and ''[[Fate of the Jedi]]'' Book series, Jedi regularly use Stealth-X fighters. These use things like emissions discipline as opposed to "Cloaking Devices", and are used more like [[Real Life]] stealth planes. In [[Fate of the Jedi|Allies]], this is [[Discussed]]:
{{quote|'''Jaina's Astromech''': "A STEALTHX EMITTING COMM WAVES IS NO LONGER A STEALTHX. IT IS JUST A POORLY ARMED, LIGHTLY ARMORED X-WING SAYING COME GET ME."}}
*** In case it wasn't obvious, this works well, because the Jedi pilots of the Stealth-X fighters have their own built-in and incredibly effective set of [[The Force|sensors]], thus avoiding the "flying blind" problem noted above for craft attempting to be stealthy by not using active sensors.
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* Kimball Kinnison acquires a [[Alliteration|stealth space speedster]] in the ''[[Lensman]]'' series. It's stealthy by dint of being visually undetectable apart from obscuring the odd star thanks to being painted with near-perfectly-absorbent black paint, being made with no iron alloys to avoid magnetic detection, and having a "detector nullifier" to scramble his universe's equivalent of radar (and presumably IR detection as well).
** There's also constant reference to 'baffles' being used to reduce engine signature (and the consequences it has for a ship's performance and the time needed to get home).
* In the ''[[The
** Ships attempting stealth tracking of smugglers also get coated in a special foam which holds in any heat the ship might produce. Obviously, this means that most operations against smugglers have to be short-term missions, otherwise the crew would be cooked inside the ship.
** In "The Nano Flower" by the same author, a scientist in a [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] world is asked whether an alien could have made [[First Contact]] with humanity yet. He responds that there's no possible way an alien vessel could have arrived in the solar system without being detected. As it turns out, the alien actually evolved within the solar system.
* The Imperium's attempts at stealth in space for the [[Warhammer
* In the ''[[Halo]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] novels, there are "Prowler" stealth craft that minimize their emissions and dump their nukes before returning to realspace, so as to avoid the Cerenkov radiation giving their reentry away. They're not so much cloaked as just hard to detect.
* ''Broken Angels'' by [[Richard Morgan]]. A UN force fighting a planetary war puts its most important assets on space platforms in far-flung elliptical orbits so the enemy can't find them. Space, as the protagonist points out, is very big.
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* In [[John Hemry]]'s ''A Just Determination'', there is a great deal on the devices used to keep ships more or less invisible in space. Both messages and changing course are avoided for the chances they offer for detection.
▲== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Star Trek]]'' has cloaking devices, mostly used by the Romulans and Klingons. They can be detected by someone who suspects they're there and has good enough sensors, though.
** The original example, from "[[Star Trek: The Original Series/Recap/S1/E14 Balance of Terror|Balance of Terror]]", was essentially so the show could do a wartime submarine drama [[In Space]], with the cloak substituting for submersion. The source movie is ''[[The Enemy Below]]''(1957) and during the initial contact the dialogue between the
** In [[Star Trek: Enterprise]], the Suliban have a different cloaking technology which seems to be particle/radiation-based, as when Trip is trying to reverse engineer one, he ends up accidentally triggering it and rendering his hand temporarily invisible.
** In the ''[[Star Trek:
* In ''[[Farscape]]'' they frequently reference ships flying on a "Stealth Vector", presumably flying on the other side of planets and other large objects as often as possible. It rarely, if ever, works.
* The new ''[[Battlestar Galactica
** {{spoiler|Managed to get destroyed when Lee somehow crashed it into a wrecked Raptor. Establishes a precedent...}}
** In the miniseries Boomer escapes detection by the Cylons simply by [[Space Friction|turning off her Raptor's engine]] until they reach Caprica. Of course, Raptors also have their own Electronic Countermeasures equipment.
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** And Necron ships are stealthy, due to being crewed by cold metallic creatures, and having inertialess drives.
*** Not to mention being made of a material that is able to instantly react to outside effects to absorb / deflect them, which may include sensor sweeps. On the other hand since Necron technology remains very obscure, it's possible that their vessels are radiating all sorts of exotic particles that no one can detect (or knows to look for).
* Explicitly averted in Ad Astra Games' ''Attack Vector: Tactical'', the first chapter of the rulebook of which is available [https://web.archive.org/web/20061207210019/http://www.adastragames.com/downloads/AVT_Tutorial.pdf here]. Ships are visible long before they reach effective guns range. In other Ad Astra titles, stealth in space is allowed, in large part because they're not aiming for as hard science an impression.
* Hiding a starship in ''[[GURPS]]'' is essentially impossible without [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|superscience]], instead you have to rely on being so far away that sensor locks are nearly impossible.
** But making a spaceship harder to find is quite possible without [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien|superscience]].
*** But making a starship requires superscience anyway so what are we complaining about?
* Redmond Simonsen's ''Battlefleet Mars'' gave us [http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3t.html#misc this] little gem:
{{quote|So which one is you, Joey, and which are the aluminum balloons? ('''Seven''' dots grew on the screen, all had slightly different vectors.) Now you know [[Frickin' Laser Beams|my heater can take you in one flash]] and you also know that one zap is all I'm going to get. And if I take it you've got a perfect excuse to blow me up for the honor of the company rather than recapture valuable property for the accountants. So what's it going to be? I think you shot off too many balloons too early Joey -- cause the other ones aren't making the course correction you just did. Ain't that you, Joe?
[[Unusual User Interface|Ulans squinted and tapped his foot.]] (firing guns) }}
* [[Star Fleet Battles]]. Being based on [[Star Trek]], Romulans vessels have this, of course.
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** As of [[Mass Effect 3]], the Normandy has been improved to the point where it can mask the arrival in a system via FTL with it. This allows the ship to move unhindered through Reaper-controlled systems, though scanning can still alert them.
* The same aversion can be seen in ''I-War 2: Edge of Chaos'' video game. There are special "stealthy" precooled internal heatsinks used to reduce the ship's IR profile, making it more difficult to detect. You can also reduce your ship's visibility by switching off non-essential systems.
* ''[[
** Actually as I recall it's "[[All There in the Manual]]" as it's explained that what the Arbiter does is just creates a reality warping field that makes their allies invisible, but to make such a big field it has to anchor itself in space-time making it immune to the fields effect.
** The sequel offers an explanation on the Zerg. Part of their uber-evolution included an ability to vibrate their bodies at incredibly high-speeds, allowing them to quickly dig through any surface. While this would work for loose terrains, it doesn't explain hiding their burrows when digging into rock or structures.
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Part of [[Big Bad|Fructose Riboflavin's]] shtick in ''[[The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob]]'' is that he invented a spaceship cloaking design years ago which he has carefully kept secret and which he can [[MacGyvering|cobble together out of stray bits]] in a short time when necessary. It's a modification to the ship's artificial gravity system (much of Nemesite technology seems to be based on artificial gravity), creating a gravitational lensing effect around the ship. He's amazed when [[Gadgeteer Genius|Galatea]] deduces how his design works before he can explain it.
*
** Later there was a ship masked with hull coating. Of course, this could matter at all only because it had shields down, and its shadow didn't matter much, because it was coming in at 0.41 c. And neither using up heat capacity or time needed to start up powerplants for a fight was a problem because at this point it was only a projectile - which is why this was all about being detected too late to ''deflect'': even if blasted into sawdust, it would still deliver about 400,000,000 megatons worth of "slam", only over a wider area.
== [[Web Original]] ==
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* Akin to the asteroids issue, just about anything in space has a good chance of going undetected from the simple scale of the problem so [[Reality Is Unrealistic|real life]] still [[Subverted Trope|subverts]] this trope, at least until we significantly upgrade our electromagnetic detection capabilities and actually deploy the technology. It should be doable, but hasn't happened yet.
** Of course the reason why the technology hasn't been deployed is that there isn't (barring belief in UFOs) any need to: there's no one out there running around the solar system to track.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120504132923/http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/spacewardetect.php This page] shows very well why there can not be stealth in space and how even decoys wouldn't work either.
* There is no such thing as total stealth on Earth either unless fairies have it, so in a way the argument only goes so far. Even submarines can be detected by sound and if you are close enough, magnetic anomaly.
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Space Does Not Work That Way]]
[[Category:Stealth in Space]]▼
[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]
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