39,327
edits
Stealth in Space: Difference between revisions
m
Mass update links
m (categories and general cleanup) |
m (Mass update links) |
||
Line 18:
It should be noted that while true stealth is impossible in completely hard sci-fi (read: [[Real Life]]), merely detecting IR emissions and visible light reflections does not necessarily equate to any form of useful data. Just because your opponent can see you does not mean they will, or be close enough to do anything about it when they do.
At a large-enough distance, the resolution for your optical and IR telescopes is likely to be so poor that all you see is a dot--which could be anything from a large starship to a decoy emitter drone. You might be able to shield your heat emissions by being near a hot-enough celestial body as well (IE having the sun at your back), though then there's still the problem of masking your transit ''to'' that location. In addition, consider that your image can only travel to their sensors at the speed of light: if your path is sufficiently far away, the enemy will detect your presence only after a period of time has passed, and by then all they can do is extrapolate your course and try to predict where you'll be. Naturally, this is not the same thing as knowing where you actually are. In an environment with [[Faster-Than-Light Travel]] this becomes even easier to do as you can actually ''outrun'' your image; doing so is the basis of the "[[Doppelganger Spin|Picard Maneuver]]" seen in ''[[Star Trek:
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.
Line 26:
* ''[[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.}}
* ''[[
* The Shangri La in ''[[Toward the Terra]]'' can become completely invisible to any form of detection, although since it's powered more or less completely [[Psychic Powers|by its occupants' thoughts]], the problem of engine heat probably doesn't apply. The heat ''of'' those occupants still applies.
** Since they're using [[Psychic Powers]], though, the physics don't apply on the other end, either -- they just prevented ''people'' from noticing their ship using [[Mind Control]] and directly disrupted enemy instruments using their powers, which doesn't require actually masking their heat.
Line 45:
== [[Film]] ==
* Kirk manages to avoid detection by Khan in ''[[
* In ''[[The Last Starfighter]]'', the Gunstar does not have stealth but avoids detection {{spoiler|by hiding with power off, inside an asteroid}}.
* In ''[[
** In the novelization at least, this is explained as that particular ship's schtick (firing while cloaked) requiring a massive power plant, which exceeded the cloak's ability to hide/contain the exhaust.
* In ''[[Wing Commander (
Line 56:
** ...a computer that cools as it computes? [[Incredibly Lame Pun|That is, LITERALLY]], [[Fridge Logic]].
** Before the magical cooling computers are perfected, there's a scene that almost perfectly delineates the extent to which stealth in space is possible. The protagonist is in a small, maneuverable ship. Its thrust is a reasonably-tightly-collimated photon beam, which therefore can't be observed unless you're almost directly aft of the ship. He's being pursued into a solar system rather than out, making it more difficult to notice the heat from his life-support systems. The system has a number of other ships, and his pursuers don't have governmental control over the system so they can't necessarily track them all. All of this means that he can stay hidden for roughly a day, after which his only recourse is to blow up the ship, fake his own death, and trust that someone will come pick him up; even that isn't really good enough as his pursuers can eventually analyze the wreckage for traces of human particles, but it buys him enough time to get to a major enough population center that he can disappear for real.
* [[
** It's also played straight in the ''[[Chanur Saga]]'', where the main character's starship went quiet while floating through an [[Asteroid Thicket]] in order to hide from kifish hunterts, and spy ships can sit invisible at the edge of a star system while gathering information on passive scanners.
* ''[[Star Wars Expanded Universe|Star Wars]]'' is pretty true to [[Real Life]] when it comes to this stuff. It has cloaking devices that generate a field around the ship that bends light, sensor beams, and (it would be imagined) other radiant energy around the ship... but just as no one can see in, no one can see out, so they're rarely used. [[The Thrawn Trilogy|Thrawn]] got around the two-way cloaking problem by using the cloaking field to hide booby traps within an uncloaked, innocent-looking freighter. The Republic could see that the freighters were carrying ''something'' by measuring their mass, but they didn't know ''what'' until the trap was sprung. Later, he got around the no-communication thing [[Magnificent Bastard|by means of]] careful timing and Joruus C'baoth's Battle Meditation.
Line 70:
** Thrawn probably also deployed smaller ships to flit in and out of the cloaking fields at one point, so that the Star Destroyers wouldn't have to expose themselves. He may also have used small cloaked drones, basically a turbolaser with an engine, to simulate Star Destroyers firing through planetary defense shields, by placing them so that it appeared the turbolaser beam fired straight through when in actuality the beam impacted on the shield then the cloaked drones fired from their [[The Chessmaster|meticously planned]] positions.
** 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:
** In [[Legacy of the Force]] and [[
{{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.
Line 79:
** Another method for ships to cloak is to [[Just One Second Out of Sync|send them 5 seconds into the future. You cannot detect something that is not here yet.]] It even works with whole planets, as done with earth itself.
*** The tsunami division uses this concept but it needs two ships to be effective, the one hiding under the CTF field is blind.
* [[Arthur C. Clarke
** Clarke also used another space-stealth rationale in his short story "Superiority". A space-warping field literally put light-years of extra distance between the generating ship and the rest of the universe, thus putting it far beyond detection range. Of course, this worked both ways, and the device turned out to have [[Cool but Inefficient|other problems]] as well.
* In the ''[[
** In a later installment Dame Honor confronts a hero-worshiping cadet attempting to praise her ingenuity for the aforementioned gambit by [[Lampshade Hanging|explaining]] just how stupid and desperate the tactic was. All Honorverse ships include numerous conventional sensors, radar, lidar, passive EM and IR detectors of all kinds; any one of which could have seen Honor coming from light-minutes away. Her trick worked simply because her enemy's sensor-techs were too lazy and trusting to check anything but their gravitic sensors, and apparently they had no automated monitoring systems.
** Of course, the reason they use gravitic sensors is that gravity sensors are FTL as they work in the universe, and all other sensors are speed-of-light. Not to mention the distances involved are usually several AU, which is rather extreme to expect any other sensors to work in time to be useful in combat. She just closed close enough to fire on them before they noticed she existed, which resulted in their instant destruction because ships have to 'roll' to protect themselves or people can shoot straight down their unprotectable weak spot between their gravity wedges (which also means that Honor's ship was also completely unprotected, because she had them off).
Line 88:
* Kimball Kinnison acquires a [[Added Alliterative Appeal|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 Nights Dawn Trilogy
** 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.
* In ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to
** And then we consider the possibilities of the Somebody Else's Problem field, which could fool the perceptions of the people operating the sensors (and maybe even automates if Douglas Adams' usual sentient robot theory applies).
* ''Tomorrow War'' has "X-Cruisers", essentially space submarines. Instead of passing through <s>hyperspace</s> X-matrix into normal space again they can "hang" on the border, so they aren't here for locators, but close enough to sniff out ships with mass-detectors. The good news is that they drop out of this state slowly enough to prevent micro-[[Tele Frag|telefrags]] through the whole volume which plague normal jumps, up to popping up in the atmosphere, but can emerge, fire and "dive" back fast enough to prevent a strong retaliation. The bad news is that this mode continuously wastes FTL fuel, about the most expensive matter known. Also, they can't move fast there and even if they re-emerge, they aren't going to accelerate well, because engines that keep the ship a proper 3D object where it shouldn't be take up to 9/10 of the ship's volume, so the normal equipment, even propulsion and defense, is severely limited.
* In the ''Void Trilogy'' by [[Peter F. Hamilton]], almost all spaceships basically hide in hyperspace, or manipulate of [[Techno Babble|quantum]] [[Hand Wave|states]].The more advanced the technology, the better they are at hiding. This makes the ''Void Trilogy'' significantly [[Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness|softer]] than the ''Commonwealth Saga'', where there is almost no stealth.
* In ''[[Anathem]]'' there is a a rare hard science fiction example without hyperspace or phlebotinum. It requires doing all the assembly on the other side of a planet from the ship they are sneaking up on. Then orbiting around hidden behind the 'cold black mirror' and hoping that the ship doesn't notice the reflection of other stars. It also involves decoys to simulate a catastrophic mission failure so they believe that those sneaking up on them are dead.
* The {{spoiler|aliens}} in [[Jack Campbell]]'s hard-sf ''[[The Lost Fleet]]'' have superb stealth capabilities: their ships can become completely undetectable at will, and even if they're visible, no one can get a detailed look at them. This is because {{spoiler|they've hacked into the humans' sensors, which then only show the humans what the aliens ''want'' humans to see}}.
Line 106:
* ''[[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 "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 ships captain and the sonar man is almost identical to the spaceship allegory, including the initial bearing of the shadowy contact, and the ship's course change to determine whether the contact is genuine or a sensor malfunction.
** 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 TNG]]'' episode "The Emissary", an old Klingon warship awakens and cloaks to attack. However, as a case of [[Technology Marches On]], in the 70 years since the warship was constructed, the Federation's sensors have advanced so they can detect the old warship.
* In ''[[
* The new ''[[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined|Battlestar Galactica]]'' has the Blackbird, which use carbon composite plating to avoid DRADIS detection, and is painted black to reduce the sunlight deflected. Both it and Stealthstar (different craft) got destroyed pretty quickly, though.
** {{spoiler|Managed to get destroyed when Lee somehow crashed it into a wrecked Raptor. Establishes a precedent...}}
Line 120:
*** As stated in one of the books, "''The Shadow Within''" Earth Alliance warships do have manual targeting options for close work. In "''A Late Delivery from Avalon''" we see a gunner manually firing the guns that damaged the Grey Council's ship.
*** Compounding their problems was the fact that the Minbari gravimetric drive systems were much faster and more maneuverable, making them very hard to track manually, and that the Minbari main weapons could essentially one-shot even the biggest earth ships. So they rarely got enough time to acquire visual targeting. The Minbari were also fully aware of their advantage and used various means of blinding Earth Alliance pilots, by attacking with the sun/star behind them, or the glare of a jump engine, etc.
* The difficulty of stealth in space is acknowledged in the pilot episode of ''[[
** In a later episode, the crew does manage to sneak up on a space station by [[Space Friction|flying toward it with their engines off]] and systems powered down, and pumping out electromagnetic interference to disguise the ship as a radar glitch. This wasn't a military station, so presumably did not have the full array of advanced sensors an Alliance warship would have.
** The series favors misdirection over outright stealth. In [[The Movie]], ''[[
*** Shows up again later, but in a not-so-obvious manner. The crew attempts to approach Miranda, but in order to get there, they have to pass through a Reaver fleet. Since they're disguised as Reavers, they can attempt to pass through. The not-so-obvious part comes from the fact that they ''can't'' go around the Reaver fleet; since there's no [[Stealth in Space]], any attempt to go around the Reaver fleet would be spotted, and be taken as a surefire sign that they're trying to avoid the Reaver fleet.
*** When coming off of Miranda, they do the same thing...only once they're through, they ''shoot at'' the Reavers, eliciting the response they want...an all out dash to Mr. Universe's planet. Said planet has a whole mess of EM interference, so much so that the Alliance fleet gathered to head ''Serenity'' off doesn't know it's being chased by Reavers until the first Reaver ship emerges.
Line 151:
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[
** The Kadeshi used a rather clever form of stealth: instead of modifying their ships, they set up camp in a nebula where the massive amounts of gas and energy obscured their ships from sensors. By the time the victims got a visual on the [[Oh Crap|dozens of Swarmers]] bearing down on them, it was already too late.
* ''[[Mass Effect]]'' has a prototype system on the SSV ''Normandy'' that works by storing the waste heat into its internal heat sink, which can only be done so for a limited period of time, or else the personnel will be cooked. The ship's own mass effect drive is then used to create mass effect fields that the ship "falls into", thus propelling it without needing to generate engine emissions. The ship is thus rendered "heatless" and invisible to scanners, but still visible to anyone peering out a window, and because the stealth system is extremely new and extremely secret, no one has yet developed countermeasures against it.
Line 165:
** 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.
*** Probably because they could hide under loose rocks or plating (or rip it up and hide), but making that animation that's only for very specific tilesets would likely be a waste of time and processing power.
* ''[[Wing Commander (
** The third game (And the film) introduce the Skipper Missile, a powerful, very annoying and thankfully rare anti-capital ship weapon. It travels under cloak, only becoming visible for a few seconds to check and correct its course before cloaking again, causing it to 'skip' in and out of sensor detection. This is actually a plausible way of using a cloaking device given the assumption that the technical issues behind making one have been solved.
* ''[[Freelancer]]'' has stealth ships, mostly used by Rhineland {{spoiler|and the Osiris -- the technology came from the Nomads}}.
Line 175:
** Even without cloaking modules a ship can be immune to combat probes if fitted with the right modules. The ship still shows up in the probe scans, but the actual location is impossible to pinpoint.
** Not to mention that while the cloaks don't cripple the Covert Ops and Recon classes of ships, you still can't lock, fire, or really do anything but move while under cloak.
* ''[[Star Fox (
** Technically, they aren't fighters. In the pre-mission cutscene, they were depicted as being used as long-range missile launchers, and may have also been attacking from the flank. They seem purposed to attack the Cornerian cruisers instead of smaller, interceptor sized craft.
* Averted in ''[[Spore]]'': you can't use the stealth tool while outside of a planet's atmosphere.
Line 191:
* ''[[Conquest Frontier Wars]]'': Has this an a borrowed alien technology, while the humans get to use this for two of their ships the aliens can even cloak themselves and other friendly ships.
* ''[[Star Control]]'' has the Ilwrath, whose warships can turn invisible. We're never told how it works, but nobody can see Ilwrath ships until they fire, except by stars they block. Fortunately for everyone else, their attack range is pathetically short. And since the positions of combatants are directly opposite relative to the center of the screen, its general location is obvious, which reduces the net effect to "somewhat harder to hit" and having to aim with normally homing weapons.
* ''[[Battlezone (1998
** The sequel added the Phantom VIR which makes you invisible and makes image-locking missiles worthless.
** Also, a vibrating topographic map is the sign of a Scion Jammer operating within radar range; it messes with every enemy that can detect it so that their radars only show friendlies.
* In [[A Final Unity]] the Chodak have a "chameleon field" that sends out false sensor readings. A 20-meter-long probe appears to be a part of a space station on sensors and tricorders but is clearly alien in nature upon visual inspection (One wonders what Geordi saw when he looked at it). It's only visible on sensors when one cycles randomly through sensor frequencies so the chameleon field can't anticipate how it's being scanned. When the probe makes its escape the Enterprise follows it, but loses it in an asteroid field when it changes its sensor profile to appear as one of the asteroids and cuts its engines to have the same motion as an asteroid. Not quite a stealth system since the chameleon field has to appear to be ''something'' but still appears to be anything but a Chodak ship.
* ''[[
* ''[[
* [[Allegiance]] has cloaking devices equippable for certain ships. They don't make you fully invisible; instead they temporarily reduce your detection signature, meaning enemies must be at a closer range than normal to see you. With a cloaked, stripped-down ship and good piloting you can be right on top of them and they won't know you're there until you start shooting.
* ''Star Crusader'' has an unusual way of handling stealth in space, at least for video games. There is no cover-all cloaking device. Stealth missions are only possible in vessels specifically designed for stealth, and staying stealthy is a matter of keeping your distance from enemy vessels while minimizing the energy emissions you produce. Thrust, steering movements and firing weapons all cause said emissions. The end result is much like trying to crawl through a field of waist-high grass patrolled by guards who stand up straight.
Line 203:
== [[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.
* While Stealth in the sense of cloaking has not come up in ''[[
Line 214:
* ''[[Exo Squad]]'' had the cloaking technology invented by [[Space Pirates]] based on ''[[Applied Phlebotinum|dark matter]]''. [[Hand Wave|And that's pretty much all we're told about it]].
* On ''[[Challenge of the Go Bots]]'', Cy-Kill's spacecraft has a "cloaking device" in the first miniseries (which only makes it invisible to radar), and a "stealth device" for the rest of the series (which makes it completely invisible).
* [[Star Wars:
** The ship was unable to fire while cloaked, due to power reasons I believe.
** Also, the crew was able to see and scan through their own cloak.
Line 224:
* The [[wikipedia:Misty chr(28)classified projectchr(29)|Misty]] series of spy satellites are thought to use a variety of stealth technologies to deflect ground based radar, lasers and sunlight away from observers on Earth.
** Unfortunately these technologies are not perfect and are only effective against observers within a specific directional cone allowing astronomy geeks in the free world to use occasional observations and orbital mechanics to keep good track of the stealth satellites' position.
* This also happens naturally. Earth-crossing asteroids are frequently discovered. These are capable of [[The End of the World
** Note that most of the problems with [[Stealth in Space]] are heat related, and asteroids are generally cold. Also, asteroids are really, really small compared to all the ''other'' stuff we could be picking up on. It's like trying to find a frozen needle in a stack of burning hay.
* 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.
| |||