Re:Tracking “Dark Ships” with New Satellite Technology
by at_a_remove on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @03:21PM
(#27041740)
As to your last idea, one of my old physics professors had a number of patents to his name, and I recollect something about the second excited state of the Helium-3 atom being able to detect minuscule variance in magnetic fields -- suitable for a grid of buoys waiting for a submarine to drift by.
Imagine non-propulsion. Selectively make one side of your ship ninety-nine percent black and the other side ninety-eight ... wait for light pressure to do its job. It's slow but damned if that wouldn't be difficult to detect as a method of making maneuvers.
... but for a more serious thought, and to trend deeper into hard sci-fi: you can have a lot of fun with questions like "How good is the technology to identify solid objects in space that are intentionally minimizing their radiation exposure?" You don't even have to go too fancy with stealth-coatings or Star Trek cloaking-devices; a challenge of modern astronomoy is that shipping-vessel-sized rocks in space are very far away, reflect very little radiation, and can be moving extremely fast. Do the authorities monitor space with optical equipment, or do they have the resources to solve the distance-to-target problem by blanketing the space they control with a network of ships or sensors? Such a fabric would probably be the saddle-point between cheap and effective if they could be mass-produced.
You can also have fun with propulsion. A ship "on the drift" can be much darker than a ship undergoing maneuvers... And it can even stay dark in the direction it's accelerating if it's using cold exhaust fired away from the observer (or if it has a lot of time to maneuver and does so by firing photons away from the observer, which will only be visible if they reflect off something behind the ship). This gets into a very submarine-combat feel, which the videogame "Objects In Space" explored.
Interesting idea I don't think I've seen in sci-fi before is deploying a grid of small satellites in to space where all they do is measure the distances between each other. Then any objects passing through the grid gravitationally disrupt it, and depending on how accurate the distance measurements are (and how much math you can do to account for other gravity fluctuations), you could hypothetically get a fairly impenetrable safety net if you stick to hard-science and ships can't create antigravity effects at range... A smaller-scale experiment like this involving two satellites orbiting the moon is how NASA mapped the mass concentrations resulting from meteorite impacts that disrupt the orbit of lunar satellites (and the trajectories of landing craft).