NS Military Realism Consultation Thread Vol. 11.0

[Austrasien]

The issue with using an event horizon (aka a region of space light cannot escape) as a cloak is nothing can ever leave the region of space enclosed by an event horizon, ever, without reversing time.

But as someone said sometime, maybe here, sci-fi is very derivative and for whatever reason authors are much more likely to have gravity manipulation than electromagnetic manipulation. Because Star Trek and Star Wars have artificial gravity I guess. Even though there is nothing which implies it is any easier to alter gravity than electromagnetism. If anything it should be the reverse since gravity is an outlier among the fundamental forces (it cannot be described by the standard model, it is the fundamental force with the greatest cosmic implications, it has a peculiar association with time, can give rise to singularities and has a complete but unexplained association with inertial mass).

While handwaving away interactions with the electromagnetic field is OFC impossible it is not a greater or lesser impossibility than being able to mess with the gravitational field with a similar handwave. So if you want a cloaking device just call it a cloaking device and don't waste time with gravity that will just introduce piles of unintended consequences.

[Triplebaconation]

I understand that and I am aware of all that, in fact it’s those very forces and more I want {my future sci-fi civilization} to harness on a quantum level to where the light is so bent, distorted and all together absorbed outright that to an distant observer the effect would be seeing a blurred, highly distorted image of complete blackness.

So, in a word the propagated effects are quite visible, which is the point of the entire thought exercise, but the source of the effect itself and by extension the lens is invisible.

If the propagated effects are quite visible you're making something that will draw attention to itself by being weird. They won't see a highly distorted image of complete blackness, they'll see a distorted image of the starfield behind it. This is how detecting things with gravitational lensing works. Or if you just absorb everything you'll eclipse part of the starfield.

magnetic fields

This is a case in point. "Weird quantum distortions" are the kind of things that make the news and focus the attention of astronomers. These will probably be the second targets for exploratory missions from nearby starfaring civilizations after potentially habitable worlds.

I guess if you want to build a stellar cloaking device to project an aura of mystery that's fine, but it won't be a mystery for long. It's basically the interstellar equivalent of a fedora.

[Bears Armed]

It's basically the interstellar equivalent of a fedora.

So, it's cool.

[Purpelia]

I guess if you want to build a stellar cloaking device to project an aura of mystery that's fine, but it won't be a mystery for long. It's basically the interstellar equivalent of a fedora.

More like the equivalent of a balaclava. People might not be able to see you but they sure as hell are able to want to look.

[Triplebaconation]

It's like wearing a balaclava under a fedora.

M'sophonts.

[Purpelia]

It's like wearing a balaclava under a fedora.

M'sophonts.

Hipster or terrorist? Why choose. I can get behind that.

[Gallia-]

It's like wearing a balaclava under a fedora.

M'sophonts.

Real chad dudes live in black holes.

The interstellar equivalent of hikkis.



M'getthefuckouttamyroommom.

It's like wearing a balaclava under a fedora.

M'sophonts.

Hipster or terrorist? Why choose. I can get behind that.

Fedoramen cannot be terrs they're too socially maladjusted to contemplate interaction with other living entities on that scale.

Jared Lee Loughner's baldness can be seen from orbit by SBIRS.

[Grand Indochina]

Hello, I’m a newbie to this thread. I need some answers to this question of mine : Are defensive structures and fortifications obsolete in modern warfare ?

As you can see with the advancement in military technologies, missiles, bombs and artillery shells have became increasingly powerful and also increasingly more accurate. I got a feeling the only way to achieve victory on the battlefield is to either be quick and aggressive or somehow cut off your enemy’s fire-support before they can do anything.

Correct me if I were wrong, hope to see your feedbacks.

[Austria-Bohemia-Hungary]

Infantry in cover - i.e. in ditches and trenches and foxholes - takes 5 times as many artillery shells to successfully suppress iirc.

[Gallia-]

Fortifications have become hard counters to tank attacks. Again.

[Arkandros]

Infantry in cover - i.e. in ditches and trenches and foxholes - takes 5 times as many artillery shells to successfully suppress iirc.

There is a difference between cover on the tactical level (eg, foxholes) and fortification on the strategic level. Fortifications (in the strategic sense) are not necessarily obsolete, but have fallen into disfavor due to significant cost and questionable value, especially if not constructed in depth. Add to this that fortifications are often difficult to upgrade or retrofit, have to be continuously manned and maintained, and only have defensive value for a limited area, and you can understand why fortifications are rarely constructed anymore.
On the flip side, if you broaden your definition of fortification outside of a Maginot line style defensive, you'll find that fortifications do still exist. Missile silos, NORAD, Balaklava naval base, and Hatch Green are just some examples of fortified positions intended to protect strategic assets.

[The Manticoran Empire]

Hello, I’m a newbie to this thread. I need some answers to this question of mine : Are defensive structures and fortifications obsolete in modern warfare ?

As you can see with the advancement in military technologies, missiles, bombs and artillery shells have became increasingly powerful and also increasingly more accurate. I got a feeling the only way to achieve victory on the battlefield is to either be quick and aggressive or somehow cut off your enemy’s fire-support before they can do anything.

Correct me if I were wrong, hope to see your feedbacks.

Fortifications are not necessarily obsolete. Even fairly rudimentary defensive positions are quite effective on the tactical level. However, on a larger scale, positions like the Maginot Line, the Atlantic Wall, or the Siegfried Line have fallen out of favor for a number of reasons.
1. Such positions are incredibly expensive to build and maintain as well as requiring years of work to build. This requires that a democratic state maintains a solid political strategy to ensure funding for the construction period, which isn't guaranteed.
2. In addition to financial and political expenditures, fixed fortifications require tens of thousands of trained personnel to operate and maintain as well as providing a fairly obvious position for enemy airpower to attack. Air power can be moderately negated by installing various defenses such as SAM batteries, ABM sites, CRAM cannons, and anti-aircraft guns. However, these positions would be vulnerable to SEAD operations, since they are static positions and the only thing you need to destroy to basically render them useless is the radar.
3. For some people, a Fortification network implies an abandonment of maneuver warfare, making them potentially unpopular with the people that manufacture things like tanks and IFVs. Combine that with the fact fortifications are expensive and vulnerable to air strikes and most nations are alright with less permanent but more flexible tactical defensive positions like foxholes and trenches as opposed to full on forts.

[Gallia-]

[Danternoust]

Fortifications against air, not infantry.

At least that is modern doctrine, correct?

[United Earthlings]

Unless they have FTL in which case they can just jump a probe to a couple light years away from their own position and see your planet a couple years further in the past. Comparing results should tell them if anything suspicious is in fact just natural or not. Nature moves at the speed of light or less. If your ships don't than you might be able to outrun it.

Not an issue, considering the fact it would be a minimum of 60 years before the event in question would even begin to be noticed. Anything sooner would require a probe to enter the claimed territory of the UCP and the Commonwealth doesn’t look kindly on uninvited guests in its personal space. No probe-no data…

The issue with using an event horizon (aka a region of space light cannot escape) as a cloak is nothing can ever leave the region of space enclosed by an event horizon, ever, without reversing time.

I was thinking less a single large event horizon and more many localized distortions of space-time to slow down the velocity of light to where it can be better manipulated in changing its direction.

Or I can just handwave away the problems like much of Sci-fi does with thorny completed issues and basically be able to throw an on/off switch on said event horizon.

So if you want a cloaking device just call it a cloaking device and don't waste time with gravity that will just introduce piles of unintended consequences.

Fair point and that’s generally what I’ve done. As I told Tribacon, this is merely a musing of mine on how a cloaking field might work.

Piles of unintended consequences sounds like a good place to start for a story.

If the propagated effects are quite visible you're making something that will draw attention to itself by being weird. They won't see a highly distorted image of complete blackness, they'll see a distorted image of the starfield behind it. This is how detecting things with gravitational lensing works. Or if you just absorb everything you'll eclipse part of the starfield.

My thinking on the matter is that, ideally, the cloaking field would manipulate the light to the point where the light from distant starfields wouldn’t be distorted at all to the observer in question.

Think of it as futurist magic. The image of distance stars is there and you can see them clearly, but the image I don’t want you to see I’m hiding and distracting you from seeing.

By propagated effects, I meant things like the creation of solar winds, the heliosphere and by relation a star’s creation of its own bow shock and finally the gravitational effect on other nearby large celestial objects like nebulas and other stars.

This is a case in point. "Weird quantum distortions" are the kind of things that make the news and focus the attention of astronomers. These will probably be the second targets for exploratory missions from nearby starfaring civilizations after potentially habitable worlds.

I guess if you want to build a stellar cloaking device to project an aura of mystery that's fine, but it won't be a mystery for long. It's basically the interstellar equivalent of a fedora.

I’m assuming of course I’ve already made first contact with other interstellar civilizations that are in close proximity to Commonwealth space before the project to cloak a system is completed.

As such, the nearby space civilizations wouldn’t have much to explore and as said before it would be decades, over half a century, before the disappearance of the star caused by the project would even be noted, if anyone even cared by that point. An aura of mystery is good and maintaining that mystery would be even easier when outsiders aren’t permitted inside the territory of the Commonwealth.

I’m ok with this project basically being the equivalent of an interstellar Peacock display.

[Kassaran]

Gravity really does seem to be the most overpowered of the space weapons though. With it you could ideally wrestle a star into compliance and then build a ship around it which would be fueled by it's output. Put the star in a big enough collar and then project tidal forces onto it with enough force to peel away the corona as it ignites and use that to power the ship. Could probably start with one of the smaller dead stars before working your way up to blue giants and whatnot.

The alien race I write into my FT bits are known as the Phyrans and harnessed gravity a long time ago for the purposes of propulsion. They just surf gravity waves in deep space and produce their own using their captive star cores. For weapons, they just redirect energy from the star core at a target and let the rage of a captive ball of exploding gas burn right through.

[Arkandros]

Honestly, the best way to cloak a solar system is to do absolutely nothing to it. A blatant modification to a system (for example, making it disappear) will draw significantly more attention (both scientifically and militarily) than a system that acts exactly as it's supposed to. Think of it this way: are you more likely to watch, the magician's showy hand flourishes and smoke effects, or the plain box he's about to magic some flowers into?
Additionally, space is huge. Genuinely, preposterously, inconceivably huge. Implying that you could find every single probe sent in the general direction of your borders in millions, if not billions, of cubic lightyears implies a level of sensor capability that would render cloaking technology obsolete almost instantaneously, especially considering you'd have to distinguish them from any number of random drifting comets and chunks of rock.

[Triplebaconation]

Unless they have FTL in which case they can just jump a probe to a couple light years away from their own position and see your planet a couple years further in the past. Comparing results should tell them if anything suspicious is in fact just natural or not. Nature moves at the speed of light or less. If your ships don't than you might be able to outrun it.

Not an issue, considering the fact it would be a minimum of 60 years before the event in question would even begin to be noticed. Anything sooner would require a probe to enter the claimed territory of the UCP and the Commonwealth doesn’t look kindly on uninvited guests in its personal space. No probe-no data…

Assuming of course, it's possible to cloak a sun but not a probe, the other civilizations aren't imaging your system with synthetic aperture tadar (this is space magic I just made up, it stands for tachyonic detection and ranging - space magic is easy!), you can complete your project in a few decades, etc, etc. In other words if everything is arbitrary you can do whatever you want.

I was thinking less a single large event horizon and more many localized distortions of space-time to slow down the velocity of light to where it can be better manipulated in changing its direction.

Or I can just handwave away the problems like much of Sci-fi does with thorny completed issues and basically be able to throw an on/off switch on said event horizon.

You'd actually have to speed up light to get the effect you want. As light is bent it travels on a longer path around a massive object, so it'd have to travel faster around that object to erase the evidence.

Unless you're willing to research things like this it's probably best to stick to hand-waving or stringing random futuristic words together.

I'm not sure we can discuss this kind of hand-waving profitably on the "NS Military Realism Thread," though. We can talk about ways to hide a planet or mask or alter its atmospheric signature (fairly easy if you know where other civilizations are), but we can't really discuss the behavior of corundium alloy when it's subjected to thalaron radiation in a 700 millicochrane subspace distortion field.

If your civilization can do whatever it wants for reasons that really don't make much sense there just isn't much to talk about.

The alien race I write into my FT bits are known as the Phyrans and harnessed gravity a long time ago for the purposes of propulsion. They just surf gravity waves in deep space and produce their own using their captive star cores. For weapons, they just redirect energy from the star core at a target and let the rage of a captive ball of exploding gas burn right through.

"The blaster is a simple weapon, just a small T-gate linked (via another pair of T-gates acting as a valve) to an endpoint orbiting in the photosphere of a supergiant star. It's messy, it's short-range, it'll take out anything short of full battle armor, and because it's basically just a couple of wormholes tied together with superstring, it's impossible to jam. On the minus side my ears are ringing, I can already feel the skin on my face itching with fresh radiation burns, and I think I melted a couple of the crypts."

[Purpelia]

Unless they have FTL in which case they can just jump a probe to a couple light years away from their own position and see your planet a couple years further in the past. Comparing results should tell them if anything suspicious is in fact just natural or not. Nature moves at the speed of light or less. If your ships don't than you might be able to outrun it.

Not an issue, considering the fact it would be a minimum of 60 years before the event in question would even begin to be noticed. Anything sooner would require a probe to enter the claimed territory of the UCP and the Commonwealth doesn’t look kindly on uninvited guests in its personal space. No probe-no data…

I think you misunderstood. I am not talking about jumping a ship into your territory to look at you. I am talking about jumping one x + 1 light years in the opposite direction (where X is the time to detection that something is odd) to take a snapshot of the light, gravity and other stuff that travels at C from a point where your change hasn't reached yet. The whole idea is to go further away from you and not close in. Remember, space is 3D.

All it takes to investigate an obviously suspicious system is for a FTL capable ship to take a look at your odd system on a map and chart a strait line through it and its own homeworld and than take off in the opposite direction stopping once every light year to take a sensor reading using regular non FTL sensors. Eventually it is going to reach a distance where the image it gets is from before you did your magic.

[Manokan Republic]

There are three things to bare in mind about spacetime bending. The reason why it cloaks things so well is not because it's jut a cloaking device, but because you aren't even there. Literally you are bending space in such a way to where you don't exist in that place, and thus can't be seen. If there was a messed up piece of spacetime in front of you, and you stuck your arm out in it, to you it would appear as if it's completely normal, even if it's really in 6000 different places. In the same vein, you literally don't see the middle of a wormhole, just the two end pieces. You're essentially dissapearing in to a void.

The second thing is it bends light. Light is moving around you, rather than you redirecting it. You aren't sending a fake signal, you are literally bending the light around you; to any observer, a machine or what have you, it appears completely normal, even if the light is bend around in complex ways. Third, because of it, it's ideal to mask things in space. One obvious way we can tell if a planet or something is somewhere, or a sun etc. is by it bending the light around it, thus giving us an idea of what exactly is there, as light is bent by gravity. With spacetime bending, you literally are exploiting this effect yourself, and thus can make it impossible for you to be seen or even interacted with. It would also work as a forcefield, literally redirecting bullets around you, or any physical object, or allowing you to move through another object, like say a planet. For all we know, a wormhole is cutting through earth right now, or is nearby, and we just can't see it for this reason. It literally warps everything around it out of the way. It would redirect all electromagnetic radiation, light, infrared, radar, basically any means of detecting something, and even counteract gravity itself, making it literally impossible to detect something there. You wouldn't just be invisible, you literally wouldn't be in that exact location. You would just be peering through another wormhole that lets you see out, and the only hope of detection would be if they could see through that tiny opening.

Any UFO capable of long distance FTL space travel would also have a perfect cloaking device via it's hyper drive.

[Austrasien]

There are three things to bare in mind about spacetime bending. The reason why it cloaks things so well is not because it's jut a cloaking device, but because you aren't even there. Literally you are bending space in such a way to where you don't exist in that place, and thus can't be seen. If there was a messed up piece of spacetime in front of you, and you stuck your arm out in it, to you it would appear as if it's completely normal, even if it's really in 6000 different places. In the same vein, you literally don't see the middle of a wormhole, just the two end pieces. You're essentially dissapearing in to a void.

The second thing is it bends light. Light is moving around you, rather than you redirecting it. You aren't sending a fake signal, you are literally bending the light around you; to any observer, a machine or what have you, it appears completely normal, even if the light is bend around in complex ways. Third, because of it, it's ideal to mask things in space. One obvious way we can tell if a planet or something is somewhere, or a sun etc. is by it bending the light around it, thus giving us an idea of what exactly is there, as light is bent by gravity. With spacetime bending, you literally are exploiting this effect yourself, and thus can make it impossible for you to be seen or even interacted with. It would also work as a forcefield, literally redirecting bullets around you, or any physical object, or allowing you to move through another object, like say a planet. For all we know, a wormhole is cutting through earth right now, or is nearby, and we just can't see it for this reason. It literally warps everything around it out of the way. It would redirect all electromagnetic radiation, light, infrared, radar, basically any means of detecting something, and even counteract gravity itself, making it literally impossible to detect something there. You wouldn't just be invisible, you literally wouldn't be in that exact location. You would just be peering through another wormhole that lets you see out, and the only hope of detection would be if they could see through that tiny opening.

Any UFO capable of long distance FTL space travel would also have a perfect cloaking device via it's hyper drive.

The thing about spacetime bending is a region where spacetime is sufficiently distorted light can no longer leave it is no longer in casual contact with the rest of the universe. It is an event horizon. And nothing can ever leave a region of space enclosed by an event horizon, ever. Even deactivating the drive would not permit escape because time dilation between the inside and outside would be infinite, if the cloak was engaged for any amount of time inside, an infinity would elapse outside. Once activated the vessel could never return to its original universe.

The only way back is to reverse time.

[Gallia-]

nanomachines square dance with electrons to reverse their spin

event horizons: refuted

[Republic of Penguinian Astronautia]

Is it possible to have air operations using dispersed aircraft, operating with STOVL of zero length launchers? Further, is it possible to make all of the necessary equipment to support fighter aircraft rapidly mobile?

[The Akasha Colony]

Is it possible to have air operations using dispersed aircraft, operating with STOVL of zero length launchers? Further, is it possible to make all of the necessary equipment to support fighter aircraft rapidly mobile?

It is physically possible.

They won't be very effective.

[Gallia-]

dumbla's biggest airbases are regimental size

so 3-4 squadrons i guess

they disperse to single squadron (or element) size airstrips after the initial alpha strike to avoid the inevitable nuclear cratering of the airbase

ideally this preserves the aviation force's fighting power longer than the enemy

the hard part is probably maintaining a sufficiently large ramp alert to make it worthwhile over a major theater airbase USAF-style tbh but i imagine a squadron of planes on ramp alert is enough givne that's 25-33% of the airbase garrison

maybe the air defense force's constant peacetime CAPs have ERINTs or something on their wings to shoot down TBMs in flight