More Words, Deeper Hole

And the schemes will recapitulate points found here. (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3w.html#nostealth)

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Stealth in Space is the functional equivalent to Sealion Can Work.

There, I went there. Muwahahahahaha!

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nyrath.livejournal.com

Thanks!
I get so much hate mail about stealth in space that I made an auxiliary web page.
The only thing that gets me more hate mail is the assertion that one-man fighter spacecraft make no sense scientifically, militarily, or economically.
The majority of SF readers get their ideas of what is cool from TV and movies, and will hold on to them like grim death.

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It's really very simple -- start out by positing distances and speeds where the things we know anything about aren't relevant (because the information won't get there in time to be tactically relevant), and then define the behavior of the *other* things you made up so that stealth is possible. What's the problem?

Even just in a single solar system, radar isn't much good at picking out drifting spaceships from among the asteroids. And all the terrestrial work on radar-stealthy aircraft should apply to spacecraft out there, too; just, there's the added advantage of millions of other targets to hide among.

Of course, an operating reaction drive of any power is another matter entirely. That's hard to hide (Smith's "flare baffles" had to have immensely underestimated how big the flare would be).

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Who said anything about radar?

It's heat. And not just an operating engine.

One thing I liked about the game Mass Effect was the background bit where the ship Normandy has a prototype stealth system, which works by temporarily storing the heat in sinks within the hull...but it can only operate for an hour or two before the crew starts to bake. Visible stealth is, of course, impossible.

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stephenshevlin.livejournal.com

"One thing I liked about the game Mass Effect was the background bit where the ship Normandy has a prototype stealth system, which works by temporarily storing the heat in sinks within the hull...but it can only operate for an hour or two before the crew starts to bake."

Yeah, that's the only way [1] I can figure out how to temporarily achieve stealth, have some magic new material that can temporarily adsorb a very large proportion of the heat produced, like a metamaterial or a Bose-Einstein condensate. I'd imagine such a system would have dramatic failure modes if it was at all likely to exist.

Clearly, if you want thermal stealth in space you need to operate in an environment that is heated to temperatures of approximately 300 K. That pretty much rules out space though.

[1] Well, ok I first thought decoys! But the page James linked to conclusively knocked that out of the water.

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The other way is to operate at the ambient temperature of space. That pretty much rules out having biological humans on board. AIs are another matter.

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And the schemes will recapitulate points found here. (http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3w.html#nostealth)

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roseembolism.livejournal.com

Oh my god James, you're right! ANY thread on stealth in space will go the same way!

You need to close this thread before- oh dear, it's too late.

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I think I can distract them.

"Nobody reading this LJ will live long enough to see humans walk on another planet."

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The thing I don't get is why everyone keeps talking about ship with humans in them. We're already sending armed drones into combat zones instead of some aircraft. Why in the far distant future would they be sending can o'man off to fight the wars instead of lots and lots of smarter than average missiles?

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The thing I don't get is why everyone keeps talking about ship with humans in them.

Drama. A million cruise missiles crying out in terror, before being suddenly silenced isn't as interesting to many people as one maladjusted star pilot demonstrating what chronic insubordination looks like.

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Well a good writer could write a drama about the chronic insubordination of the programmer writing the decision making code for the missiles that turns out to save the day. It might even appeal to the primary audience for SF fiction. <grin>

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It might even appeal to the primary audience...

Cruel.

Fair, but cruel.

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I don't mean to be cru... wait. Okay, saying that would be a wee bit dishonest. But I just feel like fandom is my family and isn't this what family is about? Fighting and backstabbing until someone from outside dares to take a side, then everyone against the interloper! <grin>

Seriously, if I'd been smart enough I'd have been a programmer. But my talents are for cutting remarks, clothes, and double-entry bookkeeping.

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mjlayman.livejournal.com

Cruise missiles don't make decisions. They get solid flight plans put in, and once they're launched, you can't make changes. The planner could make bad flight plans, but the plans are checked by several other planners before being released as possibles.

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Current ones. I would imagine that ones intended for some week or month long space missions might be given a bit more on board computing power and programing to pick targets and try to evade countermeasures.

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tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com

So, it's an optimization problem, then, between the constraints of reader disbelief & reader disinterest? The reader can believe in missiles they aren't interested in, or be interested in a maladjusted (etc.) pilot they don't really believe in?

And yet, didn't Bradbury win an award for his story (name escapes and I am lazy) about a High-tech house disintegrating away, years after a nuclear exchange leads to human extinction? That is, mere hardware can elicit pathos, too, no? (Or, is it the desolate absence of humanity which generates the pathos?)

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owlmirror36.livejournal.com

There Will Come Soft Rains (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40876).

I didn't have to look it up, but the link points to anthologies that contain it. Google also has many interesting hits.

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tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com

Thanks very much for this.

Cheers. :^)

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carloshasanax.livejournal.com

1. Obviously, the night is a time of secrets.

2. The people who want to read about stealth in space have little interest in technological limits.

3. profit!

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Also, spaceships are kind of like submarines, so.

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liveavatar.livejournal.com

It makes for great mental book-cover paintings, with submarines surfacing from and diving into the aether.

Unfortunately, there's no immediately apparent place to "run deep." That we currently know of.

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kgbooklog.livejournal.com

submarines surfacing from and diving into the aether

I think this could work (as a silly story idea). The "surface" of the aether could be fuzzily defined by gravity wells.

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Glen Cook had his "climbers" hide in alternate universes, as I recall.

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UFOs aren't alien spacecraft. They're the periscopes and snorkels of alien subaethercraft that are curled up in Kaluza-Klein dimensions.

"Run silent, run compactified."

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That sounds like a Rudy Rucker story.

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nyrath.livejournal.com

Submarines in Space

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wakboth.livejournal.com

I love the "spaceships as subs" model of space warfar, even though it has no bearing with the reality. Sometimes, coolness triumphs the realism.

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But can't realism be cool?

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No. Pretty much by definition.

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carloshasanax.livejournal.com

I'm sorry, your mind must be at least this broad: >< to participate in this discussion.

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Dood, you are so missing the concept of "cool".

But you can't scare me; any discussion that you're allowed into will tolerate *anything*.

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gareth-wilson.livejournal.com

The problem is that the impossibility of stealth makes writing about space warfare so much harder. All the easy analogies are out: no more Napoleonic ships of the line or WWII aircraft carriers. I'm not even sure if there's any historical analogue to a situation where you can always see your enemy coming and always get at least a rough estimate of how dangerous they are. Medieval land battles, perhaps.

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All the easy analogies are out

Not that that stops us. Look at all the new solar-system planets "stumbled on" in early (or persistently dumb later) SF, even after centuries of astronomy.

More subtly, the meme of this new ocean, Columbus etc. has retained for some people the tacit connotations of "hey, you never know -- whole new continents!" even within the solar system. The forebrain assimilates a cold dry Mars and baking dry Venus and fiercely irradiated Jovian system, but the rest of the brain lags behind.

Of course there will be plenty of wonderful, eminently worthwhile surprises to come from both more probes and manned exploration. But the relationship between "seeing/knowing" and "going" really is qualitatively and quantitatively different for space than it was for most of terrestrial exploration, and it's taking a while for our metaphors to catch up.

From: (Anonymous)

The obvious analogy is with Cold War nuclear warfare; everyone has a reasonable idea of other people's capabilities, you can be certain of seeing the missiles on radar, but you can't do very much about them except fire back.

Or pre-Tactical Weapons Unit Cold War air combat, the kind of thing the F-4 and F-101 and MiG25 were designed for. Scramble, climb like hell, control vectors you near the enemy, then your RIO takes over; launch medium-range missiles, then evade. No dogfighting.

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On the plus side, in many circumstances you will have much longer to react than the Cold War situation allowed the Great Powers.

ObSF: Long Shot for Rosinante, where the habitat had months of warning about the incoming nuclear missile.

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Ship of the line battles before and during the Age of Sail. On a clear day you could see the enemy coming long before anyone was in gunnery or ramming range. Any reasonably knowledgeable commander knew what ships he was facing in general terms if not the specific ships, what the capabilities of speed and maneuver were, effective firing ranges (after cannons were developed and on board), what the enemy could or could not do based on the wind and weather, and usually what specific maneuver the enemy was setting up.

Admittedly there was a limit on how far you could see them coming, but very rarely did fleet actions come about as a complete surprise to one side. Villeneuve, for instance, knew he was going to get attacked the evening before the battle of Trafalgar and on the morning of October 21st had a good idea of what he was facing for some hours before the battle began.

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wakboth.livejournal.com

Sure, but not automatically. And I think that making the realistic space combat cool requires a lot more work from both the author and the reader than picking a less realistic but more verisimilitudious (defined here as "feeling realistic") model, such as the subs in space; possibly more work than is worth the effort, especially if it gets into the way of a story being written.

IIRC, Walter Jon Williams' "Dread Empire's Fall" had a pretty interesting model of space combat that, while not strictly realistic, at least acknowledged things like the importance of missiles, difficulty of stealth and the likely lethality of ship-to-ship combat.

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Remember, one of John Campbell's many weird ideas was that you could stick a Dean Drive or other impossible space-drive gadget in a submarine, and, presto, instant spaceship. Not quite Space Battleship Yamato, but pretty close.

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carloshasanax.livejournal.com

"Hard" science fiction as a stylistically deficient form of magic realism: discuss.

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Hmm... there is a sort of kinship between magic realism's insertion of fantastic elements into mundane settings, and marketed-as-hard-SF's insistence that its fantastic elements proceed from realistic scientific principles (whether or not this is true). I suppose the common element is the effort to convince the reader that this could happen in our world.

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avram

You're talking about SF with real science, right? No cloaking devices or hyperspace heat sinks?

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Yes.

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The good news is that these people rate outer space very highly.

Edited Date: 2008-01-19 09:12 pm (UTC)

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heron61.livejournal.com

Tell me about it. When writing SF games, I find it nifty and interesting that communications and sensors are both very fast and very long range, while actually being able to get to or affect some other ship takes a lot of effort and time. Similarly, I like the idea of having instantaneous communications and near perfect navigation on even the most newly settled colony world, but that actually getting (for example) a rescue party to someone in trouble can be a whole lot harder and more time consuming than talking to them. However, I've dealt with more than one RPG company who simply didn't want to hear this - they wanted unreliable planetary communications and submarine warfare in space...

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wakboth.livejournal.com

The planetary communications thing I have to agree with you. Why would any sane group of voluntary colonists, as opposed to crash survivors, mutineers (or loyalists) dumped onto a semihabitable planet etc., *not* build a network of GPS, weather and communications satellites, as well as make a complete orbital survey of the world, before making the first landing?

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Heck, we're already well on the way to doing that for Mars, and its active surface population consists of a couple of card-table-sized machines.

Edited Date: 2008-01-20 12:44 pm (UTC)

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...It's interesting that the setup for John Scalzi's The Last Colony consists largely of an elaborate excuse for doing the low-tech-colony-on-under-surveyed-planet scenario in spite of its implausibilities.

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Is it time for the discussion of why Scalzi's answer for the Fermi Paradox in the OMW universe doesn't work?

From: (Anonymous)

Which is? Or do we have to read the books first?

(Wasn't planning to...)

Bruce

From: (Anonymous)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any thread that begins by pointing out why stealth in space is impossible will rapidly turn into a thread whereby the scientifically illiterate will propose physically impossible schemes by which they believe stealth in space will be achieved.

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Actually, the way these discussions typically run is that both parties agree that directive radiating is possible. The anti-stealth types point out that in that case you need an network of sensors that the radiative cones will slice through, and with a big enough sensor array this must happen. Then the pro-stealth people will say that they will simply radiate in a different direction. At which point the anti-stealth people will say that this is not possible because you have to know where the sensors are.

Game over then occurs when the pro-stealth types point out that in that case the anti-stealth people are assuming that their sensors can be stealthed, a contradiction.

There are other issues, like spatial and time resolution, but that's the gist of these types of threads.

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Stealthing the sensors might be easier than stealthing a spaceship with live humans aboard. In fact, in the particular area of heat radiation, I'd think it had to be *much* easier.

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Well, yes, but then the sensors are in point of fact stealthed, are they not? So you are assuming stealth capability in order to disprove it, unless I am greatly mistaken.

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I'm pointing out that "you can't stealth the spaceship" and "you can't stealth the sensors" are *not* equivalent statements, in general. The lovely summary of the argument (resulting in victory for the pro-stealth people) includes the assumption that those statements *are* equivalent.

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Why would you assume that anyone is taking them to be equivalent? The question - look at the top - is not, 'is stealth impossible for some some objects in some situations'[1], the question is 'is stealth impossible'.

And clearly, the people saying they can stealth their sensors are in fact saying that they can stealth their sensors.

There's really not a lot of wiggle room to operate there.

[1]Is gravity really the weakest force? Someone once made the observation on a listserve physics group that it's impossible to escape the pull of the Earth just by jumping, so gravity can't really be all that weak.

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it's impossible to escape the pull of the Earth just by jumping, so gravity can't really be all that weak.

They had it wrong way round. Given a staircase, air supply, rest stops etc. you could just keep climbing as long as you like. IOW, the metabolism (not annihilation, just lazy electron swapping) of kilogram quantities of food and oxygen per day would be overcoming the best efforts of 6 x 10E24 kilograms of planet to retain you.

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Well, without giving away any names, I will say that they tended to be a wrong-way around type of person. If I tell you that the group was sci.physics, and that this was in the early 90's, you can probably guess the person in no more than five tries. To be more specific would be to invoke He Who Must Not Be Named.

Any, the point is, you're not allowed to do that, you have to stick with the scenario. I think the point in the context of this thread is obvious.

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Because that's what the structure of the original paragraph requires. The whole argument is nonsense otherwise.

The statement "stealth is impossible" in the broadest sense is nonsense; the F-117 is a counter-example. So something other than the broadest sense must be meant.

I think you're trying to impose a formal logic structure on a discussion that some people think is about the real world; this never ends well.

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Um, no, for starters, the F-117 is most certainly _not_ a counter-example. It is stealthed under certain given circumstances, but not under others. Check out the wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stealth_technology) for the starter nugget:

The concept of stealth is not new: being able to operate without the knowledge of the enemy has always been a goal of military technology and techniques. However, as the potency of detection and interception technologies (radar, IRST, surface-to-air missiles etc.) has increased, so too has the extent to which the design and operation of military vehicles have been affected in response. A 'stealth' vehicle will generally have been designed from the outset to have reduced or controlled signature. It is possible to have varying degrees of stealth. The exact level and nature of stealth embodied in a particular design is determined by the prediction of likely threat capabilities and the balance of other considerations, including the raw unit cost of the system.

Iow, stealth is highly situational. I would suggest that saying that in one particular situation where you assume the stealth of some objects to show that others cannot have that property, and then to further say that the stealth of those objects 'don't count' towards the notion of whether or not stealth is possible is not being terribly realistic or practical. I would also suggest that it is you who need to think about the real world, and further, to even make the suggestion that the other person in a discussion is not thinking about the real world while the opposite side is, is practically guaranteed to make sure the exchange doesn't end well.

The bottom line is, the opponents of stealth assume it's existence in order to disprove it, and in fact don't realize that stealth is not so much technological as it is tactical and situational.

This is, btw, quite standard military stuff, old as the hills if you're interested in doing any research.

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Yes, you see, that's exactly my point. Stealth is highly situational. Any kind of "abolute" stealth is nonsense; luckily no current military or fictional system I'm familiar with makes any kind of "absolute" claims.

And I assure you, I was already knew everything you said there, and it was *because* I know that that I'm taking the position I am in this argument.

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Sigh. Yes, we've actually participated in some of the same threads. But that's not what the anti-stealth people are claiming; in fact what you are describing is the stealth position, as near as I can tell(at least, once you get past the first cut who learned their physics from Star Trek). It is the anti-stealth people making extravagant claims about detection, not the other way around.

Btw, I suggest you work on your wording. I got the impression from what you wrote here:

The statement "stealth is impossible" in the broadest sense is nonsense; the F-117 is a counter-example.

that you think the existence of the F-117 is a counter-example to the notion that stealth is impossible in the broadest sense, rather than what you seem to be saying now, which is that the F-117 is stealthy under certain circumstances(that is, that the F-117 is not a counter-example, but an example.) And isn't this what is exactly meant and understood when we say it's possible to stealth aircraft? When someone says the F-117 is stealthy, they don't mean it's a knock-off of Wonder Woman's plane, now, do they? So why would you think that when people talk about stealthing objects in space that they don't mean it in exactly that same sense?

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"Stealth is impossible in the broadest sense" means to me that nothing can be in any way stealthy. And the f117 is definitely a counterexample to that claim.

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Um, I don't mean to be chivvying, but you when you write that, "stealth is impossible in the broadest sense", I take your meaning to be, basically, the same as "there is no such thing as a cloaking device." I think your explanation of what you meant would have been the way to go the first time around.

Just sayin'.

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owlmirror36.livejournal.com

]Is gravity really the weakest force? Someone once made the observation on a listserve physics group that it's impossible to escape the pull of the Earth just by jumping, so gravity can't really be all that weak.

Would it be fair to suggest that the atomic bonds holding the body of the jumping person are stronger than gravity, else jumping would rip the legs apart? And that nuclear bonds must also be stronger than gravity, else jumping would induce fission?

Just wondering over here.

From: (Anonymous)

As I said, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any thread that begins by pointing out why stealth in space is impossible will rapidly turn into a thread whereby the scientifically illiterate will propose physically impossible schemes by which they believe stealth in space will be achieved.

The math on directional heat rejection has been done. It's not workable in any practical sense for coasting and falls apart completely when a ship lights off an engine.

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At the cost of recapitulating points made here, John Schilling noted

Plus, there's the problem of how you know what a safe direction to radiate is in the first place. You seem to be simultaneously arguing for stealthy spaceships and complete knowledge of the position of enemy sensor platforms. If stealth works, you can't expect to know where the enemy has all of his sensors, so you can't know what is a safe direction to radiate. Which means you can't expect to achieve practical stealth using that mechanism in the first place.

So the pro-stealths are contradicting themselves, by arguing that the sensors can't be stealthed...

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traviswells.livejournal.com

It's a problem like the Monty Hall problem or that whole airplane+treadmill mess.
Just difficult enough that people with a little to some scientific knowledge can see the "obvious" (and wrong) solution immediately, while it requires more in-depth study to reach the correct answer.

It's a devious mental trap, since people on both sides immediately start attempting to convert the other side, and usually fail.

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Are you suggesting that the anti-stealth types don't have that much scientific knowledge? I'm thinking it's more a matter of committing to a position in a way that's difficult to undo without a severe perceived loss of face.

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traviswells.livejournal.com

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's a problem that happens to lie at a level of knowledge that ends up dividing much of the audience into "enough knowledge to automatically see X" and "enough knowledge to automatically see Y".
(I'm not saying either camp is very deficient in knowledge, I certainly don't have enough scientific knowledge to see either the "obviousness" of either stealth or anti-stealth positions)

But you're right about committing to a position. That's what turns these sort of arguments into big arguments. Since people immediately jump to the "obvious" solution, they don't consider the other position very much end up arguing endlessly because they don't want to admit they were wrong.

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Well, you don't have to know much science really, it's just that one side is uses an argument that assumes the existence of what it's trying to disprove. I'd say that this internal contradiction is indicative of who is right and who is wrong.

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Only to the dim.

The argument is this: it is impossible to make a ship that maneuvers and/or is producing energy stealthy. That is not the same thing as saying "it's impossible to make something hard to detect."

A passive sensor has advantages the warship does not. One, it doesn't have to maneuver. Two, its energy use can (and likely will be) be orders of magnitude smaller. Three it doesn't need life support. Four, it can be really small in comparison to a ship.

All that makes it hard to detect. Not impossible, just very, very hard.

Given that it's harder to detect than the ship as a primary rule, than adding whatever "stealth" system on top of that magnifies the problem proportionally more for the ship detecting the sensor than it does the sensor detecting the ship.

That is what we're saying.

Real world example: it's provable that the shuttle main engines can be seen when firing from Pluto with off-the-shelf tech right now. However, that doesn't work in reverse. Mount the biggest-ass telescope and infrared sensors you want on the shuttle and it doesn't have a hope in hell of detecting a satellite in Earth orbit from Pluto. Or Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter or Mars.

That's the situation being discussed, and that's with no attempt whatsoever to hide satellites.

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Some things are easier to stealth than others. And some setups are more one-sided than others. Uh-huh. Got any other nuggets?

I don't suppose, btw, from your tone, that you've even considered the possibility that it's not the ship itself doing the detecting of these sensors, as opposed to some other intelligence operation that is telling the ship how to move. Or that there may be an active campaign going on to take out each side's sensors, or that the sensor array might be localized enough that it would be geometrically impossible for it to detect those directed emissions.

Because, as we all know, none of that's ever happened in military history and never will.

So if that's the scenario you think you're offering up as a general disproof, after changing the definition of stealth, which, I notice, you again seem to think is hunky-dory with one class of objects but not another, well, I think you need to try a little harder, and actually do some reading on the subject.

Certainly you need to change your tone.

Although, I must say, you are an excellent example of people who commit themselves into a position in such a way that it must be extremely hard to back away from gracefully later.

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bricklovinfreak.livejournal.com

Thank you for making me giggle.

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You seem like an excellent example yourself, apparently equally committed to the pro-stealth position, despite someone contradicting your statement that "everyone agrees that directive radiating is possible".

One can construct stealth-possible situations: for example, have no one bother looking in the first place, or attack some planet which doesn't have radar or telescopes yet. "stealth in space is impossible" is shorthand for "stealth in space, for ships and bases (the things doing the actual work), against intelligent opponents with realistic technology, is impossible". Intelligent opponents would note that sensors are a lot cheaper than ships, so you can make a lot of them, and scatter them around; there's no reason to *not* be trying to watch every activity or interesting object in the entire system, from multiple angles. Sensors *will* be harder to detect, and even if they aren't, the act of trying to take them out will be unstealthy. And sensors can be replaced.

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Sigh. No, I am not pro-stealth particularly. I am against the belligerence of the anti-stealth side. As for:

You seem like an excellent example yourself, apparently equally committed to the pro-stealth position, despite someone contradicting your statement that "everyone agrees that directive radiating is possible".

Do tell. Who is this person, and what are their qualifications for making this statement? I'm _fascinated_.

Sensors *will* be harder to detect, and even if they aren't, the act of trying to take them out will be unstealthy. And sensors can be replaced.

I don't think anyone has argued that they will be harder to detect. Insisting by fiat that they are undetectable, is, the however, the position a lot of anti-stealth people seem to take. Do you agree that this is an indefensible position?

Don't waffle and reiterate that they will be harder to detect; that's what makes the people who hold the anti-stealth position seem contemptible, given their repeated assertions that pro-stealth people 'just don't know basic physics'.

I would also note, that 'the act of taking out sensors' is unstealthy seems to fly in the face of a long tradition of doing just that to remain stealthy. It even gets movie treatment, e.g. tossing a bug in a circuit breaker to power down a critical security camera. Typically, fat guard #1 gets off his duff and investigates, then disgustedly makes some humorous observation(humorous to the fourth wall, that is) to guard #2 over the walkie-talkie, and flips the breaker back on, restoring power to the critical cam. Meanwhile, the ops team has run through the critical zone . . . In fact, that's why the anti-stealth people, poor losers, insisted why their detectors were by fiat unfindable.

Do you really not see this? Or is it that you've committed to a position that you can't comfortably back away from . . . presumably after telling pro-stealth types that "they don't know basic physics"?

What was the line from Brazil? 'Whose going to stop you from coming in? Well, do you have form dd-stroke-274?' 'Not . . . as such.'

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You're using movies as your evidence?

And interrupting power to a camera and dashing through is *so* like attacking a deep space satellite and moving your ships in the meantime.

I agree that space cameras aren't magically undetectable. But the difference between an immobile low-power ambient temperature camera and a moving ship with life support is rather significant, not waffling. And they don't even have to be stealthed, just numerous and redundant. How are the stealthers going to knock out the sensor array and exploit the hole?

Do tell. Who is this person, and what are their qualifications for making this statement? I'm _fascinated_.

Who are you, for that matter, and what are your qualifications? A profileless LJ handle isn't much of a step up from an anonymous posting.

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Sigh. Thanks for admitting I'm right, finally, however gracelessly you do it. Next time, please think out what you're saying, and consider points other people have made, rather than automatically calling them scientific illiterates when they dare to disagree with you. That way you won't look so silly when you have to admit your mistakes.

Uh, you aren't by any chance a libertarian, are you? This sort of technique is usually their style.

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Have you failed to notice that you're arguing with more than one person? I've made only a few posts to this thread. In none of them did I claim sensors were undetectable, nor have I called anyone a scientific illiterate. So your "finally" and "gracelessly" are hardly appropriate. Nor have I agreed that you're right about anything substantive.

Nor am I a libertarian. But that you think it's appropriate to ask such a question means you aren't worth arguing with. Bye!

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Hmmm ... let me see, let's google on Damien Sullivan:

From one government to another? Some solution. The same or
similar problems would exist there; that is the definition of government.

You wrote this, did you not? But you're 'not a libertarian'. Uh-huh. I think we can stop right there, but I'll reiterate my point and say that if certain anti-stealth people hadn't argued like this group typically does, there really wouldn't be that big an issue, and the discussion would have quickly converged to a numbers game - everything from direction of resources to sensors vs industrialization in a new system, relative economic weights, spy vs spy (the sensor platforms just don't put themselves there by magic, they have to get there without violating the laws of physics), etc. But no, some people just can't resist sneering . . . even if (or especially if) it is to no good purpose.

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Well, I did use to be libertarian. As for that quote, I don't remember writing it, and Google doesn't show it to me on the web, blogs, or groups, so I don't know where you found it.

As for stealth in space, you've failed to actually make a convincing case for it, just emitted some handwaving about alleged logical flaws. All the numbers and equations I've ever seen have come from the anti-stealth side. Like projectrho.

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j-larson.livejournal.com

First-class minds are not deterred by mere impossibility.

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tsm-in-toronto.livejournal.com

No, but they are constrained by them.

IMHO, good art only ever happens when the artist (in whatever medium) is stuck within limits, be it in materials, lack of time, too small a canvas (Gary Larson's greatness as a cartoonist is measured by what he was able to do with and within a single panel), whatever.

We dismiss work as 'formulaic' or derivative (e.g., http://www.google.ca/search?q=sword+of+shannara), when the artist recycles old, known solutions to the artistic problem.

But in the absence of constraints within which the artist must work, there is no problem. I think this is why a lot of people, especially in moments of candour, will admit they hate "modern art". And, those who like it, typically do so because they enjoy the vicarious thrill implicit in it, of pretending there are no constraints at all.

Or something (hope that made sense).

This is why

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mjlayman.livejournal.com

So, James, why'd you make this post?

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I asked for stories with non-stealthy ships over on rasfw and got stories about stealthy ships and a thread about whether stealth is possible in space.

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mjlayman.livejournal.com

Ah, you thought you'd get the same answers here?

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spikebrennan.livejournal.com

You want this to be Nicoll's Law? (with Sealion and FTL threads being corollaries?)

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