On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:21:43 -0500, Jack Tingle <wjtingle@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>I occurred to me that there is one way a stealthy attack in space might
>work (at least once). It would depend on a lot of misdirection, really
>good security, and an inattentive, though not really incompetent victim.
>The key is a mass driver, driven by a fission reactor, and the fact that
>most of the viewpoints humans can reach easily are in or near the plane
>of the ecliptic.
Actually, that's false. If you're not in a great hurry, a viewpoint say
10 AU above or below the ecliptic is not significantly harder to reach
than one 10 AU out from Sol (or Earth) on the ecliptic.
[Evil Martians push an asteroid onto an impact trajectory; nobody notices]
>It just so happens, that this asteroid was one that the Republick's
>survey visited. And that the Republick has a long-standing bone to pick
>with Terra.
Which means that they should have launched a barrage of nuclear missiles;
that would have been faster, cheaper, more efficient, and slightly less
obvious.
>Mass drivers probably have the lowest radiated signature of any
>propulsion system.
Care to make a quantitative estimate for the RF and microwave signature
of a decent mass driver?
Just because the energy doesn't come out as IR, doesn't mean it isn't
a signature.
>If you keep a very well designed radiator panel aligned parallel to the
>ecliptic (hard, when it's a few acres, but not impossible), very few
>sensors will ever see it.
Except for the off-ecliptic sensors that will be deployed at negligible
cost by any spacefaring power that ever considers the possibility that
someone might try to launch a stealthy attack against them.
>Now the whole deal can be queered if someone happens to look at the
>asteroid during the initial movement.
Which they will do. Part of the problem with Stealth In Spaaaaace!!!
is that, if you're looking for high-energy propulsion systems, it is
pretty easy to look at *everything, simultaneously*. Or close enough
as makes no difference.
Worse, this particular scheme requires not only that nobody happen to
look at your asteroid, not just during the initial movement, but at
any time thereafter. Or look at where the asteroid used to be and
is supposed to still be.
Asteroids are very hard to move (yes, really, no matter how easy it
is for an SF author to describe an asteroid being moved). They are
moderately easy to find and very easy to track.
So by the time anyone can even seriously consider actually doing this
sort of thing, everyone else who matters will have mapped and charted
*all* the asteroids, and will be periodically updating those maps. A
routine update of the solar cartographical database intended to pin
down perturbations in the sixth decimal place of asteroid orbits, will
notice that there's an asteroid gone completely missing, long before
it reaches its target.
>Whether they see the heat signature, or the odd whatever signature that
>the mass drivers will cause, the sight of an asteroid actively changing
>course surely gives the game away. You have to do it when the asteroid
>is obscured by the sun from your target, and from anyone else who might
>rat.
An object can only be obscured by the sun from one direction. Well, two,
really. But your target will employ professional rats with vantage
points in many directions.
>You can probably also only do this once.
You can't do this even once. The waste heat from the nuclear reactor will
be detected by off-ecliptic sensors shortly after it goes critical. The
RF and/or microwave emissions from the extremely powerful mass driver will
be detected the moment it begins operation. And the asteroid's absence
from its normal orbit will be noticed within a few months at most.
>Still, it is a stealthy attack in space.
An attack that remains stealthy only if the enemy is incompetent and/or
impotent. We've seen plenty of proposals for that sort of thing, all of
them assuming the attacker has extensive and highly sophisticated space
infrastructure and the target is the United States of America of roughly
2000 AD. Whee.
--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*John.Schillin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
* for success" *
*661-718-0955 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *
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