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What stealth negates which sensors?

Rabbit Eclair

Rabbit Eclair

Inactive Member
This is one I've bumped into a few times, and the Miharu's search for stealthed probes has goaded me into action. Would it be possible to get a chart showing which forms of stealth are effective against which sensors? Not all of the stealth/sensor system pages really cover their abilities in much detail; heck, several of the stealth systems have a sentence along the lines of 'renders the ship invisible to X and other methods' or simply 'makes the ship invisible to many detection methods'. Sure, common sense is often enough to say that X stealth doesn't work against Y sensor, but when you come down to things with words like 'gravimetric' in the name, common sense doesn't always apply.
 
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Yeeeeeah ... I wanted to avoid this, but alas, here we are.

There are two ways to look at this:

1. Fred wants it this way so we can actually figure out what shit does, and possibly eliminate some of the stuff we can't figure out for the life of us. That's something we'd do here.

2. You're stuck coming up with something wholly creative, off-the-wall and more-or-less crazy and somehow it works. Hey, it worked with hacking the NIWS ... barely. Did it really define anything? No. But it worked, and that was enough.

Fred should be the one to answer this, if Wes can't. But that might end up giving you the answer rather quickly, and usually Fred wants to give you poor sensor dudes something that actually makes sense. *shrugs*
 
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Kel said:
This is one I've bumped into a few times, and the Miharu's search for stealthed probes has goaded me into action. Would it be possible to get a chart showing which forms of stealth are effective against which sensors? Not all of the stealth/sensor system pages really cover their abilities in much detail; heck, several of the stealth systems have a sentence along the lines of 'renders the ship invisible to X and other methods' or simply 'makes the ship invisible to many detection methods'. Sure, common sense is often enough to say that X stealth doesn't work against Y sensor, but when you come down to things with words like 'gravimetric' in the name, common sense doesn't always apply.
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Stuff I know/ think I know:
Sensor Types

Gravimetric: According to Uso, these sensors just scope out gravity, which gives ships a very nice picture of planets, suns, and anything using gravity, especially gravitic drives, which, also according to Uso, show up like gigantic flares.

Aetheric: Pretty straight forward, these things get a ping on anything tearing up space time and pulling in some aether/ hyperspace tap/ quantum foam/ etc. in for power. As far as I know, it's the only sensor type that can't be negated by any type of countermeasure other than switching off your aether generator.

I'll finish this list thing later, as I got a trolley-thing to catch...
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As far as I know, it's the only sensor type that can't be negated by any type of countermeasure other than switching off your aether generator.
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Xiulurium protects against detection by passive aether sensor types.
 
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viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1079

That particular thread was never really given a conclusion or a final guideline... but it's what I pretty much stick to.

What Wes said applies too. The Miharu limits itself to 4 aetheric generators and large capacitor banks (which arguably could have been just more aether generators) because more would have made an aetheric signal too powerful for its xiulurium cover to hide.

The best way you can pretty much use to find things using passive sensors, going into silent running and such is pretty much to go in active sensor mode and run a scanner sweep of an area. Some factors can make it harder and easier, depending on the circumstances and the environment.
 
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CFS dimensional separation cloaking renders almost all forms of sensors useless to the cloaked vessel.
 
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As I recall, the RDD is both the only sensor that can detect a CFS-cloaked ship (which is hiding in another dimension), and the only sensor of any use to such a ship while cloaked.

But what about the other kinds of stealth?

And can RDD use be detected (perhaps by another RDD)?
 
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Xerena said:
While we are on the topic of stealth and sensors, are any of these kinds of stealth completely or partially "double-blind" like Star Wars cloaks are?
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Well, yeah. CFS stealth is really effective but on the other hand imposes a double-blind penalty to the stealthed vehicle.

As far as I recall, ships invisible in that fashion open up holes to 'real space' to be able to take a peek on the going ons outside. This is risky since it also gives a chance for those looked at to be able to look back. Also, I hear CFS trans-dimensional camouflage has its shares of risk to the vessel doing it (why? not sure).

The impetus of the question, though, is due to the Miharu's crew trying to figure out a way to find CFS-stealthed chibi-MEGAMI probes within the Great Southern Nebula. The ship whom left the probes behind used them both to leave a trail with recording of its progress in case it never came back (and it didn't so far). On the other hand, the probes couldn't be obvious so to avoid the enemy finding them, so, they were coated in stealth material (Xiulurium) and placed in CFS-stealth.

Of course, the probes aren't concerned with looking around - so, their CFS stealth has no gaps to exploit. They act as recording and their goal really is to not be found except by someone looking really hard.
 
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Xerena said:
As I recall, the RDD is both the only sensor that can detect a CFS-cloaked ship (which is hiding in another dimension), and the only sensor of any use to such a ship while cloaked.
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See, this is the kinda stuff I'm talking about. The wiki article...

CFS wiki article said:
The ship can also be rendered invisible to scalar radar, aetheric-energy sensors, other forms of detection by using the shield bubble to keep the ship in its own alternate plane of existence. It can also use its scalar fields to simulate that photons and other sensory forms pass through the “empty space” and thus its presence is hidden.
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... wouldn't lead me to believe that. Hell, the only thing the wiki article explicitly lists CFS as working against are radar, aether sensors, and presumably visual sensors. All of these "renders the ship invisible to X and many other forms of detection" lines make the wiki articles just about worthless when it comes down to figuring out if two ships can see each other.
 
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I've noticed that a lot of devices have more or less detailed descriptions of the many things they do well against, but very little if any information about what they do poorly against.

The descriptions of the various forms of cloaking and stealth technology, like the CFS stealth function, really should mention at least one or two detection methods from which that particular stealth method cannot hide, as well as any limitations it may impose - such as any actions which that method of stealth either prevents or cannot completely hide. For instance, can a ship fire weapons while using this or that type of cloak, and can it do so without giving away its position.

For those of you reading this and thinking "there is no way a ship can shoot without giving away its positions", that is not necessarily entirely true, especially for non-beam weapons. Missiles, torpedoes and similar munitions might well be possible to fire stealthily, though they might need to be specifically designed for such use; presumably "stealth model" torpedoes would have some other disadvantage (higher cost, reduced performance, etc.) with respect to the standard models.

I could make similar remarks about some of the shield and weapon descriptions - there are plenty of weapons that say neither this shield, nor that shield, nor some other shield can block them, but fail to mention what type of shield does. In fact, only scalar weapons say what kind of shielding (any kind that completely blocks both electromagnetism and gravity, in this case) IS effective against them.
 
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