@@chrisellis8089 Yep I may talk more about low-probability of intercept in the electronics warfare video, or maybe even something next year on sensors! - hoojiwana from Spacedock
you know I always thought of dogfighting being possible in a setting where sci fi stealth becomes so fucking advanced to the point where the ONLY way for any ship to engage is within 2 kilometers or so. due to the insane stealth capabilities that every single ship has.
im tired of idiots who keep saying nonsense like how all space battles needs to be 100,000 kilometers apart, people kept saying that trench warfare wasn't viable anymore, until ukraine-russia war happened and it literally went back to world war one trench battles, where even the maximum machine guns are still being used
I think you forgot about one thing in discussing the F35 and F22 radars that help them stay undetected; they don't need to use their OWN radar, they can share each others, as well as from other non-stealth or even non-aircraft sources. If an enemy can only see five radar sources when there are really a hundred aircraft, that's still successful stealth.
Yup, you see a single F-35 that's using its radar and suddenly 20 of them show up and launch their payloads at you, painted by the one radar. Wild stuff.
Not to mention next generation systems that are planned to use teamed drones. We may see a future where the manned aircraft has no sensors, no weapons and is almost completely undetectable.
@@CharliMorganMusic I am being hyperbolic of course. Even outside of combat scenarios radar and other sensors are invaluable for navigation. But I can definitely see them being stripped down to the bare bones needed to function independently.
I love that in The Expanse books they detect the Anubis near the Scopuli simply because the Canterbury’s radar hitting the stealth’s hull starts heating the hull plating slightly above the background level causing Adé to think “hey, that’s weird”.
They had that in the series too. And I started to think of when Inaros lobbed asteroids at Earth in the series. Pushed with just enough force for them to become ballistic and coated with energy absorbing material. The could be detected at launch but only if looking at the right place at the right time and the solar system is a big place. They could be detected before they hit, but not soon enough to stop it unless you knew the right frequency and angle to search with. relatively low tech and simple, but very effective
It's kinda weird though as I would expect a stealth ship to have active cooling in the hull. Doubt hiding would be possible without it in the first place.
It is, though, REALLY weird that the stealth ship hull generates so much heat that a civilian ship can see it on sensors, never mind a military vessel. If that's the tradeoff you'd have to make, I can't see it being viable
@@Paveway-chan the anubis didnt make the heat itself, the cant had active radar on the away team and by coincidence the anubis was in the path. the _cants_ radar heated up the hull, the anubis itself was the perfect temperature
@@qhu3878 Yes, that's what I meant. If radar waves from a *civilian* system heat up the hull by that much, I feel that stealth isn't much use to begin with...
a really good example that you didn't mention here is also how in the expanse, at the start of the Donnager battle, the Protogen stealth ships arranged themselves "vertical" to each other relative to the Donnager to look like one ship instead of several
That is a classic tactic. If you want to hide your numbers, you march single file. Each soldier in the footsteps of the one before them. The enemy won't know if ten or ten thousand soldiers marched through. And you can do the opposite. if you put your troops single line on a ridge, the enemy won't know how many are behind it. You show a hundred soldiers, and that could be all you have, or the formation could be thousands deep, hidden behind the ridge.
I thought of a scary use for space torpedos, they could be cooled to an ambient temperature prior to launch and remain hidden to infrared after being released, just sitting still and quiet until needed.
Might run into the problem that things that stay motionless and cold for a while and are then called to action very quickly have a tendency of feeling put upon by the sudden change of pace and taking petty revenge by breaking in creative ways.
I always loved the way the Interdimensional Submarine from Space Battleship Yamato used its abilty to hide in between Dimensions to be almost undetectable and almost unhitable.
Well the "submarine" hunt is the theme behind Romulan and Klingon cloaking in Star Trek. But it was weird reason the good guys the Federation don't have "submarines" is cause they signed a one sided deal with Romulans. WHY?
@@boxhead6177 This is something I, as a lifelong Trekkie, have never figured out. Sure, the Trek Feds are the good guys, but does this mean they have to be suckers too? (And I sometimes wonder if this applies to real-life U.S. liberals too ... )
There is another form of "stealth" in space of just filling the space with material that gives a massive thermal signature hiding in the cloud of material making it hard to target.
@@danielseelye6005 kinda sorta but they are more like active jamming to everyone. But this is like venting hot coolant and hiding in the cloud so they can't pinpoint where you are.
Or hiding behind solar sails. Imagine trying to hit one or dozens of ships with a cross-section of 50 meters behind a reflector with an area of hundreds of square kilometers.
Modern stealth is designed to obviously not be noticed in the first place, but it's value shines in a high intensity war where it makes it exceedingly difficult for an enemy to get a weapons grade lock. Seeing it and hitting it are very different things. Even in space combat, something as innocuous and low powered as a cell phone trying to connect can be seen across the solar system if you're looking for it, so 1: Don't be noticed
Also, you could have a chaff equivalent/decoy to send out a whole lot of signals much easier to lock onto than your own, thus making it even harder to get a lock.
Met a few F-22 pilots in my time. Had several tell me about wargames with other nations and services. They pretty all said everytime that they let it become a close fight they got the same response of "My Radar finally got you, I just couldn't get a damn lock!" Seeing a target is one thing, hitting it is another.
@@Plaprad Kinda surprised they didn't go to guns in those situations. It's interesting how stealth tech and the fact that missiles, while a lot better, still aren't quite perfect is resulting in the return of the F4 Phantom problem. One of the flaws of the F4 was that it wasn't expected to need to get into a close-range dogfight, so it was designed to be fast and carry a lot of missiles, but maneuverability was an afterthought and it wasn't until the F4-E that the aircraft was even fitted with guns. So when the missiles inevitably failed to hit and the Phantoms found themselves being swarmed by MiGs, they were unable to fight back. Obviously the F22 isn't going to have that problem, it's still a highly maneuverable craft, not enough to outturn a Eurofighter or a Flanker but enough to at least hold its own, but the F35's only real trick is being able to maintain extreme attitude in stable flight, which is great for shooting at things but useless in a dogfight as it results in a significant loss of speed, and the first step to winning in ANY combat situation is to not lose.
One aspect that doesn’t translate from atmospheric combat to space is maneuverability. Weapons locks are required for air combat because it’s very easy for a target to dodge; this isn’t the case in space. While ships can maneuver, doing so requires thrust; the more maneuverable a ship is the easier it is to see and thus to get a more-needed weapons lock. The less more stealthy / hard it is to get a lock, the less a lock is needed. Decoys only work so long as maneuvers aren’t required, since it’s be immediately obvious which is the real ship just by comparing engine plume strengths with acceleration rates (unless the decoys are of similar mass and engine size to the hiding object) Active tracking blocking like chaff only works against things that require active targeting; the target could be sprayed with ballistic projectiles since chaff is basically announcing where exactly you are. If you maneuver to be less easy to hit with ballistics, you’ve given up your stealth advantage, and you’re back to “the more a lock is needed, the easier it is to get a lock”
One of the additional things I appreciate about these videos: Whenever you show a clip from another source, you put that source in the corner somewhere, just in case we want to look it up later 😄
It's nice to see a video where Low Observablility is actually understood. So many people think "It's stealth so no one can see it." No, it's "Stealthy" so everyone has a harder time seeing it, and an even harder time tracking and locking. There are methods and technologies that can still track anything, but it's so hard that you really can't utilize them to their fullest extent. I also appreciate you got the F-117 incident a lot better than most. Almost no one I've met has even done basic research on that downing. Good job on that. Stealth is a very interesting and VERY nuanced thing. Hell, the Brits even had a "Stealth Battleship" in WWII. Granted that was all diversions and such, but the Germans never saw it until shells started to go pop. Another thing that was alluded too, but not really delved into was terrain. We used to fly down valleys in Afghanistan to prevent detection. Then realized there really wasn't any real air defense besides the guys in the valleys with machine guns and MANPADS. Something that can also be used in space using things like asteroids and such. I'm sure at some point even stellar winds will be used in some capacity for detection.
See effective visual camouflage for a great example, disruptive patterns aren't about mimicking nature, but breaking up your profile over the background.
@@NM-wd7kx Yep, dealt with that in the military. We deployed to a base with a squadron of RAF Tornadoes that were painted pink. We laughed until we saw them in the air from above. Damn things just vanished into the sands.
The British stealth battleship operation was accomplished by coordinating the shell bombardment with RAF bombers who were attacking at the same time. The Germans didn't realize a battleship was in the game until the bombers left and they were still getting hit.
Distraction is also useful here, such as in Firefly. Having something that is more visible to sensors or appears to be a bigger threat can draw attention away from you and give you time to escape, strike, hide, or complete your objective.
Or one scene in Galactica, where they hid vipers in freight containers for a surprise attack. Yes, the cylons knew there is a ship. But it was a freight ship without any weapons. That the thing suddenly shits out a dozen fighters was a nice surprise.
You need to watch that episode again, the roci was the thing they pretended to drop while it was completely powered down. The fight was already on when the containers were sent at the station. They weren't any kind of stealth or even trying to hide, they were improvised boarding craft that Thoth station was shooting at and killed one
Stealth aircraft nosecones aren't one way radar reflective, they're RF transparent, how they stay stealthy was right there in the clip. The phased array radar panel points up to bounce radar away, it uses beamforming between the phased elements to steer the radar at the ground, no dish, no moving parts.
if you are dealing with IR sesnsors, sacrificial heatsinks have some interesting implications as decoys and deception tools, you could store all your heat in one of those and then if you get detected you could launch it on your current trajectory and change course as rapidly as you are able without blowing out your own thermal sig. Subs kinda can do this with sound against sonar now so its a cool idea.
The heatsink's external shape needs to be carefully adjusted to produce virtually identical radar signature to the parent ship. Radar triangles thingies might be useful here.
@@crowhoptech it has sacrificial heatsinks but they don't really serve a decoy purpose since Elite still allows for visual identification even if you can't lock the ship
@@derhesligebonsaibaumThis is a late response, but in theory you can make use of systems like cold gas jets, which instead of using burning to produce thrust, they simply use the expansion of compressed gas. It's not very efficient, but with a sizable reservoir of fuel for the system it could be enough to make a difference. Also, at long enough range, you could ditch the heat sink and then just rotate your ship and start burning in a different direction. And because your engine would be facing away from somebody who is tracking you, they wouldn't necessarily see the IR bloom until you've massively changed course.
7:38 interestingly, elite dangerous has a system that pretty much perfectly matches what youre describing. well its more 2 systems that overlap and get used together. by default, your ship puts out heat through heat vents (presumably just some ultra-advanced version of a radiator that lets it work far more efficiently). you can activate silent running which completely seals those heat vents, rendering your ship nearly invisible to IR (which is what most sensors in the game are) except at very close range (though as your ship builds up heat the range you can be seen from does increase, though if heat is kept to a minimum through other means, in some cases another ship could nearly crash into you without knowing you were there, unless the pilot happens to see you with their own eyes, because youre just THAT well hidden from sensors). the game also has a module called heat sink launchers which, when used, redirect coolant away from the heat vents and through to a heat sink, which is then ejected to remove the heat from your ship very quickly. these two systems are typically used together to extend the duration of stealth offered by silent running, by using the heat sinks to occasionally eject built up heat. (its also useful if you accidentally fly too close to a star and need to cool down to avoid taking damage from the intense heat... a mistake i personally make a lot more often than i particularly want to admit). combine the two properly, and your ship becomes pretty much invisible to any other ship, outside of their pilot visible spotting you, and even if thats the case, firing on you becomes more difficult, since both turreted and gimballed weapons use the sensor lock to aim, meaning the pilot has to aim manually, something that admittedly, most pilots that regularly engage in combat will be at least somewhat good at, but is still going to be less accurate than if they could lock on to you and have the guns aim themselves.
That is very similar to a heat management system I came up with. Radiators have the issue that they can be shot. So what if you could heat up some particles and vent them as a cloud, taking the heat with them. And since they're small and have lots of surface area, they will cool faster than your ship. So if you went them out in the front, pass by, and pull them back in at the back, you can drastically improve thermal management without needing flimsy radiators. Bonus point is, that the cloud also helps as defensive system. Every enemy projectile, missile, etc would have to fly through that cloud. You basically throw out a huge array of immensely hot caltrops that double as radiators and flares. But "classic" radiators also exist, but they are mounted behind blast doors and can be retracted during combat. And a very smart spaceship commander could use the radiators facing away from the enemy while keeping the "hot" side in defensive mode. Combat would mainly focus on overwhelming the enemy thermal management. Why burn a hole into the enemy ship, when you can cook the crew. Weapons are designed to project more than 50% of the energy onto the target, that way they heat the enemy ship up more than your own. Engine burns create heat, so fighting would mostly be done coasting. Oh, and there is an obvious way to stop the enemy pilot visually stopping your stealth craft: paint it black. Yes, there are stars that would be covered, but finding those is much harder than a bright white spaceship.
4:12 - worth pointing out that the battery commander deliberately disobeyed standing orders about how many times he could sweep his radar because live intel told him the support aircraft carrying anti-radiation missiles were grounded by fog. The second F-117 was another incident, but the same commander & battery, attempting to repeat the feat, but although he attained radar lock and damage this failed to down the aircraft.
@@retrosquadchannel2.050 they got one, when it's bay doors were open, on a common path, after being extremely lucky. I guess they forgot to tell the Yugoslavians taking down one outdated aircraft that wasn't worth destroying doesn't win the war.....
@@retrosquadchannel2.050 Then why didnt the serbs shoot it down before it dropped its payload? Why didnt they manage to stop the F-117 raids before or after? Are they stupid?
Something i recently learned, is that the f22 raptor can create a sensor echo, that either makes the craft seem farther back, or further ahead to sensors
US naval fleets actually do this as part of their early missile defence. Even the old Vietnam era B-52 bombers had this capability. US may lead in stealth technology, but they're also stupidly far ahead in electronic warfare. Meanwhile, russia can't even figure out how to run backup encrypted comms after having destroyed the 4G towers in Ukraine that they needed for their own encryption.All those hundreds of russians officers that got whacked by Ukraine; US SIGINT satellites picking up calls and relaying coordinates back to Ukraine.
Stealth is a lovely layer of the defensive space onion. I like to daydream there could be a dichotomy between active and passive sensors, with the former largely forsaking stealth to take a more aggressive role.
That's not a daydream. That's how submarines work: Hydrophones to listen passively to sounds in water followed by active sonar to pinpoint specific targets.
That's how the USAF does it now. You'll have an F-15 in the back line with it's Radar going attracting targets while the squadrons of F-22's around it are dark and shooting on datalink.
4:13 a bit of luck is a pretty big understatement The first 2 sweeps picked up noþing, the 3rd one happened to be in the less than a second interval when the bomb bay door was open. (Lazrpig made a video about F-117) The night hawks were the only aircraft in the sky, the serbs knew when they were coming, and where they were going. And yes, the night hawk was shot down, it wasn't before it destroyed its target
Stealth is interesting because since there's no friction in space, you can just set yourself on a course and then turn engines off and follow it for a really long time, as long as you can plan well in advance, which is part of why the meteors in The Expanse were so effective. A robotic ship could also be stealthier, as it wouldn't need life support, so could safely power down way more systems than a crewed ship.
Issue with that is so long as someone sees your last burn they can calculate your trajectory, also your life support systems (including radiators to stop your crew from boiling to death) are still visible. Heck even robots need radiators as otherwise they could heat themselves to destruction.
@@georgethompson1460 Yeah, to truly go unnoticed you'd have to start coasting a long way away, so this is not a great option for quick responses to threats. The question with radiators is whether you could direct the radiation in some way, like having some reflectors that could concentrate it into a thin beam so that it couldn't be noticed from most angles.
A lot of this is what the ToughSF blog I mentioned goes into, particularly being able to manuever whilst remaining stealthy. Google the term "Hydrogen Steamer" for more! - hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@inventor121 Plus of course small amounts of cold gas early in the trajectory (while you're far away and less noticeable anyway) can result in very large changes to the trajectory later on. And when you do that, what with space being 3D, you can pick a trajectory at random from any number of them, so even if an adversary knows roughly where you're going they may find it difficult to predict your final approach.
Something that always needs to be mentioned whenever a discussion of stealth comes up is that, due to the physics of how radar works, it requires an obsessive level of signature control to get anything useful out of it. For instance, decreasing your radar signature from a specific angle by 50% doesn't drop the distance at which you can be picked up by 50%. It only decreases it by a little bit (about a 15% reduction). To drop the distance at which you can be picked up by 50%, you need to decrease the size of your return by a lot (around a 95% reduction). So stealth requires a disproportionate investment (along with its associated tradeoffs) before it becomes really useful. In an environment like the skies, where radar was often the key (almost only) way of spotting and tracking aircraft, then it's definitely worth it. In space, where things like telescopes would also be used to look for thermal hot-spots or bright reflections at absurd distances, then radar becomes one tool among many. This pushes the cost of stealth up even further, and makes it useful only in a few niche cases.
Plus you can always make your stealth craft appear as something else. If your fighter-bomber looks like a seagul, nobody will fire on it. And if your massive gunship looks like a civilian prop plane, you can just continue cruising.
Stealth isn't just radar. In space obviously thermal stealth would as if not more important. Not sure why you assume you'd only try to hide from radar. Thermal stealth could work by having large internal heat sinks and active cooling in the hull. Definitely feasible. The ship would just have to occasionally dump heat close to a celestial object that it can use to hide.
@@XMysticHerox I mentioned it because it's the main type of stealth that we've developed so far, and because it illustrates a general problem with stealth concepts. Thermal signatures in space, as you mention, are damned hard to hide and you need to make a lot of compromises to get them to work. Tough SF (a good blog for this sort of thing) worked up a viable design based on cryogenic hydrogen storage - the hydrogen steamer. But to be usefully stealthy it ends up sacrificing almost all of the characteristics you want for a space warship.
@@sangomasmithIt's the main type of stealth because it is what is mainly needed for aircraft. I know it and something like the hydrogen steamer would already be useful as a recon ship or strategic weapon and likely be built. Which would both be warships. But I actually think there are a couple of issues with that article. And one "issue". The "issue" being that it is extremely hard sci fi eg basically current technology. Which isn't necessarily the case even for hard sci fi settings or even all that sensible when discussing future technology. It is safe to assume we will have made some advances by the time we are building spaceships for combat. As for the actual issues. Mainly things not considered by the author. Imo the fundamental issue is something actually touched upon in the video. The design is basically for a ship "totally invisible". Which is very difficult of course but also hardly what you need. The main aspect of that would be the requirement the author set for it's entire drive system to use cold exhaust. That is total overkill in my opinion and would be one of the main reasons for it to be less useful as a warship. Why is it not necessary. Two things. To be useful as a spaceship it can simply use a conventional drive and burn well at range. The resolution of sensors is limited. Something often overlooked in this discussion. Even at the distance of Pluto a drive plume would have to expand to 190 km and still be distinguishable to be visible by something like the Hubble (if we have something like a magnetically confined fusion engine I assume this is the case though I have not personally done the math). And that is not a telescope capable of scanning the entire sky or even more than a tiny fraction of it. A telescope that can do that would have a much smaller resolution. Especially if FTL is available and ships could just jump to the edge of the system, a completely cold drive is absurd overkill. If something like In a similar vein it is ignored that a ship could burn behind other objects like planetoids and even asteroids as well as dump heat. Doesn't really matter how hot your exhaust is if the enemy can't actually see the exhaust. Of course this requires you to know roughly where the enemy sensors are placed which can be risky with the enemy presumably also having stealth. Last thing would be beaming heat which is not considered but something we can do even with current tech. Rather than just radiating it out wherever through radiators or dumping the contents of heat sinks you could beam the heat even into outer space if you think there are no senors there or get close to a planet and beam it at that (without having to hide behind it). This could be combined with the other methods as well.
In retrospect it's probably more electronic warfare, but I was reminded of the ole Razzle Dazzle (since it's hard to hide in space). Have your profile reflect really weird to make the enemy have to guess 1 ship, 2 ships, a squadron, a fleet? a la the "don't be identified" strategy similar to the tank blanket
been playing from the depths and one other thing that can be done is increasing your radar and other detection footprint so wide that its hard to hit you. from chaff launchers to just having decoys at the ends of your craft or even outward extending decoy arms. I think in space this can be used even more effectively for example shooting really hot canisters in 4 cardinal directions, because its space it they could just keep going and with some very basic thrusters they can randomly move to make it harder to tell whats real.
In Lancer: Battlegroup, the 'stealth' options veer closer to the ones mentioned later in the video; through different methods including very long radiator strips and letting off gasses, tactical stealth in Battlegroup is the space equivalent of kicking up enough sand to obscure your position just enough so that the enemy can't tell where you are exactly in the giant heat signature.
In The Lost Fleet books, there’s no stealth, but one alien species manages to seemingly make their ships invisible. Except what they’ve actually done is infect human ship computers with quantum worms that keep their ships from showing up on sensors. Once the worms are removed, it turns into a turkey shoot for the humans since the aliens aren’t expecting to be visible now. Later on, something similar is done with a human fleet
Thats not entirely correct. Some shuttles and fast attack craft have stealth systems, but it's effectiveness is.... limited to say the least. No fleet-level warships have stealth systems, however.
@@Ryukuro my mistake. I guess the books mostly deal with capital ships since fighters have no place in interplanetary combat due to mass-thruster ratio and limited fuel. They’re mainly for aerial and orbital combat where the fighters’ higher delta-V makes up for the deficiencies
In the HonorVerse series which is basically all about spaceship combat. They mention that true surprises will no longer be possible in the future due to superior senor arrays however surprises happen when a commander precieves the intent of a pattern in a different way possibly due to past experince biases. Considering everyone are professional spaceship commanders battlefield surpises are few and far between.
There was that time when Honor, having captured and manned her own private space force, manages to ambush a Peep task force in deep space. How? Well, most sensors of the day look for gravitic drive signatures ... so Honor, who also had the advantage of knowing precisely where the Peeps were coming in, coasted her ships into position using their maneuvering thrusters only. She achieved such overwhelming surprise that it was the first time in the Honorverse that one side wiped out the other.
I'm surprised, because that situation could easily lead to the whole "chess novice beats a grand master by making nonsensical moves" situation. If everyone expects the other guy to do the most optimal thing, then not doing that thing becomes a surprise.
@@seanbigay1042except when the situation was broken down by her friend, she pointed out dozens of things that could’ve gone wrong that would’ve likely resulted in her fleet being wiped out. And the only reason she knew the enemy would jump in where they did was because the local state security agency was really anal retentive about that since it was a prison planet. They also maneuvered in such a way as to let them fire into the unshielded stern (or “up the kilt” as the slang goes)
There is an often-used quote in the books about surprise that went something like, "Surprise happens when you don't recognize something you saw until after the fact."
@@artembentsionov Yeah, when Honor taught at the Academy during the truce between the First and Second Haven Wars one of her most important lessons was why NEVER to try and emulate the so-called Battle of Cerberus ...
Electronic warfare is such a broad topic, it might be worthwhile to break it down into 2 separate videos. On one hand, it's extremely closely related to stealth/low observability, but it also covers a whole lot of stuff with applications that are more involved with active combat operations than anything else. And of course, there's the whole use of ESM as a sensor in its own right in there.
In Mass Effect, the Normandy used stealth very effectively against the Geth. The Normandy was able to keep all of its emissions inside the ship and so was invisible to most sensors - except visual identification. But the Geth, being machines, didn't have windows on their ships or stations.
When the engineer describes the stealth systems of the Normandy in the first game, he got it backwards in one respect: When replying to Shepard's question if this makes the ship wholly undetctable, the engineer states that a passive scan can pick them up right away, or anyone looking out a window can see them plain as day... ...it's an _active_ scan that can pick up the Normandy despite the stealth system-- the whole deal about the heat sink is to negate passive sensor detection since the ship would not be actively emitting infrared energy. Radar or lidar sweeps don't care about that.
There’s an indie strategy game called Concealed Intent that’s all about playing cat and mouse with enemy ships. The more you move around, the easier it is for the enemy to get a read on your position and strike first. But it’s also a way for you to do a search pattern to try to get close enough to get a scan of the enemy. You can use active sensors, but you’d be also screaming “I’m right here!” to the enemy, and they’d see you first
Sometimes you can detect something by seeing what is NOT there as well. For instance when a sonar / radar absorbent material on a vessle passes between an emitter and the receiver, or from a point of known reflection, the lack of signal is just as noticeable as if the vessle had flares trailing behind it. A good example is an eclipse, the moon blocking the sun makes the moon's presence very obvious. This is how electric eyes or laser detection beams work. I believe it was also the premise behind a tachyon detection grid in Star Trek, when they were trying to blockade cloaked ships at their boarder.
7:45 i think its funny how in mass effect theres a running in game joke of how the biggest enemy of the normandy's stealth system is an open window, and the way how the main enemies ships like the reapers or geth litierally dont have windows lmao
This reminded me of the Laser Heat Sinks in the battletech tabletop game. I have never seen them in any other IP but it seems like a great idea for stealth & I’m not aware of any reason it couldn’t be used as an at least temporary way of masking IR. Use an internal heat sink to temporarily absorb skin temperature, dump that IR into a laser as the stimulating radiation and point the laser away from the people you’re hiding from. The narrow observability of the laser would mean unless it’s actually hitting you, you wouldn’t see the IR & yeah efficiencies are a problem but you gotta figure it might be able to make those internal heat sinks run a bit longer before they start warming the ship up
Doesn't work. The narrower you try to make the heat emission (with a laser being the ultimate version of it, with an emission angle of basically zero), the more inefficient it gets to the point where the amount of waste heat you produce trying to limit where you emit waste heat equals or exceeds the amount of waste heat you're trying to dump.
Unfortunately this only works with sci-fantasy physics-breaking tech. Heat is very difficult to actively manage - it wants to radiate from everything all the time, and expending energy to move it around produces _even more_ heat, which you then have to expend _even more_ energy to move around, etc etc. This is why heat is the worst enemy of any stealth spaceship.
The other option would probably be massive kilometre long narrow heat sink tails behind your ship that you dump all your heat into. With enough math, the ambient radiation leaking outside your ships silhouette might be small enough to get you ignored until you are in firing range. @@keith6706
Additional Considerations: 1; Gravity drives = Gravimetric distortions that can be detected = Non Stealth/High-Visibility/Positve ID as a Ship/Artificial Object. 2; All Low-Visibility measures vs. Solar Winds/Interstellar Medium = Visibility owing to 'Wake' and excitation of the Interstellar Medium/Solar Wind flow = Visiblt to Passive Sensors and Positive Tracking. 3; AI Image processing = Spotted by object occlusion of stars and body of Galaxy = Visibility/Tracking. 4; Hiding behind planet = Only feasible with reactors off as neutrino signature can be detected through planets, only a star would give you a 'mask' vs. this due to it's greater neutrino signature. 5; RF emissions from active power sources distribution networks can be detected. AC current creates RF emissions.
"AI Image processing = Spotted by object occlusion of stars and body of Galaxy = Visibility/Tracking." You don't even need an AI for that really. Basic image processing can do that. The problem is not the processing however. It's actively scanning the entire sky in a resolution high enough to detect tiny changes. Thats... well very out there. Sensors have hard physical limits we are actually fairly close to rn for some forms of detection. It'd require a utterly absurd investment to do something like this or sensors approaching the realm of magic. Well actually this applies to everything you said. Yes in theory you can detect all these things. The question is if the resolution of your sensors is good enough to do so at range and to what degree a stealth ship may be able to mask their output. The latter is certainly possible for 3-5.
Keep in mind that high + low grade thermal mixing, heat pumped radiators, and giant waste heat collimation optics can, for some engineering and additional (but well worth it) power expenditure, essentially turn your thermal emissions into a few degree wide cone (and dramatically blueshift them to the point they wouldn't be detectable as thermal in origin).
@9:10 So as far as I know the radar is angled upwards so incoming radar waves are reflected away from the source. The cone is transparent in both directions. Also the newer radars are fixed and steered by canceling the waves of the radar against itself (AESA radar is basically many small independent radar emitters that work together).
one of my favourite depictions of stealth in space is in (I think) Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, where a prowler relies on the tiniest burst from thrusters to move away from a nuclear mine it has deployed and stay hidden. Drastic movements will both knock the mine, and potentially allow hostile ships the notice some stars "blinking out of existence" for a second.
Great overview of low observability, appreciate the way you approached it compared to others I have seen that do try to treat it like cloaking or that anything being able to detect a "stealth" aircraft/ship means stealth is automatically worthless as a result. I think one of your points bears repeating and that is that you don't need your systems to defeat all enemy sensors. If you look to the real world LO aircraft and ships, there are lots of radars that can detect even the stealthiest of these but that doesn't mean those radars provide target quality tracks or do so at the range required to engage before you do. VHF radars (typically) will not provide sufficient quality tracks for engaging a stealthy object. Similarly, missile radars (if active guided vs external queueing) may not be able to track the target their launch platform saw when they shot them. In terms of first shoot probability, the right amount of LO can force the enemy to get closer to have a good enough lock to fire, potentially allowing you to fire first or otherwise complete your mission before being engaged.
Yes, this. What makes, say, the F-35 so good (well, one of the things) is that you need to get quite close to it before you can "see" it properly - and at that point, it will have seen you long before, and shot you to pieces, far beyond visual range. The scary thing about being up against stealth aircraft is that, out of seemingly nowhere, you get lit up by a radar lock by a missile that's already in the terminal phase... In other words, you get a huge scare to "entertain" you for what is most likely the very last seconds of your life; at that point, reaction time (human and aircraft) makes it nigh-impossible to do anything.
Another topic little addressed in space combat is the cooperative engagement capability (CEC), sensor platforms can provide a fire solution for weapons retreated at massive distances, or for multiples of them without putting the launch platform at risk.
I've heard the science paper on radar cross section calculations in the soviet union was taken at face value for what the author intended it for, which was identifying radar returns around airports from buildings and terrain. Soviet leadership didn't think that required being classified, being primarily intended to help civilian air traffic controllers figure out what is what on their radar screen.
There's a really neat set of episodes from Legend of the Galactic Heroes Gaiden, where Reinhard is commanding his first vessel and has to hide from Free Planets Alliance Navy vessels searching for him. They make sure to not use active sensors so they don't give away their position.
9:00 If the nose of the plane was transparent in only one way, it would mean the radar behind it is useless. It needs to "hear" the radar bounce back, so it needs to let the wave through both ways.
if you look closely at the Raptors nose you'll notice several 'lines'. These are the things that read the bounce back, and the computer on board goes to work figuring it out.
@@Tank50us I don't think those are receivers for the main radar. They have way too little surface area to get a decent range out of them. Do you have any source on that? I would be guessing if they are radae components they would be for the RWR
@@Tank50us Are you referring to the very faint lines going from the back partway up the radome? Those aren't receiver antenna. They're bonding strips so if lightning hits the nose or static electricity develops it will go into the airframe and out somewhere else. We had them on C-130's as well. Without them a lightning strike on the radome can cause it to shatter. With them, you just get a small burn hole and a laundry list of inspections and replacements for maintenance.
Don't quote me on this but I think the nose cone is just transparent but the radar is tilted up (phased array baby!) so any radar waves from the ground bounce upwards.
The Russians claim that they can detect stealth aircraft with the SU-57 Felons because of L-band receivers embedded in the leading edges of the wings. So, they 'listen' for radar signals coming out of ground radar stations using their wingspan instead of the nose. What a nifty way to do things. I wonder if anyone else in the stealth fighter game had that figured out already.
You forgot the gravitational signature. It's far-fetched and more a sci-fi tech, but any material object has a weight, therefore, it creates its minuscule gravitational well. In interstellar space, an advanced piece of tech could also pick that up and use it to aim at a spaceship. No way to avoid that.
As for the F-22 and F-35 nose cones, they are in fact transparent to RADAR pulses both ways. In order to retain stealth, the F-22 and F-35 have their RADARs pointed slightly upwards, which causes any incoming RADAR pulses to reflect skywards instead of back to the enemy.
That's interesting and explains the black foamy stuff around it, I just didn't think that angle was high enough to do that effectively! - hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@FranksFilmEcke Have you watched the video? Because it pretty clearly covers this topic: IR stealth is impossible in the strict sense of IR invisibility, but there are plenty of circumstances covered under the broader umbrella of 'stealth' and discussed in the video that would work just fine with current physics - many of them are used right now for our current stealth vehicles.
@@KillahMate Just a copy from other Text. I think the part of IF was not well researeched here my other post. Oh and i work with that stuff. Infrared camouflage in space faces significant challenges, not least of which is the sophistication of modern infrared sensors. These sensors are incredibly sensitive, capable of detecting variations in temperature as slight as fractions of a degree. This sensitivity means that even minor heat emissions from a spacecraft, which are inevitable due to onboard systems and life support, can be detected. The task of camouflaging or masking these emissions is therefore extremely difficult. Spacecraft must dissipate excess heat, often via infrared radiation, to avoid overheating. Any attempt to cloak this heat signature would have to contend with these highly sensitive sensors, which are designed to pick up even the most subtle infrared signals against the backdrop of space. This backdrop itself presents another challenge; the cosmos is filled with infrared radiation from various sources, and blending into this complex, dynamic environment is a significant hurdle. Given these factors, achieving effective infrared camouflage in space, where sophisticated sensors can detect even the slightest temperature differences, is a formidable and currently unattainable goal.
@@peasant8246 Alright, let's assume you manage to cool your ship to the temperature of space (which is technically near impossible, but let's just say it's feasible). Now, you encounter a different issue. In the infrared (IR) spectrum, you can see the background of space. What you have then is a dark, black spot. You might think this is not exactly invisible but still stealthy. To the human eye, that's true. However, for computers equipped with pattern recognition, this dark spot, which doesn't match the background, is easily detectable. You might argue that we could emulate the background radiation. This might work if you're only trying to deceive a single sensor on one ship. But consider this: if there's just a 5-meter gap between two sensors, they can detect an angular difference from about 4 million kilometers away. So, evading detection becomes exponentially more difficult.
To explain the story of the F117 that got shot down a little more, the Yugoslavians knew exactly where it was coming from, what was in the air during that night, and in a stroke of dumb luck, the operator ran a sweep just as the F117 opened its bomb bay doors, which are usually open for only a couple seconds. If those doors had not been open at that exact time, the operator would’ve gotten nothing, which the radar had told him twice before. There could not have been a more ideal situation for the Yugoslavs during that night.
I think the misconceptions about stealth are most noticeable when people jump to declare that a stealth aircraft is useless because some radar somewhere detected it. Just because an aircraft is detected doesn’t mean the enemy can actually catch it or shoot it down; most stealth planes are specialized for avoiding the radar frequencies used to guide missiles, not avoid detection entirely. And they’re obviously not invisible to everything - we can SEE them.
I think the best solutions for space camouflage are obfuscation and misdirection, rather than avoiding detection entirely. One way would be to design your radiators, sensor profiles, and transponders to match some common or civilian spacecraft. Disguise yourself as a freighter, and unless you're somewhere you clearly shouldn't be, you can avoid being recognized as a target. The second would be to position debris - potentially in the form of either towed asteroids or something like chaff - between yourself and an observer, so that the craft's emissions and silhouette are distorted and difficult to identify. Unless your enemy has a very good idea of when rocks are going to pass by, it seems like you can avoid detection if you can just hide behind or among a nice handful of asteroids.
I agree, and to add to that, minbari and Aeldari ships having systems that throw out sensor ghosts around them, making it impossible to know where exactly the ship is. But those are arguably ECM systems rather than conventional stealth methods.
The problem with active radar is that the opposition can spot you earlier then you can detect. This is because of the inverse square rule of emitted radiation where the strength of the return signal is reduced by the square of the distance travelled. This means that the signal strength of the returned signal is 1/4 of that which is received by the target. This is why the preferred option is to search using a passive option that would use reflections from near by pulsars or other stellar radio sources to find distant ships. This approach also explains Sci-Fi's habit of not having large sensor arrays on ships as 1. It doesn't look cool and 2. Its easier to fudge the tech angle so it doesn't get in the way of the plot/avoid background explanations.
In the game "Children of a Dead Earth" it's explained that stealth is functionally impossible in space due to the simple fact that any space-faring civilization is going to have to focus heavily on tracking space debris in order to protect shipping lanes, satellites, orbital stations, bases on planets/moons that don't have a thick atmosphere, etc. And the cheapest/easiest way to do so would be to just have a bunch of regular optical cameras and telescopes pointed at the sky and then use computers to sort through the massive amounts of data to pinpoint likely bits of space debris by seeing when they pass in front of stars and predict the paths so the debris could either be avoided or diverted before it became a serious threat. But this also means that you can't try to sneak up because spaceships would need to travel at FAR faster speeds than space debris. Sure, you could try to disguise yourself as space junk by inserting yourself into a known orbit or by matching the speeds normal for space junk, but the issue is that it could take you years/decades/centuries by moving at those speeds and orbits.
@@roetheboat1 that would only work if your opponent isn't actively creating new space junk all the time by blowing stuff up. Also, looking at the stars can last days before you notice something, as if you want to use dimmer stars you need a bigger telescope and smaller field of view
@@tedarcher9120 If you have some sort of FTL travel or even some sort of way of quickly accelerating up to like 20% the speed of light then stealth would make more sense. But if you are moving at speeds like what is seen in The Expanse (or Children of a Dead Earth which doesn’t have the Epstein drive and so can’t fully accelerate the entire trip) then you will be spending months or even years in transit between the planets. If you are creating space debris to hide in, you need to move at that same speed and follow the orbit of the debris in such a way that it looks natural. After all, it would make it pretty obvious if suddenly unknown objects started moving directly towards some sort of military target at abnormally fast speeds. And it probably would take days or even weeks to notice, but you have to keep in mind that it would take MONTHS of travel time even for us to go from Earth to Mars at the closest point in their orbits going as fast as possible. Meanwhile your stealth/disguise would need to be able to hold for that entire time despite it drawing more and more attention the closer you got. That would mean avoiding doing anything that could leave a heat signature or a radio signal or whatever. Stealth/hiding would be easier in cluttered systems like the rings of the gas/ice giants, but you would have to figure out how to first reach those targets without being seen or else your enemy would know where you entered the area and then have a better chance of predicting where you will attack from.
@@roetheboat1The problem with that is that it assumes the system is very built up. There is no real reason to assume that would be the case. Space is big. If you have cheap FTL especially you could easily have millions of lightly inhabited systems. To track everything you just need to survey the system once. You don't need to actively monitor everything. That is ridiculous. As for optical. Again space is really big. To scan the entire "sky" you would need an utterly absurd number of telescopes. Again in a very built up system sure. But a smaller colony would be unlikely to have anything of the sort. Even then depending on the resolution there would be a hard limit to how far out things can be detected. Especially since stealth ships would likely be painted a deep black and be difficult to detect. Earth today certainly does not have the capability to detect some random deep black object moving through the outer solar system. And we do have a *lot* of cameras looking. Now consider some smaller colony of a couple million people. Would they really have a massive sattelite network just for the offchance a stealth ship might show up? Well no. Even a colony of hundreds of millions is unlikely to have that imo. I like how the Expanse does it with earth having an expensive scanner system specifically for the purpose.
Radar is easy to use on earth because the air is transparent to radar waves. In space the whole spectrum is available to use because space really doesn’t block anything. The biggest advantage in space is its shear immensity. Most near earth asteroids were only discovered recently, and if one is on a collision corse we won’t really know unless it has completed an orbit or two near earth. As for stealthy shapes in space, a sphere is probably the best. Since only a very small point would be reflected back to the transmitter, and it works in any direction. The down side is it does reflect in every direction off one hemisphere so if your detector is good enough then it can be discovered from any direction.
A topic suggestion I have is different types of radiators you can use for a spacecraft and how efficient they are, particularly sense that seems to be overlooked very often in spacecraft design. I’m particularly curious about Dusty Plasma radiators as I used those for a recent spacecraft design of mine.
For my setting I employ two kinds of sensors: active and passive. Passive sensors simply hear for things, similar to on a submarine. Active sensors send out signals and wait for the response. You can reduce your risk to passive sensors by reducing your output. The less heat and radiation you emit, the harder you are to find. Which obviously causes issues with thermal management. And active sensors light you up like a christmas tree. On the other hand active sensors are more accurate and have more range. And since the setting is relatively soft, FTL sensors exist. But only of the active variety. And while "classic" cloaking tech exists and works against active and passive sensors, it isn't perfect and requires the ship to be running dark even more if you want to stay hidden. And you have to coast. But the opposite also exists. Basically autonomous drones that emit massive signals and appear larger than they are. Drop out sone of these pods, make them emit the signatures of a fleet of massive battleships, and your small cruiser suddenly appears unimportant.
Just like to make a mention for the Gundam Deathscythe from Gundam Wing. While its upgrade did get a more conventionally thought of stealth cloak that made it invisible the original had simply its Hyper Jammers which rendered it invisible to most electronics despite still being visible to the naked eye until the upgrade. To expand on this in ep.2 there is a pilot of an aquatic Mobile Suit who says to his commanding officer "We're under attack. But I can't see the enemy anywhere." likely because Deathscythe was not showing up on the viewscreens in some capacity as a later pilot in the episode was able to make a note of the Gundam's signature weapon unless his MS merely had more advanced optics so to speak. This confusion led to the officer's assumption it was an attack by units considered allies rather than an actual enemy leading to friendly fire.
The radar being Jammed was a nice touch. Excellent video. Also the ship i have in my novel has a combination of stealth (sensor absorbing materials and construction) along with purpose built jammers to evade detection behind enemy "lines" (lol). One of the special weapons being an anti-matter torp that has built in jammers, so that it creates ghosts on the enemy ship sensors tricking the weapons into thinking that there is a massive strike incoming and all the guns firing wildly into the cosmos.
Was positively surprised to see patlabor 2 here, absolutely love that movie. Especially the interception scene you showed, its something I've only seen in documentaries.
Valid strategies all! Add another one: -burn only near or behind stars to mask your exhaust signature! How close? Well, that depends on what are you trying to hide from. But, let's say you want to invade some neighboring system. Your star is noisy and bring enough, to make even your planets invisible to enemy sensors, unless they happen to cross right in front of it. You can use two options: 1. Burn toward the enemy with the sun at your back, like coming out of the sun in aerial warfare of today! 2. Burn behind the sun, and use a series of such burns around other stars to use slingshot effect to get to your enemy. The first method is more direct, but requires more energy and the second is more efficient, but takes more time. Either way, you spend most of the travel time not burning at all. The enemy becomes aware of you strictly by luck if some listening outpost picks you up in a case of cosmic coincidence, or only after you start breaking OR launch you relativistic kill missiles/projectiles or whatever long range weapon you intend to use. And by then, it can be too late.
A possible idea I had was if you had disposable heat sinks. You turn on your stealth engine and rapidly dump heat into the sinks. Then when they get too hot, you sheath it in a capsule that masks the heat for just long enough as you jettison the heat sink in random directions. Icing on the cake if you can make it so the capsules open up at a preset time so that when (not if) the heat starts to become noticeable, there's a bunch of random heat signatures that make it look like there are a bunch of ships out there while you skedaddle.
In my setting the ships cool their skin and have massive heatsinks forcing military ships to be massive and still using radiators but they can shut them off for a while to "run dark" they just have to be careful to not do it for too long vs civilian ships can be much smaller since they can leave their raditors out all the time
One thing that makes sense is to have lights on the ship that can mimic the stars that are behind it from each direction. There'll definitely be errors in that that would be detectable by good enough sensors at close enough range, but it would go a long way. Alongside other stealth measures it could probably defeat older less good sensors and weapons and make even newer better sensors have to get closer than they otherwise would before they see you clearly. Which is exactly like any kind of stealth and any kind of ECM in real life, so it kinda makes sense because rarely anything changes at the level of fundamental underlying principles, no matter how different it looks on the surface.
Something that down come up with the F117 shot down by the Serbs was just how complacent everyone had become. Not only were the aircraft using the same flightpaths repeatedly but on the day of the shoot down the F117's were operating without the support of electronic warfare aircraft (EA-6B Prowler) and of the flight of three aircraft coming in Vega 31 (the aircraft that was targeted and shot down) had opened its weapons bay well before its target for its attack run, completely negating the stealth profile of the airframe. The Serbian SAM system failed to lock both of the other aircraft in the formation and almost certainly was only able to properly target Vega 31 because its weapons bay was open. Get the impression everybody involved has just started to believe the Airframes stealth was invincible and got way to comfortable when sending them into hostile airspace.
Akchewally, the Nighthawk was hit because it had a weapons bay open. In that conflict, US fighters had been using the same flight path repeatedly. The SAM operater essentially shot a hail mary in their direction, and the missile picked up the exposed Nighthawk at just the right moment. Nighthawks are still used now and again for special missions because their shape is more of a dedicated stealth craft than newer designs.
One book I’ve read has a ship use a gravity generator to bend outgoing emissions in an endless loop around the ship. Not only does it keep the ship from being visible, but it also forms an impromptu shield from all the energy coursing in a sphere. But the generator had to be constantly adjusted on the fly by a skilled tech
I don't know if this would be particularly stealthy, as you're basically turning the ship into a miniature black hole, which are very distinct in their absence of emissions.
@@basedeltazero714 space is big. If your ship is small (and this one was a fighter), you’d be looking for a black hole the size of maybe 10 meters. And even then you’d have to know to look for it
The tabletop rpg Lancer: BATTLEGROUP has an interesting take for spaceship stealth. They dont do stealth at all. I mean, ships dont try to hide their signatures, "stealth" ships use specific bloom ports so they can show as much heat as possible. This way getting an accurate target profile is difficult since the crossection is enormous on purpose to hide the ship inside the mess.
My understanding is that is basically how jamming works today. You make enough noise that they know something is in the area, but have no idea what or where.
In my opinion, the best way to achieve stealth in space is to compensate for the lack of clutter by *bringing your own clutter* - chaff with infrared reflectors and heat sources to spread bright hot spots all around and give the enemy a swarm of artificially-constructed sensor ghosts on top of the ones they normally see, while also reducing your ship's own presence to match the fakes.
Another concept I've heard brought up on the Merge and elsewhere is strategically mixing stealth and non stealth assets to increase background noise and make the stealth harder to detect. Stealth operating alone can still stand out from a background of nothing, stealth operating in a cacophony is another matter. Certainly there can be creative ways to implement this in a space setting which is significantly more three dimensional than in-atmo flight and has the whole "near absolute zero" background temp to deal with. The Normandy operating in the battle for Rannoch, for example, could likely run a bit hotter than normal solo missions while still being low-observable
7:40 Solar sails could have some stealth applications because with a solar sail you can ride the solar wind and therefore do not need to preform a burn, you could also use the luminosity and solar wind of a star to break line of sight from telescopes and sensor equipment.
@@Plapradnotably, they only managed to get a missile lock when the F-117 actually opened its bays, and indeed got extremely lucky to intercept it in that timeframe of them being open. LazerPig did a video on the topic recently; "Stealth: A Controversy." He goes over this incident in detail there.
In Space: Above and Beyond, there was a high tech enemy space fighter (Chiggy Von Richthofen)that seemed to actively confuse or spoof both radar and lidar of the Hammerhead fighters.
Yeah, all they saw was a strange ripple on the radar that indicated it was near. Still, their boss was able to beat the alien one-on-one after delivering a badass speech to a chaplain
F22, F35, Rafale and basically all Modern/Modernized jets that include a static AESA without repositionner (not rippen or typhoon) have their antennae canted upwards several degrees. They are basically mirrors and by doing this you deflect the energy away from the sensor. in addition, no, Composite nose cones aren't unidirectional :)
Talking about the f-117 shoot down though, it should be noted that even with all the foreknowledge of where and when it was going to be flying and even at what altitude it was still unable to be targeted until the bomb bay doors opened which significantly increases its RCS.
4:30 For the record, luck was a major factor in that shoot down, but it was also that radar team disobeying protocol and putting all of their lives in danger. It should also be noted the only reason the radar picked up the nighthawk, was because the scan bounced off the inside of the bomb bay doors, during the approximately 3 seconds they were open. To those of you with reasoning skills, you will have correctly deduced that therefore, the nighthawk had already completed its bombing mission, meaning that the stealth of the aircraft did exactly what it was meant to do. Stealth tech has one purpose, keeping the asset safe and undetected until its mission is carried out. If, as a bomber, the only time that enemy detection systems can see you, is while your bomb bay doors are open, and actively dropping ordinance, then I'd say that's mission complete.
Infrared camouflage in space faces significant challenges, not least of which is the sophistication of modern infrared sensors. These sensors are incredibly sensitive, capable of detecting variations in temperature as slight as fractions of a degree. This sensitivity means that even minor heat emissions from a spacecraft, which are inevitable due to onboard systems and life support, can be detected. The task of camouflaging or masking these emissions is therefore extremely difficult. Spacecraft must dissipate excess heat, often via infrared radiation, to avoid overheating. Any attempt to cloak this heat signature would have to contend with these highly sensitive sensors, which are designed to pick up even the most subtle infrared signals against the backdrop of space. This backdrop itself presents another challenge; the cosmos is filled with infrared radiation from various sources, and blending into this complex, dynamic environment is a significant hurdle. Given these factors, achieving effective infrared camouflage in space, where sophisticated sensors can detect even the slightest temperature differences, is a formidable and with the know Physics at the moment a unattainable goal.
7:57 in Star Wars Legends, the StealthX (basically a stealth variant of the X-Wing starfighter) uses a kind of fuel causes the efflux to go black a millisecond after it leaves the thrusters.
Being able to attack from Absurd Range is it's own form of stealth, too. Say you have ships hiding in an asteroid belt, just shoving stray rocks at carefully calculated trajectories to slam into your target planet. Yes, they'll take months to get there. And your enemy will likely see them coming. But if you queue up a thousand of them, long before your enemy has any idea that you're even there, you're going to give them a hard day, and you have all kinds of time to clear the area.
I think that the old anime, Starship Operators, did a decent job of this. it was very submarine-esque. the distances involved are _huge_ so most passive signals would become too diffuse to pick up, and getting a return signal from an active sensor would require such a tightly focused beam that it'd take a very _very_ long time to search the _unimaginably large_ volume of space. in the show, doing a radar sweep of the suspected area was going to take days or weeks to complete. spoiler: what they did in stead was blanket the area with radiation by detonating all their missiles in a formation, and observing the area for reflections or occlusions. This wouldn't work for the same reason as radar didn't work, but rule of cool so they found em.
The biggest issue with "stealth in space" is the simplest-heat. Any spaceship is going to have a HUGE heat signature-reactors, life support systems, electronics...all generate heat and that has to be gotten rid of somehow. There's tricks to store it, but they only work for so long and then you have to get rid of it. And that requires you to radiate the heat (and you can't just "use your hull to block most sensors", either). The drive plume of the ship's main engines, using any realistic drive system, is going to be as bright as most small stars to long-range detection. And the problems go from there...
If you had an effective reflection system, could you direct the IR from your radiators in one specific direction, thus avoiding scans from at least some angles?
@@RorikH To a degree, so long as you are not burning and are just coasting. If you burn your reaction mass will give you away. But you will still be easily spotted by optical sensors and there is nothing you can do about them.
Active cooling plus heat sinks. There you go. As for dumping the heat. Yes thats the trick. However 1. depending on how long the mission is and how FTL works it might be possible to accomplish whatever you set out to do. 2. space is big but not empty. If you know where the enemy is and especially where they are "looking" you can simply put your ship behind any planetoid or asteroid and dump heat to your hearts content. Burns can also be performed in this manner. Alternatively a cold exhaust could be used. It's definitely feasible to do this in a still realistic setting.
@@joewelch4933 "But you will still be easily spotted by optical sensors and there is nothing you can do about them." Assuming the enemy has sensors that can optically scan the entire system with a resolution good enough to detect a shiptrying to hide at interplanetary distances. Which is frankly as out there as a ship literally going invisible. We today have a planet of 8 billions people with a shit ton of cameras looking at the entire system.Our sensors are pretty good too with many close to the physical limit as we understand it. Yet we have only detected 90% of *large* asteroids. In years of scanning. And asteroids are not attempting to hide. Even if sensors improve vastly even past the physical limits we believe there are. It'd take a truly enourmous sensor net to reliably and actively scan an entire system optically. I could see it for important worlds and military installations. But again the idea every little colony and fleet would be able to do so is as absurd as a ship literally going invisible.
Nine times out of ten it's easier to dissappear into the background than actually turn invisible. Space is so big that going unnoticed is usually as simple as turning off your lights and engine.
But this wouldn't work because even bare minimum life support would release IR radiation, not much but enough to stand out like a sore thumb compared to the absolute 0 of space. In the same way you can see a candle flame from a mile away in total darkness.
I agree, but here's some devil's advocacy. Given that we have already developed 1) very wide angle telescopes 2) IR telescopes and 3) AI very capable of pattern recognition, why couldn't a spacefaring military simply have a network of automated stations looking for ALL of the uncorrelated IR signatures and ALL unexplained visible objects? If you make yourself absorb all of the visible wavelengths, you will heat up. Also, there is the double edged sword of stealth. If stealth is at all effective in space, then at least some of the stealth-busting detector stations will be stealthed, making space stealth harder. (This is why I've always held the position that space stealth is always going to be very hard, kind of jank, but still ubiquitous!)
The big problem is that, for most spacecraft, turning off your engine is... a bad idea. The myriad life support, electronics, waste processing and other such systems need to be on for it to function long term, and short term people get uncomfortable at 270 degrees or so above background temperature. Satellites can be kept cool more way more easily, as they don't need to worry about the crew turning into ice sculptures several days before the heatings fully powered down, but ships are generally quite visible still when simply 'turned off', or so cold that they've stopped being much use as ships.
@@saucevc8353 Well, if your ship's a robot with no crew, then it wouldn't need any life support, just a wee bit of energy for a little passive scanning and enough processing power to know when to turn the rest of its systems on.
Loved this video very well done it kind of reminded me of one of my fav examples of Stealth in fiction, from the Starfire book series. Highly recommend it to anyone who loves Military Space Opera. 'Crusade', 'In Death Ground', and 'The Shiva Option' by David Weber and Steve White all are fantastic reads. In the Series they frequently use ECM i.e. Electronic Counter Measures. which is split into various types. Type 1 means the target becomes harder to hit. Type 2 means it makes the ship harder to identify, and Type 3 which is stealth. Making the Ship nearly invisible to sensors. And as said in Space you got a lot to see and keep your eyes on and in the Starfire series they frequently mark distance in Light Seconds. Which is 300,000 km/sec or 186,000 miles/sec. at that range visual sensors are pointless so you would use other means like a laser sensor or such to detect something If you can fool a sensor into thinking there is nothing there then effectively you are achieving stealth like you said. And when your fighting an enemy over a few or even dozens of light seconds away or more then yeah stealth would be crucial in this kind of combat.
The book series Expeditionary Force talks about this in great detail. In the book they use radation instead of radio waves. You cant completely block the radiation from a freactor or other events in the books so they detect radiation and bursts of light since all of that travels at the speed of light Edit: a word
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Fun fact about the F117A Nighthawk, if it's computer fails, it falls out of the sky like a brick.
Phased Array radars actually reduce the signature of active radar significantly.
@@chrisellis8089 Yep I may talk more about low-probability of intercept in the electronics warfare video, or maybe even something next year on sensors!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
you know I always thought of dogfighting being possible in a setting where sci fi stealth becomes so fucking advanced to the point where the ONLY way for any ship to engage is within 2 kilometers or so. due to the insane stealth capabilities that every single ship has.
im tired of idiots who keep saying nonsense like how all space battles needs to be 100,000 kilometers apart,
people kept saying that trench warfare wasn't viable anymore, until ukraine-russia war happened and it literally went back to world war one trench battles, where even the maximum machine guns are still being used
I think you forgot about one thing in discussing the F35 and F22 radars that help them stay undetected; they don't need to use their OWN radar, they can share each others, as well as from other non-stealth or even non-aircraft sources. If an enemy can only see five radar sources when there are really a hundred aircraft, that's still successful stealth.
They also have low probability of intercept radars, these use a bunch of simultaneous frequency's to not be picked up by enemy RWR.
Yup, you see a single F-35 that's using its radar and suddenly 20 of them show up and launch their payloads at you, painted by the one radar. Wild stuff.
Not to mention next generation systems that are planned to use teamed drones. We may see a future where the manned aircraft has no sensors, no weapons and is almost completely undetectable.
@@robadcI don't think it won't have sensors, but I can see no weapons happening.
@@CharliMorganMusic I am being hyperbolic of course. Even outside of combat scenarios radar and other sensors are invaluable for navigation. But I can definitely see them being stripped down to the bare bones needed to function independently.
I love that in The Expanse books they detect the Anubis near the Scopuli simply because the Canterbury’s radar hitting the stealth’s hull starts heating the hull plating slightly above the background level causing Adé to think “hey, that’s weird”.
They had that in the series too. And I started to think of when Inaros lobbed asteroids at Earth in the series. Pushed with just enough force for them to become ballistic and coated with energy absorbing material. The could be detected at launch but only if looking at the right place at the right time and the solar system is a big place. They could be detected before they hit, but not soon enough to stop it unless you knew the right frequency and angle to search with. relatively low tech and simple, but very effective
It's kinda weird though as I would expect a stealth ship to have active cooling in the hull. Doubt hiding would be possible without it in the first place.
It is, though, REALLY weird that the stealth ship hull generates so much heat that a civilian ship can see it on sensors, never mind a military vessel. If that's the tradeoff you'd have to make, I can't see it being viable
@@Paveway-chan the anubis didnt make the heat itself, the cant had active radar on the away team and by coincidence the anubis was in the path. the _cants_ radar heated up the hull, the anubis itself was the perfect temperature
@@qhu3878
Yes, that's what I meant. If radar waves from a *civilian* system heat up the hull by that much, I feel that stealth isn't much use to begin with...
a really good example that you didn't mention here is also how in the expanse, at the start of the Donnager battle, the Protogen stealth ships arranged themselves "vertical" to each other relative to the Donnager to look like one ship instead of several
Protogen cruiser is just 7 frigates in a trench coat.
which would hardly do anything to the thruster plumes
They still had rounded edges that's not good
That is a classic tactic.
If you want to hide your numbers, you march single file. Each soldier in the footsteps of the one before them. The enemy won't know if ten or ten thousand soldiers marched through.
And you can do the opposite. if you put your troops single line on a ridge, the enemy won't know how many are behind it. You show a hundred soldiers, and that could be all you have, or the formation could be thousands deep, hidden behind the ridge.
unfortunate name lol but yeah thats a fun tactic.
I thought of a scary use for space torpedos, they could be cooled to an ambient temperature prior to launch and remain hidden to infrared after being released, just sitting still and quiet until needed.
Might run into the problem that things that stay motionless and cold for a while and are then called to action very quickly have a tendency of feeling put upon by the sudden change of pace and taking petty revenge by breaking in creative ways.
@@ICU1337 loved that movie
What makes a space torpedo different than a missile?
For one thing, I don't ever recall the confederate flag being used as a space torpedo@@Blurns
I don't get the reference.@@Arashmickey
I always loved the way the Interdimensional Submarine from Space Battleship Yamato used its abilty to hide in between Dimensions to be almost undetectable and almost unhitable.
the naval parallels in the anime goes so hard, the dimensional sub gives off such uboat vibes and has such a tense theme
Space Battleship Yamato looked at other examples of WW2 in space, and laughed at their weakness.
When it's "submerged" it actually floats through sunlit shallows and sticks a "periscope" up above the "surface" to track its prey!
Well the "submarine" hunt is the theme behind Romulan and Klingon cloaking in Star Trek.
But it was weird reason the good guys the Federation don't have "submarines" is cause they signed a one sided deal with Romulans. WHY?
@@boxhead6177 This is something I, as a lifelong Trekkie, have never figured out. Sure, the Trek Feds are the good guys, but does this mean they have to be suckers too? (And I sometimes wonder if this applies to real-life U.S. liberals too ... )
There is another form of "stealth" in space of just filling the space with material that gives a massive thermal signature hiding in the cloud of material making it hard to target.
Makes me think of the Minovsky particles from "Gundam"
@@danielseelye6005 kinda sorta but they are more like active jamming to everyone. But this is like venting hot coolant and hiding in the cloud so they can't pinpoint where you are.
Or hiding behind solar sails. Imagine trying to hit one or dozens of ships with a cross-section of 50 meters behind a reflector with an area of hundreds of square kilometers.
So basically a smokescreen with some special materials mixed in that prevent infrared or radar from getting through clearly?
@@darkbooger Chaff basically for radar plus thermal cloud of expanding hot coolant for IR
Modern stealth is designed to obviously not be noticed in the first place, but it's value shines in a high intensity war where it makes it exceedingly difficult for an enemy to get a weapons grade lock. Seeing it and hitting it are very different things. Even in space combat, something as innocuous and low powered as a cell phone trying to connect can be seen across the solar system if you're looking for it, so 1: Don't be noticed
Also, you could have a chaff equivalent/decoy to send out a whole lot of signals much easier to lock onto than your own, thus making it even harder to get a lock.
Met a few F-22 pilots in my time. Had several tell me about wargames with other nations and services. They pretty all said everytime that they let it become a close fight they got the same response of "My Radar finally got you, I just couldn't get a damn lock!"
Seeing a target is one thing, hitting it is another.
@@RorikH
Cry baby cry, make your mama sigh. ...you should probably get that reference.
@@Plaprad
Kinda surprised they didn't go to guns in those situations.
It's interesting how stealth tech and the fact that missiles, while a lot better, still aren't quite perfect is resulting in the return of the F4 Phantom problem. One of the flaws of the F4 was that it wasn't expected to need to get into a close-range dogfight, so it was designed to be fast and carry a lot of missiles, but maneuverability was an afterthought and it wasn't until the F4-E that the aircraft was even fitted with guns. So when the missiles inevitably failed to hit and the Phantoms found themselves being swarmed by MiGs, they were unable to fight back.
Obviously the F22 isn't going to have that problem, it's still a highly maneuverable craft, not enough to outturn a Eurofighter or a Flanker but enough to at least hold its own, but the F35's only real trick is being able to maintain extreme attitude in stable flight, which is great for shooting at things but useless in a dogfight as it results in a significant loss of speed, and the first step to winning in ANY combat situation is to not lose.
One aspect that doesn’t translate from atmospheric combat to space is maneuverability. Weapons locks are required for air combat because it’s very easy for a target to dodge; this isn’t the case in space.
While ships can maneuver, doing so requires thrust; the more maneuverable a ship is the easier it is to see and thus to get a more-needed weapons lock. The less more stealthy / hard it is to get a lock, the less a lock is needed.
Decoys only work so long as maneuvers aren’t required, since it’s be immediately obvious which is the real ship just by comparing engine plume strengths with acceleration rates (unless the decoys are of similar mass and engine size to the hiding object)
Active tracking blocking like chaff only works against things that require active targeting; the target could be sprayed with ballistic projectiles since chaff is basically announcing where exactly you are. If you maneuver to be less easy to hit with ballistics, you’ve given up your stealth advantage, and you’re back to “the more a lock is needed, the easier it is to get a lock”
One of the additional things I appreciate about these videos: Whenever you show a clip from another source, you put that source in the corner somewhere, just in case we want to look it up later 😄
It's nice to see a video where Low Observablility is actually understood. So many people think "It's stealth so no one can see it." No, it's "Stealthy" so everyone has a harder time seeing it, and an even harder time tracking and locking. There are methods and technologies that can still track anything, but it's so hard that you really can't utilize them to their fullest extent.
I also appreciate you got the F-117 incident a lot better than most. Almost no one I've met has even done basic research on that downing. Good job on that.
Stealth is a very interesting and VERY nuanced thing. Hell, the Brits even had a "Stealth Battleship" in WWII. Granted that was all diversions and such, but the Germans never saw it until shells started to go pop.
Another thing that was alluded too, but not really delved into was terrain. We used to fly down valleys in Afghanistan to prevent detection. Then realized there really wasn't any real air defense besides the guys in the valleys with machine guns and MANPADS. Something that can also be used in space using things like asteroids and such. I'm sure at some point even stellar winds will be used in some capacity for detection.
See effective visual camouflage for a great example, disruptive patterns aren't about mimicking nature, but breaking up your profile over the background.
@@NM-wd7kx Yep, dealt with that in the military. We deployed to a base with a squadron of RAF Tornadoes that were painted pink.
We laughed until we saw them in the air from above. Damn things just vanished into the sands.
The British stealth battleship operation was accomplished by coordinating the shell bombardment with RAF bombers who were attacking at the same time. The Germans didn't realize a battleship was in the game until the bombers left and they were still getting hit.
@@BogeyTheBear Accurate.
Thanks!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Distraction is also useful here, such as in Firefly. Having something that is more visible to sensors or appears to be a bigger threat can draw attention away from you and give you time to escape, strike, hide, or complete your objective.
The "Cry Baby"?
Or an armada of reavers?
Cry baby, cry
@@gordol66"Cry baby, cry."
- "Make your mother sigh."
Sort of like a probe that is emitting all the signals and heat signatures of a much larger ship?
Good example of "stealth" was in the The Expanse where they hid the boarding pods in with shipping containers that had "broken loose".
Or one scene in Galactica, where they hid vipers in freight containers for a surprise attack.
Yes, the cylons knew there is a ship. But it was a freight ship without any weapons. That the thing suddenly shits out a dozen fighters was a nice surprise.
You need to watch that episode again, the roci was the thing they pretended to drop while it was completely powered down. The fight was already on when the containers were sent at the station. They weren't any kind of stealth or even trying to hide, they were improvised boarding craft that Thoth station was shooting at and killed one
Stealth aircraft nosecones aren't one way radar reflective, they're RF transparent, how they stay stealthy was right there in the clip. The phased array radar panel points up to bounce radar away, it uses beamforming between the phased elements to steer the radar at the ground, no dish, no moving parts.
Someone who works with those nosecones might be able to chip on that-- if it didn't get them into trouble.
@@BogeyTheBearnosecones have been RF transparent since aircraft have had radar in the nosecone.
if you are dealing with IR sesnsors, sacrificial heatsinks have some interesting implications as decoys and deception tools, you could store all your heat in one of those and then if you get detected you could launch it on your current trajectory and change course as rapidly as you are able without blowing out your own thermal sig. Subs kinda can do this with sound against sonar now so its a cool idea.
Elite: Dangerous has this!
The heatsink's external shape needs to be carefully adjusted to produce virtually identical radar signature to the parent ship. Radar triangles thingies might be useful here.
@@crowhoptech it has sacrificial heatsinks but they don't really serve a decoy purpose since Elite still allows for visual identification even if you can't lock the ship
How exactly would you change course without blowing your own thermal sig?
@@derhesligebonsaibaumThis is a late response, but in theory you can make use of systems like cold gas jets, which instead of using burning to produce thrust, they simply use the expansion of compressed gas. It's not very efficient, but with a sizable reservoir of fuel for the system it could be enough to make a difference. Also, at long enough range, you could ditch the heat sink and then just rotate your ship and start burning in a different direction. And because your engine would be facing away from somebody who is tracking you, they wouldn't necessarily see the IR bloom until you've massively changed course.
7:38 interestingly, elite dangerous has a system that pretty much perfectly matches what youre describing. well its more 2 systems that overlap and get used together. by default, your ship puts out heat through heat vents (presumably just some ultra-advanced version of a radiator that lets it work far more efficiently). you can activate silent running which completely seals those heat vents, rendering your ship nearly invisible to IR (which is what most sensors in the game are) except at very close range (though as your ship builds up heat the range you can be seen from does increase, though if heat is kept to a minimum through other means, in some cases another ship could nearly crash into you without knowing you were there, unless the pilot happens to see you with their own eyes, because youre just THAT well hidden from sensors).
the game also has a module called heat sink launchers which, when used, redirect coolant away from the heat vents and through to a heat sink, which is then ejected to remove the heat from your ship very quickly. these two systems are typically used together to extend the duration of stealth offered by silent running, by using the heat sinks to occasionally eject built up heat. (its also useful if you accidentally fly too close to a star and need to cool down to avoid taking damage from the intense heat... a mistake i personally make a lot more often than i particularly want to admit).
combine the two properly, and your ship becomes pretty much invisible to any other ship, outside of their pilot visible spotting you, and even if thats the case, firing on you becomes more difficult, since both turreted and gimballed weapons use the sensor lock to aim, meaning the pilot has to aim manually, something that admittedly, most pilots that regularly engage in combat will be at least somewhat good at, but is still going to be less accurate than if they could lock on to you and have the guns aim themselves.
That is very similar to a heat management system I came up with.
Radiators have the issue that they can be shot. So what if you could heat up some particles and vent them as a cloud, taking the heat with them. And since they're small and have lots of surface area, they will cool faster than your ship. So if you went them out in the front, pass by, and pull them back in at the back, you can drastically improve thermal management without needing flimsy radiators.
Bonus point is, that the cloud also helps as defensive system. Every enemy projectile, missile, etc would have to fly through that cloud. You basically throw out a huge array of immensely hot caltrops that double as radiators and flares.
But "classic" radiators also exist, but they are mounted behind blast doors and can be retracted during combat. And a very smart spaceship commander could use the radiators facing away from the enemy while keeping the "hot" side in defensive mode.
Combat would mainly focus on overwhelming the enemy thermal management. Why burn a hole into the enemy ship, when you can cook the crew. Weapons are designed to project more than 50% of the energy onto the target, that way they heat the enemy ship up more than your own. Engine burns create heat, so fighting would mostly be done coasting.
Oh, and there is an obvious way to stop the enemy pilot visually stopping your stealth craft: paint it black. Yes, there are stars that would be covered, but finding those is much harder than a bright white spaceship.
4:12 - worth pointing out that the battery commander deliberately disobeyed standing orders about how many times he could sweep his radar because live intel told him the support aircraft carrying anti-radiation missiles were grounded by fog. The second F-117 was another incident, but the same commander & battery, attempting to repeat the feat, but although he attained radar lock and damage this failed to down the aircraft.
And they were still extremely lucky that they turned on their targeting radar when the bomb bay was open. They got extremely lucky.
“One ping only, Mr. Vasily.”
@@mbpaintballa I guess, they forgot to tell yugoslavians, that F-117 was stealth.
@@retrosquadchannel2.050 they got one, when it's bay doors were open, on a common path, after being extremely lucky. I guess they forgot to tell the Yugoslavians taking down one outdated aircraft that wasn't worth destroying doesn't win the war.....
@@retrosquadchannel2.050 Then why didnt the serbs shoot it down before it dropped its payload? Why didnt they manage to stop the F-117 raids before or after? Are they stupid?
Something i recently learned, is that the f22 raptor can create a sensor echo, that either makes the craft seem farther back, or further ahead to sensors
Yes, CIA, this comment right here...
@@peasant8246 Warthunder forums moment
US naval fleets actually do this as part of their early missile defence. Even the old Vietnam era B-52 bombers had this capability. US may lead in stealth technology, but they're also stupidly far ahead in electronic warfare.
Meanwhile, russia can't even figure out how to run backup encrypted comms after having destroyed the 4G towers in Ukraine that they needed for their own encryption.All those hundreds of russians officers that got whacked by Ukraine; US SIGINT satellites picking up calls and relaying coordinates back to Ukraine.
4:36 woah woah woah. Let’s not forget that lock was only completed when the non stealthy internal bomb bag doors were finally opened.
Stealth is a lovely layer of the defensive space onion. I like to daydream there could be a dichotomy between active and passive sensors, with the former largely forsaking stealth to take a more aggressive role.
That's not a daydream. That's how submarines work: Hydrophones to listen passively to sounds in water followed by active sonar to pinpoint specific targets.
That's how the USAF does it now. You'll have an F-15 in the back line with it's Radar going attracting targets while the squadrons of F-22's around it are dark and shooting on datalink.
Yup, you can hear for the enemy ping, or you can ping and wait for the echo. But pinging around makes the enemy hear you.
That music cue for the Sojurn at 1:00 was eerie, serene and noble all at once, I absolutely love it.
4:13 a bit of luck is a pretty big understatement
The first 2 sweeps picked up noþing, the 3rd one happened to be in the less than a second interval when the bomb bay door was open. (Lazrpig made a video about F-117)
The night hawks were the only aircraft in the sky, the serbs knew when they were coming, and where they were going. And yes, the night hawk was shot down, it wasn't before it destroyed its target
Stealth is interesting because since there's no friction in space, you can just set yourself on a course and then turn engines off and follow it for a really long time, as long as you can plan well in advance, which is part of why the meteors in The Expanse were so effective. A robotic ship could also be stealthier, as it wouldn't need life support, so could safely power down way more systems than a crewed ship.
Issue with that is so long as someone sees your last burn they can calculate your trajectory, also your life support systems (including radiators to stop your crew from boiling to death) are still visible.
Heck even robots need radiators as otherwise they could heat themselves to destruction.
@@georgethompson1460 Yeah, to truly go unnoticed you'd have to start coasting a long way away, so this is not a great option for quick responses to threats. The question with radiators is whether you could direct the radiation in some way, like having some reflectors that could concentrate it into a thin beam so that it couldn't be noticed from most angles.
you could also use cold gas (jets of compressed air) to alter your trajectory, it's mass intensive but it won't be picked up on IR.
A lot of this is what the ToughSF blog I mentioned goes into, particularly being able to manuever whilst remaining stealthy. Google the term "Hydrogen Steamer" for more!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
@@inventor121 Plus of course small amounts of cold gas early in the trajectory (while you're far away and less noticeable anyway) can result in very large changes to the trajectory later on. And when you do that, what with space being 3D, you can pick a trajectory at random from any number of them, so even if an adversary knows roughly where you're going they may find it difficult to predict your final approach.
Thank the lord you included the best kind of interference, jamming, especially with raspberry jam.
Something that always needs to be mentioned whenever a discussion of stealth comes up is that, due to the physics of how radar works, it requires an obsessive level of signature control to get anything useful out of it.
For instance, decreasing your radar signature from a specific angle by 50% doesn't drop the distance at which you can be picked up by 50%. It only decreases it by a little bit (about a 15% reduction). To drop the distance at which you can be picked up by 50%, you need to decrease the size of your return by a lot (around a 95% reduction).
So stealth requires a disproportionate investment (along with its associated tradeoffs) before it becomes really useful. In an environment like the skies, where radar was often the key (almost only) way of spotting and tracking aircraft, then it's definitely worth it. In space, where things like telescopes would also be used to look for thermal hot-spots or bright reflections at absurd distances, then radar becomes one tool among many. This pushes the cost of stealth up even further, and makes it useful only in a few niche cases.
Plus you can always make your stealth craft appear as something else. If your fighter-bomber looks like a seagul, nobody will fire on it. And if your massive gunship looks like a civilian prop plane, you can just continue cruising.
Stealth isn't just radar. In space obviously thermal stealth would as if not more important. Not sure why you assume you'd only try to hide from radar.
Thermal stealth could work by having large internal heat sinks and active cooling in the hull. Definitely feasible. The ship would just have to occasionally dump heat close to a celestial object that it can use to hide.
@@XMysticHerox I mentioned it because it's the main type of stealth that we've developed so far, and because it illustrates a general problem with stealth concepts. Thermal signatures in space, as you mention, are damned hard to hide and you need to make a lot of compromises to get them to work. Tough SF (a good blog for this sort of thing) worked up a viable design based on cryogenic hydrogen storage - the hydrogen steamer. But to be usefully stealthy it ends up sacrificing almost all of the characteristics you want for a space warship.
@@sangomasmithIt's the main type of stealth because it is what is mainly needed for aircraft.
I know it and something like the hydrogen steamer would already be useful as a recon ship or strategic weapon and likely be built. Which would both be warships.
But I actually think there are a couple of issues with that article. And one "issue". The "issue" being that it is extremely hard sci fi eg basically current technology. Which isn't necessarily the case even for hard sci fi settings or even all that sensible when discussing future technology. It is safe to assume we will have made some advances by the time we are building spaceships for combat.
As for the actual issues. Mainly things not considered by the author. Imo the fundamental issue is something actually touched upon in the video. The design is basically for a ship "totally invisible". Which is very difficult of course but also hardly what you need.
The main aspect of that would be the requirement the author set for it's entire drive system to use cold exhaust. That is total overkill in my opinion and would be one of the main reasons for it to be less useful as a warship.
Why is it not necessary. Two things. To be useful as a spaceship it can simply use a conventional drive and burn well at range. The resolution of sensors is limited. Something often overlooked in this discussion. Even at the distance of Pluto a drive plume would have to expand to 190 km and still be distinguishable to be visible by something like the Hubble (if we have something like a magnetically confined fusion engine I assume this is the case though I have not personally done the math). And that is not a telescope capable of scanning the entire sky or even more than a tiny fraction of it. A telescope that can do that would have a much smaller resolution. Especially if FTL is available and ships could just jump to the edge of the system, a completely cold drive is absurd overkill. If something like
In a similar vein it is ignored that a ship could burn behind other objects like planetoids and even asteroids as well as dump heat. Doesn't really matter how hot your exhaust is if the enemy can't actually see the exhaust. Of course this requires you to know roughly where the enemy sensors are placed which can be risky with the enemy presumably also having stealth.
Last thing would be beaming heat which is not considered but something we can do even with current tech. Rather than just radiating it out wherever through radiators or dumping the contents of heat sinks you could beam the heat even into outer space if you think there are no senors there or get close to a planet and beam it at that (without having to hide behind it). This could be combined with the other methods as well.
In retrospect it's probably more electronic warfare, but I was reminded of the ole Razzle Dazzle (since it's hard to hide in space). Have your profile reflect really weird to make the enemy have to guess 1 ship, 2 ships, a squadron, a fleet? a la the "don't be identified" strategy similar to the tank blanket
been playing from the depths and one other thing that can be done is increasing your radar and other detection footprint so wide that its hard to hit you. from chaff launchers to just having decoys at the ends of your craft or even outward extending decoy arms.
I think in space this can be used even more effectively for example shooting really hot canisters in 4 cardinal directions, because its space it they could just keep going and with some very basic thrusters they can randomly move to make it harder to tell whats real.
In Lancer: Battlegroup, the 'stealth' options veer closer to the ones mentioned later in the video; through different methods including very long radiator strips and letting off gasses, tactical stealth in Battlegroup is the space equivalent of kicking up enough sand to obscure your position just enough so that the enemy can't tell where you are exactly in the giant heat signature.
In The Lost Fleet books, there’s no stealth, but one alien species manages to seemingly make their ships invisible. Except what they’ve actually done is infect human ship computers with quantum worms that keep their ships from showing up on sensors. Once the worms are removed, it turns into a turkey shoot for the humans since the aliens aren’t expecting to be visible now. Later on, something similar is done with a human fleet
Thats not entirely correct. Some shuttles and fast attack craft have stealth systems, but it's effectiveness is.... limited to say the least. No fleet-level warships have stealth systems, however.
@@Ryukuro my mistake. I guess the books mostly deal with capital ships since fighters have no place in interplanetary combat due to mass-thruster ratio and limited fuel. They’re mainly for aerial and orbital combat where the fighters’ higher delta-V makes up for the deficiencies
In the HonorVerse series which is basically all about spaceship combat.
They mention that true surprises will no longer be possible in the future due to superior senor arrays however surprises happen when a commander precieves the intent of a pattern in a different way possibly due to past experince biases.
Considering everyone are professional spaceship commanders battlefield surpises are few and far between.
There was that time when Honor, having captured and manned her own private space force, manages to ambush a Peep task force in deep space. How? Well, most sensors of the day look for gravitic drive signatures ... so Honor, who also had the advantage of knowing precisely where the Peeps were coming in, coasted her ships into position using their maneuvering thrusters only. She achieved such overwhelming surprise that it was the first time in the Honorverse that one side wiped out the other.
I'm surprised, because that situation could easily lead to the whole "chess novice beats a grand master by making nonsensical moves" situation. If everyone expects the other guy to do the most optimal thing, then not doing that thing becomes a surprise.
@@seanbigay1042except when the situation was broken down by her friend, she pointed out dozens of things that could’ve gone wrong that would’ve likely resulted in her fleet being wiped out. And the only reason she knew the enemy would jump in where they did was because the local state security agency was really anal retentive about that since it was a prison planet. They also maneuvered in such a way as to let them fire into the unshielded stern (or “up the kilt” as the slang goes)
There is an often-used quote in the books about surprise that went something like, "Surprise happens when you don't recognize something you saw until after the fact."
@@artembentsionov Yeah, when Honor taught at the Academy during the truce between the First and Second Haven Wars one of her most important lessons was why NEVER to try and emulate the so-called Battle of Cerberus ...
Electronic warfare is such a broad topic, it might be worthwhile to break it down into 2 separate videos. On one hand, it's extremely closely related to stealth/low observability, but it also covers a whole lot of stuff with applications that are more involved with active combat operations than anything else.
And of course, there's the whole use of ESM as a sensor in its own right in there.
In Mass Effect, the Normandy used stealth very effectively against the Geth. The Normandy was able to keep all of its emissions inside the ship and so was invisible to most sensors - except visual identification. But the Geth, being machines, didn't have windows on their ships or stations.
Joker - Like the geth are just sitting there saying, "Those organics would never try the no-windows thing twice!"
"I bet those pesky organics won't use the whole no windows thing twice" Joker
Because they couldn't manufacture fly-eye things with visible light cameras? Plot hole.
All they gotta do is look out a window to see us
When the engineer describes the stealth systems of the Normandy in the first game, he got it backwards in one respect: When replying to Shepard's question if this makes the ship wholly undetctable, the engineer states that a passive scan can pick them up right away, or anyone looking out a window can see them plain as day...
...it's an _active_ scan that can pick up the Normandy despite the stealth system-- the whole deal about the heat sink is to negate passive sensor detection since the ship would not be actively emitting infrared energy. Radar or lidar sweeps don't care about that.
There’s an indie strategy game called Concealed Intent that’s all about playing cat and mouse with enemy ships. The more you move around, the easier it is for the enemy to get a read on your position and strike first. But it’s also a way for you to do a search pattern to try to get close enough to get a scan of the enemy. You can use active sensors, but you’d be also screaming “I’m right here!” to the enemy, and they’d see you first
Nebulous Fleet Command maybe?
@@cp1cupcake just found it. Concealed Intent. Added it to my original post
Sometimes you can detect something by seeing what is NOT there as well. For instance when a sonar / radar absorbent material on a vessle passes between an emitter and the receiver, or from a point of known reflection, the lack of signal is just as noticeable as if the vessle had flares trailing behind it.
A good example is an eclipse, the moon blocking the sun makes the moon's presence very obvious.
This is how electric eyes or laser detection beams work. I believe it was also the premise behind a tachyon detection grid in Star Trek, when they were trying to blockade cloaked ships at their boarder.
Glad to see Spaceballs' exceptionally accurate depiction of radar jamming included. That film really knew its stuff!
7:45 i think its funny how in mass effect theres a running in game joke of how the biggest enemy of the normandy's stealth system is an open window, and the way how the main enemies ships like the reapers or geth litierally dont have windows lmao
This reminded me of the Laser Heat Sinks in the battletech tabletop game. I have never seen them in any other IP but it seems like a great idea for stealth & I’m not aware of any reason it couldn’t be used as an at least temporary way of masking IR.
Use an internal heat sink to temporarily absorb skin temperature, dump that IR into a laser as the stimulating radiation and point the laser away from the people you’re hiding from. The narrow observability of the laser would mean unless it’s actually hitting you, you wouldn’t see the IR & yeah efficiencies are a problem but you gotta figure it might be able to make those internal heat sinks run a bit longer before they start warming the ship up
Don't lasers produce massive amounts of heat as a byproduct of firing?
@@georgethompson1460yes but their also very narrow. So you would see them looking directly at them.
Doesn't work. The narrower you try to make the heat emission (with a laser being the ultimate version of it, with an emission angle of basically zero), the more inefficient it gets to the point where the amount of waste heat you produce trying to limit where you emit waste heat equals or exceeds the amount of waste heat you're trying to dump.
Unfortunately this only works with sci-fantasy physics-breaking tech. Heat is very difficult to actively manage - it wants to radiate from everything all the time, and expending energy to move it around produces _even more_ heat, which you then have to expend _even more_ energy to move around, etc etc. This is why heat is the worst enemy of any stealth spaceship.
The other option would probably be massive kilometre long narrow heat sink tails behind your ship that you dump all your heat into. With enough math, the ambient radiation leaking outside your ships silhouette might be small enough to get you ignored until you are in firing range. @@keith6706
Additional Considerations:
1; Gravity drives = Gravimetric distortions that can be detected = Non Stealth/High-Visibility/Positve ID as a Ship/Artificial Object.
2; All Low-Visibility measures vs. Solar Winds/Interstellar Medium = Visibility owing to 'Wake' and excitation of the Interstellar Medium/Solar Wind flow = Visiblt to Passive Sensors and Positive Tracking.
3; AI Image processing = Spotted by object occlusion of stars and body of Galaxy = Visibility/Tracking.
4; Hiding behind planet = Only feasible with reactors off as neutrino signature can be detected through planets, only a star would give you a 'mask' vs. this due to it's greater neutrino signature.
5; RF emissions from active power sources distribution networks can be detected. AC current creates RF emissions.
"AI Image processing = Spotted by object occlusion of stars and body of Galaxy = Visibility/Tracking."
You don't even need an AI for that really. Basic image processing can do that. The problem is not the processing however. It's actively scanning the entire sky in a resolution high enough to detect tiny changes. Thats... well very out there. Sensors have hard physical limits we are actually fairly close to rn for some forms of detection. It'd require a utterly absurd investment to do something like this or sensors approaching the realm of magic.
Well actually this applies to everything you said. Yes in theory you can detect all these things. The question is if the resolution of your sensors is good enough to do so at range and to what degree a stealth ship may be able to mask their output. The latter is certainly possible for 3-5.
Keep in mind that high + low grade thermal mixing, heat pumped radiators, and giant waste heat collimation optics can, for some engineering and additional (but well worth it) power expenditure, essentially turn your thermal emissions into a few degree wide cone (and dramatically blueshift them to the point they wouldn't be detectable as thermal in origin).
@9:10 So as far as I know the radar is angled upwards so incoming radar waves are reflected away from the source. The cone is transparent in both directions. Also the newer radars are fixed and steered by canceling the waves of the radar against itself (AESA radar is basically many small independent radar emitters that work together).
one of my favourite depictions of stealth in space is in (I think) Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, where a prowler relies on the tiniest burst from thrusters to move away from a nuclear mine it has deployed and stay hidden. Drastic movements will both knock the mine, and potentially allow hostile ships the notice some stars "blinking out of existence" for a second.
Great overview of low observability, appreciate the way you approached it compared to others I have seen that do try to treat it like cloaking or that anything being able to detect a "stealth" aircraft/ship means stealth is automatically worthless as a result. I think one of your points bears repeating and that is that you don't need your systems to defeat all enemy sensors. If you look to the real world LO aircraft and ships, there are lots of radars that can detect even the stealthiest of these but that doesn't mean those radars provide target quality tracks or do so at the range required to engage before you do. VHF radars (typically) will not provide sufficient quality tracks for engaging a stealthy object. Similarly, missile radars (if active guided vs external queueing) may not be able to track the target their launch platform saw when they shot them. In terms of first shoot probability, the right amount of LO can force the enemy to get closer to have a good enough lock to fire, potentially allowing you to fire first or otherwise complete your mission before being engaged.
Yes, this. What makes, say, the F-35 so good (well, one of the things) is that you need to get quite close to it before you can "see" it properly - and at that point, it will have seen you long before, and shot you to pieces, far beyond visual range.
The scary thing about being up against stealth aircraft is that, out of seemingly nowhere, you get lit up by a radar lock by a missile that's already in the terminal phase... In other words, you get a huge scare to "entertain" you for what is most likely the very last seconds of your life; at that point, reaction time (human and aircraft) makes it nigh-impossible to do anything.
Another topic little addressed in space combat is the cooperative engagement capability (CEC), sensor platforms can provide a fire solution for weapons retreated at massive distances, or for multiples of them without putting the launch platform at risk.
I've heard the science paper on radar cross section calculations in the soviet union was taken at face value for what the author intended it for, which was identifying radar returns around airports from buildings and terrain. Soviet leadership didn't think that required being classified, being primarily intended to help civilian air traffic controllers figure out what is what on their radar screen.
There's a really neat set of episodes from Legend of the Galactic Heroes Gaiden, where Reinhard is commanding his first vessel and has to hide from Free Planets Alliance Navy vessels searching for him. They make sure to not use active sensors so they don't give away their position.
I totally forgot about the "jamming" scene from SpaceBalls!
One of the best, if not the best use of jam tech in all media.. 😂
And it would even be somewhat effective. You basically change the geometry of the enemy radar dish.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Sure. Dielectric jam!
9:00 If the nose of the plane was transparent in only one way, it would mean the radar behind it is useless. It needs to "hear" the radar bounce back, so it needs to let the wave through both ways.
if you look closely at the Raptors nose you'll notice several 'lines'. These are the things that read the bounce back, and the computer on board goes to work figuring it out.
@@Tank50us I don't think those are receivers for the main radar. They have way too little surface area to get a decent range out of them. Do you have any source on that? I would be guessing if they are radae components they would be for the RWR
@@Tank50us Are you referring to the very faint lines going from the back partway up the radome?
Those aren't receiver antenna. They're bonding strips so if lightning hits the nose or static electricity develops it will go into the airframe and out somewhere else.
We had them on C-130's as well. Without them a lightning strike on the radome can cause it to shatter. With them, you just get a small burn hole and a laundry list of inspections and replacements for maintenance.
Don't quote me on this but I think the nose cone is just transparent but the radar is tilted up (phased array baby!) so any radar waves from the ground bounce upwards.
The Russians claim that they can detect stealth aircraft with the SU-57 Felons because of L-band receivers embedded in the leading edges of the wings. So, they 'listen' for radar signals coming out of ground radar stations using their wingspan instead of the nose. What a nifty way to do things. I wonder if anyone else in the stealth fighter game had that figured out already.
You forgot the gravitational signature. It's far-fetched and more a sci-fi tech, but any material object has a weight, therefore, it creates its minuscule gravitational well. In interstellar space, an advanced piece of tech could also pick that up and use it to aim at a spaceship. No way to avoid that.
As for the F-22 and F-35 nose cones, they are in fact transparent to RADAR pulses both ways. In order to retain stealth, the F-22 and F-35 have their RADARs pointed slightly upwards, which causes any incoming RADAR pulses to reflect skywards instead of back to the enemy.
That's interesting and explains the black foamy stuff around it, I just didn't think that angle was high enough to do that effectively!
- hoojiwana from Spacedock
Thanks! Very glad to see the topic tackled and not just waved away as impossible.
Sorry, but IR Steath is as far as we know Physics today is impossible.
@@FranksFilmEcke Have you watched the video? Because it pretty clearly covers this topic: IR stealth is impossible in the strict sense of IR invisibility, but there are plenty of circumstances covered under the broader umbrella of 'stealth' and discussed in the video that would work just fine with current physics - many of them are used right now for our current stealth vehicles.
@@KillahMate Just a copy from other Text.
I think the part of IF was not well researeched here my other post.
Oh and i work with that stuff.
Infrared camouflage in space faces significant challenges, not least of which is the sophistication of modern infrared sensors. These sensors are incredibly sensitive, capable of detecting variations in temperature as slight as fractions of a degree. This sensitivity means that even minor heat emissions from a spacecraft, which are inevitable due to onboard systems and life support, can be detected. The task of camouflaging or masking these emissions is therefore extremely difficult. Spacecraft must dissipate excess heat, often via infrared radiation, to avoid overheating. Any attempt to cloak this heat signature would have to contend with these highly sensitive sensors, which are designed to pick up even the most subtle infrared signals against the backdrop of space. This backdrop itself presents another challenge; the cosmos is filled with infrared radiation from various sources, and blending into this complex, dynamic environment is a significant hurdle. Given these factors, achieving effective infrared camouflage in space, where sophisticated sensors can detect even the slightest temperature differences, is a formidable and currently unattainable goal.
@@FranksFilmEcke Google *hydrogen steamer ship*
@@peasant8246 Alright, let's assume you manage to cool your ship to the temperature of space (which is technically near impossible, but let's just say it's feasible). Now, you encounter a different issue. In the infrared (IR) spectrum, you can see the background of space. What you have then is a dark, black spot. You might think this is not exactly invisible but still stealthy. To the human eye, that's true. However, for computers equipped with pattern recognition, this dark spot, which doesn't match the background, is easily detectable. You might argue that we could emulate the background radiation. This might work if you're only trying to deceive a single sensor on one ship. But consider this: if there's just a 5-meter gap between two sensors, they can detect an angular difference from about 4 million kilometers away. So, evading detection becomes exponentially more difficult.
To explain the story of the F117 that got shot down a little more, the Yugoslavians knew exactly where it was coming from, what was in the air during that night, and in a stroke of dumb luck, the operator ran a sweep just as the F117 opened its bomb bay doors, which are usually open for only a couple seconds. If those doors had not been open at that exact time, the operator would’ve gotten nothing, which the radar had told him twice before. There could not have been a more ideal situation for the Yugoslavs during that night.
I think the misconceptions about stealth are most noticeable when people jump to declare that a stealth aircraft is useless because some radar somewhere detected it. Just because an aircraft is detected doesn’t mean the enemy can actually catch it or shoot it down; most stealth planes are specialized for avoiding the radar frequencies used to guide missiles, not avoid detection entirely. And they’re obviously not invisible to everything - we can SEE them.
I think the best solutions for space camouflage are obfuscation and misdirection, rather than avoiding detection entirely.
One way would be to design your radiators, sensor profiles, and transponders to match some common or civilian spacecraft. Disguise yourself as a freighter, and unless you're somewhere you clearly shouldn't be, you can avoid being recognized as a target.
The second would be to position debris - potentially in the form of either towed asteroids or something like chaff - between yourself and an observer, so that the craft's emissions and silhouette are distorted and difficult to identify. Unless your enemy has a very good idea of when rocks are going to pass by, it seems like you can avoid detection if you can just hide behind or among a nice handful of asteroids.
I agree, and to add to that, minbari and Aeldari ships having systems that throw out sensor ghosts around them, making it impossible to know where exactly the ship is.
But those are arguably ECM systems rather than conventional stealth methods.
The problem with active radar is that the opposition can spot you earlier then you can detect. This is because of the inverse square rule of emitted radiation where the strength of the return signal is reduced by the square of the distance travelled. This means that the signal strength of the returned signal is 1/4 of that which is received by the target. This is why the preferred option is to search using a passive option that would use reflections from near by pulsars or other stellar radio sources to find distant ships. This approach also explains Sci-Fi's habit of not having large sensor arrays on ships as 1. It doesn't look cool and 2. Its easier to fudge the tech angle so it doesn't get in the way of the plot/avoid background explanations.
My favourite stealth detection tech is just looking at trillions of start all the time and waiting till something obscures them
In the game "Children of a Dead Earth" it's explained that stealth is functionally impossible in space due to the simple fact that any space-faring civilization is going to have to focus heavily on tracking space debris in order to protect shipping lanes, satellites, orbital stations, bases on planets/moons that don't have a thick atmosphere, etc.
And the cheapest/easiest way to do so would be to just have a bunch of regular optical cameras and telescopes pointed at the sky and then use computers to sort through the massive amounts of data to pinpoint likely bits of space debris by seeing when they pass in front of stars and predict the paths so the debris could either be avoided or diverted before it became a serious threat.
But this also means that you can't try to sneak up because spaceships would need to travel at FAR faster speeds than space debris. Sure, you could try to disguise yourself as space junk by inserting yourself into a known orbit or by matching the speeds normal for space junk, but the issue is that it could take you years/decades/centuries by moving at those speeds and orbits.
@@roetheboat1 that would only work if your opponent isn't actively creating new space junk all the time by blowing stuff up. Also, looking at the stars can last days before you notice something, as if you want to use dimmer stars you need a bigger telescope and smaller field of view
@@tedarcher9120 If you have some sort of FTL travel or even some sort of way of quickly accelerating up to like 20% the speed of light then stealth would make more sense.
But if you are moving at speeds like what is seen in The Expanse (or Children of a Dead Earth which doesn’t have the Epstein drive and so can’t fully accelerate the entire trip) then you will be spending months or even years in transit between the planets.
If you are creating space debris to hide in, you need to move at that same speed and follow the orbit of the debris in such a way that it looks natural.
After all, it would make it pretty obvious if suddenly unknown objects started moving directly towards some sort of military target at abnormally fast speeds.
And it probably would take days or even weeks to notice, but you have to keep in mind that it would take MONTHS of travel time even for us to go from Earth to Mars at the closest point in their orbits going as fast as possible.
Meanwhile your stealth/disguise would need to be able to hold for that entire time despite it drawing more and more attention the closer you got. That would mean avoiding doing anything that could leave a heat signature or a radio signal or whatever.
Stealth/hiding would be easier in cluttered systems like the rings of the gas/ice giants, but you would have to figure out how to first reach those targets without being seen or else your enemy would know where you entered the area and then have a better chance of predicting where you will attack from.
@@roetheboat1The problem with that is that it assumes the system is very built up. There is no real reason to assume that would be the case. Space is big. If you have cheap FTL especially you could easily have millions of lightly inhabited systems.
To track everything you just need to survey the system once. You don't need to actively monitor everything. That is ridiculous.
As for optical. Again space is really big. To scan the entire "sky" you would need an utterly absurd number of telescopes. Again in a very built up system sure. But a smaller colony would be unlikely to have anything of the sort. Even then depending on the resolution there would be a hard limit to how far out things can be detected. Especially since stealth ships would likely be painted a deep black and be difficult to detect.
Earth today certainly does not have the capability to detect some random deep black object moving through the outer solar system. And we do have a *lot* of cameras looking.
Now consider some smaller colony of a couple million people. Would they really have a massive sattelite network just for the offchance a stealth ship might show up? Well no. Even a colony of hundreds of millions is unlikely to have that imo.
I like how the Expanse does it with earth having an expensive scanner system specifically for the purpose.
Radar is easy to use on earth because the air is transparent to radar waves. In space the whole spectrum is available to use because space really doesn’t block anything. The biggest advantage in space is its shear immensity. Most near earth asteroids were only discovered recently, and if one is on a collision corse we won’t really know unless it has completed an orbit or two near earth. As for stealthy shapes in space, a sphere is probably the best. Since only a very small point would be reflected back to the transmitter, and it works in any direction. The down side is it does reflect in every direction off one hemisphere so if your detector is good enough then it can be discovered from any direction.
10:48 "We've lost the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps"
Presenting The New Stealth Cruiser named A47...get it.
Respect and keep up the epic work.
A topic suggestion I have is different types of radiators you can use for a spacecraft and how efficient they are, particularly sense that seems to be overlooked very often in spacecraft design. I’m particularly curious about Dusty Plasma radiators as I used those for a recent spacecraft design of mine.
Old Man Kung Fu: don’t be there when the attack happens.
Corollary: The only evidence you were there is a crater where something used to be.
Radar jamming @10:50 is an appropriate closure 😀
Loved the clip from patlabor 2!!!!, Im a big fan of patlabor!!!
For my setting I employ two kinds of sensors: active and passive.
Passive sensors simply hear for things, similar to on a submarine.
Active sensors send out signals and wait for the response.
You can reduce your risk to passive sensors by reducing your output. The less heat and radiation you emit, the harder you are to find. Which obviously causes issues with thermal management.
And active sensors light you up like a christmas tree. On the other hand active sensors are more accurate and have more range.
And since the setting is relatively soft, FTL sensors exist. But only of the active variety.
And while "classic" cloaking tech exists and works against active and passive sensors, it isn't perfect and requires the ship to be running dark even more if you want to stay hidden. And you have to coast.
But the opposite also exists. Basically autonomous drones that emit massive signals and appear larger than they are. Drop out sone of these pods, make them emit the signatures of a fleet of massive battleships, and your small cruiser suddenly appears unimportant.
i always like the stealth of space
Just like to make a mention for the Gundam Deathscythe from Gundam Wing. While its upgrade did get a more conventionally thought of stealth cloak that made it invisible the original had simply its Hyper Jammers which rendered it invisible to most electronics despite still being visible to the naked eye until the upgrade.
To expand on this in ep.2 there is a pilot of an aquatic Mobile Suit who says to his commanding officer "We're under attack. But I can't see the enemy anywhere." likely because Deathscythe was not showing up on the viewscreens in some capacity as a later pilot in the episode was able to make a note of the Gundam's signature weapon unless his MS merely had more advanced optics so to speak. This confusion led to the officer's assumption it was an attack by units considered allies rather than an actual enemy leading to friendly fire.
I'd be very interested in an episode about fire onboard spaceships depicted in sci-fi.
Great job as usual! ^^ Keep it going!
The radar being Jammed was a nice touch. Excellent video. Also the ship i have in my novel has a combination of stealth (sensor absorbing materials and construction) along with purpose built jammers to evade detection behind enemy "lines" (lol). One of the special weapons being an anti-matter torp that has built in jammers, so that it creates ghosts on the enemy ship sensors tricking the weapons into thinking that there is a massive strike incoming and all the guns firing wildly into the cosmos.
Was positively surprised to see patlabor 2 here, absolutely love that movie. Especially the interception scene you showed, its something I've only seen in documentaries.
Valid strategies all! Add another one:
-burn only near or behind stars to mask your exhaust signature! How close? Well, that depends on what are you trying to hide from. But, let's say you want to invade some neighboring system. Your star is noisy and bring enough, to make even your planets invisible to enemy sensors, unless they happen to cross right in front of it. You can use two options:
1. Burn toward the enemy with the sun at your back, like coming out of the sun in aerial warfare of today!
2. Burn behind the sun, and use a series of such burns around other stars to use slingshot effect to get to your enemy.
The first method is more direct, but requires more energy and the second is more efficient, but takes more time. Either way, you spend most of the travel time not burning at all. The enemy becomes aware of you strictly by luck if some listening outpost picks you up in a case of cosmic coincidence, or only after you start breaking OR launch you relativistic kill missiles/projectiles or whatever long range weapon you intend to use. And by then, it can be too late.
Respect for using The Operations Room for the segment about the Blackhawk.
for refrence the moon is 2 light seconds away while the sun is a little over 8 min away
A possible idea I had was if you had disposable heat sinks. You turn on your stealth engine and rapidly dump heat into the sinks. Then when they get too hot, you sheath it in a capsule that masks the heat for just long enough as you jettison the heat sink in random directions. Icing on the cake if you can make it so the capsules open up at a preset time so that when (not if) the heat starts to become noticeable, there's a bunch of random heat signatures that make it look like there are a bunch of ships out there while you skedaddle.
In my setting the ships cool their skin and have massive heatsinks forcing military ships to be massive and still using radiators but they can shut them off for a while to "run dark" they just have to be careful to not do it for too long vs civilian ships can be much smaller since they can leave their raditors out all the time
One thing that makes sense is to have lights on the ship that can mimic the stars that are behind it from each direction. There'll definitely be errors in that that would be detectable by good enough sensors at close enough range, but it would go a long way. Alongside other stealth measures it could probably defeat older less good sensors and weapons and make even newer better sensors have to get closer than they otherwise would before they see you clearly. Which is exactly like any kind of stealth and any kind of ECM in real life, so it kinda makes sense because rarely anything changes at the level of fundamental underlying principles, no matter how different it looks on the surface.
My head exploded when i saw this video had come out, recommending the channel to everyone.
Stealth, speed and adaptability is what makes it a deadly predator in space.
Something that down come up with the F117 shot down by the Serbs was just how complacent everyone had become. Not only were the aircraft using the same flightpaths repeatedly but on the day of the shoot down the F117's were operating without the support of electronic warfare aircraft (EA-6B Prowler) and of the flight of three aircraft coming in Vega 31 (the aircraft that was targeted and shot down) had opened its weapons bay well before its target for its attack run, completely negating the stealth profile of the airframe. The Serbian SAM system failed to lock both of the other aircraft in the formation and almost certainly was only able to properly target Vega 31 because its weapons bay was open.
Get the impression everybody involved has just started to believe the Airframes stealth was invincible and got way to comfortable when sending them into hostile airspace.
Akchewally, the Nighthawk was hit because it had a weapons bay open. In that conflict, US fighters had been using the same flight path repeatedly. The SAM operater essentially shot a hail mary in their direction, and the missile picked up the exposed Nighthawk at just the right moment. Nighthawks are still used now and again for special missions because their shape is more of a dedicated stealth craft than newer designs.
One book I’ve read has a ship use a gravity generator to bend outgoing emissions in an endless loop around the ship. Not only does it keep the ship from being visible, but it also forms an impromptu shield from all the energy coursing in a sphere. But the generator had to be constantly adjusted on the fly by a skilled tech
I don't know if this would be particularly stealthy, as you're basically turning the ship into a miniature black hole, which are very distinct in their absence of emissions.
@@basedeltazero714 space is big. If your ship is small (and this one was a fighter), you’d be looking for a black hole the size of maybe 10 meters. And even then you’d have to know to look for it
The tabletop rpg Lancer: BATTLEGROUP has an interesting take for spaceship stealth. They dont do stealth at all. I mean, ships dont try to hide their signatures, "stealth" ships use specific bloom ports so they can show as much heat as possible. This way getting an accurate target profile is difficult since the crossection is enormous on purpose to hide the ship inside the mess.
My understanding is that is basically how jamming works today. You make enough noise that they know something is in the area, but have no idea what or where.
In my opinion, the best way to achieve stealth in space is to compensate for the lack of clutter by *bringing your own clutter* - chaff with infrared reflectors and heat sources to spread bright hot spots all around and give the enemy a swarm of artificially-constructed sensor ghosts on top of the ones they normally see, while also reducing your ship's own presence to match the fakes.
Another concept I've heard brought up on the Merge and elsewhere is strategically mixing stealth and non stealth assets to increase background noise and make the stealth harder to detect. Stealth operating alone can still stand out from a background of nothing, stealth operating in a cacophony is another matter. Certainly there can be creative ways to implement this in a space setting which is significantly more three dimensional than in-atmo flight and has the whole "near absolute zero" background temp to deal with. The Normandy operating in the battle for Rannoch, for example, could likely run a bit hotter than normal solo missions while still being low-observable
7:40 Solar sails could have some stealth applications because with a solar sail you can ride the solar wind and therefore do not need to preform a burn, you could also use the luminosity and solar wind of a star to break line of sight from telescopes and sensor equipment.
There's more to the F-117 being shotdown. Essentially, the SAM got stupid lucky.
Luck was definitely a big part of it. But he had it more right than most. It was mainly due to NATO complacency and laziness. Plus a lot of luck.
@@Plapradnotably, they only managed to get a missile lock when the F-117 actually opened its bays, and indeed got extremely lucky to intercept it in that timeframe of them being open.
LazerPig did a video on the topic recently; "Stealth: A Controversy." He goes over this incident in detail there.
In Space: Above and Beyond, there was a high tech enemy space fighter (Chiggy Von Richthofen)that seemed to actively confuse or spoof both radar and lidar of the Hammerhead fighters.
Yeah, all they saw was a strange ripple on the radar that indicated it was near. Still, their boss was able to beat the alien one-on-one after delivering a badass speech to a chaplain
@@artembentsionov “…and when I return, I’m going to drink a bottle of scotch, as if it were Chiggy Von Richtofen’s blood, and celebrate his death.”
@@padawanmage71 amen
F22, F35, Rafale and basically all Modern/Modernized jets that include a static AESA without repositionner (not rippen or typhoon) have their antennae canted upwards several degrees.
They are basically mirrors and by doing this you deflect the energy away from the sensor.
in addition, no, Composite nose cones aren't unidirectional :)
Please make a video about one manned spacecrafts in sci fi like bsg’s vipers and ties
Talking about the f-117 shoot down though, it should be noted that even with all the foreknowledge of where and when it was going to be flying and even at what altitude it was still unable to be targeted until the bomb bay doors opened which significantly increases its RCS.
4:30 For the record, luck was a major factor in that shoot down, but it was also that radar team disobeying protocol and putting all of their lives in danger. It should also be noted the only reason the radar picked up the nighthawk, was because the scan bounced off the inside of the bomb bay doors, during the approximately 3 seconds they were open. To those of you with reasoning skills, you will have correctly deduced that therefore, the nighthawk had already completed its bombing mission, meaning that the stealth of the aircraft did exactly what it was meant to do.
Stealth tech has one purpose, keeping the asset safe and undetected until its mission is carried out. If, as a bomber, the only time that enemy detection systems can see you, is while your bomb bay doors are open, and actively dropping ordinance, then I'd say that's mission complete.
Some really great ideas here for my universe. Thanks spacedock.
Infrared camouflage in space faces significant challenges, not least of which is the sophistication of modern infrared sensors. These sensors are incredibly sensitive, capable of detecting variations in temperature as slight as fractions of a degree. This sensitivity means that even minor heat emissions from a spacecraft, which are inevitable due to onboard systems and life support, can be detected. The task of camouflaging or masking these emissions is therefore extremely difficult. Spacecraft must dissipate excess heat, often via infrared radiation, to avoid overheating. Any attempt to cloak this heat signature would have to contend with these highly sensitive sensors, which are designed to pick up even the most subtle infrared signals against the backdrop of space. This backdrop itself presents another challenge; the cosmos is filled with infrared radiation from various sources, and blending into this complex, dynamic environment is a significant hurdle. Given these factors, achieving effective infrared camouflage in space, where sophisticated sensors can detect even the slightest temperature differences, is a formidable and with the know Physics at the moment a unattainable goal.
7:57 in Star Wars Legends, the StealthX (basically a stealth variant of the X-Wing starfighter) uses a kind of fuel causes the efflux to go black a millisecond after it leaves the thrusters.
Being able to attack from Absurd Range is it's own form of stealth, too.
Say you have ships hiding in an asteroid belt, just shoving stray rocks at carefully calculated trajectories to slam into your target planet. Yes, they'll take months to get there. And your enemy will likely see them coming. But if you queue up a thousand of them, long before your enemy has any idea that you're even there, you're going to give them a hard day, and you have all kinds of time to clear the area.
I think that the old anime, Starship Operators, did a decent job of this.
it was very submarine-esque.
the distances involved are _huge_ so most passive signals would become too diffuse to pick up, and getting a return signal from an active sensor would require such a tightly focused beam that it'd take a very _very_ long time to search the _unimaginably large_ volume of space.
in the show, doing a radar sweep of the suspected area was going to take days or weeks to complete. spoiler: what they did in stead was blanket the area with radiation by detonating all their missiles in a formation, and observing the area for reflections or occlusions. This wouldn't work for the same reason as radar didn't work, but rule of cool so they found em.
The biggest issue with "stealth in space" is the simplest-heat.
Any spaceship is going to have a HUGE heat signature-reactors, life support systems, electronics...all generate heat and that has to be gotten rid of somehow. There's tricks to store it, but they only work for so long and then you have to get rid of it. And that requires you to radiate the heat (and you can't just "use your hull to block most sensors", either).
The drive plume of the ship's main engines, using any realistic drive system, is going to be as bright as most small stars to long-range detection.
And the problems go from there...
If you had an effective reflection system, could you direct the IR from your radiators in one specific direction, thus avoiding scans from at least some angles?
@@RorikH To a degree, so long as you are not burning and are just coasting. If you burn your reaction mass will give you away. But you will still be easily spotted by optical sensors and there is nothing you can do about them.
Active cooling plus heat sinks. There you go.
As for dumping the heat. Yes thats the trick. However 1. depending on how long the mission is and how FTL works it might be possible to accomplish whatever you set out to do. 2. space is big but not empty. If you know where the enemy is and especially where they are "looking" you can simply put your ship behind any planetoid or asteroid and dump heat to your hearts content. Burns can also be performed in this manner. Alternatively a cold exhaust could be used.
It's definitely feasible to do this in a still realistic setting.
@@joewelch4933 "But you will still be easily spotted by optical sensors and there is nothing you can do about them."
Assuming the enemy has sensors that can optically scan the entire system with a resolution good enough to detect a shiptrying to hide at interplanetary distances. Which is frankly as out there as a ship literally going invisible.
We today have a planet of 8 billions people with a shit ton of cameras looking at the entire system.Our sensors are pretty good too with many close to the physical limit as we understand it. Yet we have only detected 90% of *large* asteroids. In years of scanning. And asteroids are not attempting to hide.
Even if sensors improve vastly even past the physical limits we believe there are. It'd take a truly enourmous sensor net to reliably and actively scan an entire system optically. I could see it for important worlds and military installations. But again the idea every little colony and fleet would be able to do so is as absurd as a ship literally going invisible.
Nine times out of ten it's easier to dissappear into the background than actually turn invisible. Space is so big that going unnoticed is usually as simple as turning off your lights and engine.
The way the Normandy in Mass Effect hides enough of it's emissions. That only getting lucky with active ladar or looking out a window would help.
But this wouldn't work because even bare minimum life support would release IR radiation, not much but enough to stand out like a sore thumb compared to the absolute 0 of space. In the same way you can see a candle flame from a mile away in total darkness.
I agree, but here's some devil's advocacy. Given that we have already developed 1) very wide angle telescopes 2) IR telescopes and 3) AI very capable of pattern recognition, why couldn't a spacefaring military simply have a network of automated stations looking for ALL of the uncorrelated IR signatures and ALL unexplained visible objects? If you make yourself absorb all of the visible wavelengths, you will heat up. Also, there is the double edged sword of stealth. If stealth is at all effective in space, then at least some of the stealth-busting detector stations will be stealthed, making space stealth harder. (This is why I've always held the position that space stealth is always going to be very hard, kind of jank, but still ubiquitous!)
The big problem is that, for most spacecraft, turning off your engine is... a bad idea. The myriad life support, electronics, waste processing and other such systems need to be on for it to function long term, and short term people get uncomfortable at 270 degrees or so above background temperature. Satellites can be kept cool more way more easily, as they don't need to worry about the crew turning into ice sculptures several days before the heatings fully powered down, but ships are generally quite visible still when simply 'turned off', or so cold that they've stopped being much use as ships.
@@saucevc8353 Well, if your ship's a robot with no crew, then it wouldn't need any life support, just a wee bit of energy for a little passive scanning and enough processing power to know when to turn the rest of its systems on.
i was JUST coming down here to mention Ops Room video on that incident when you straight up put it in your video
Loved this video very well done it kind of reminded me of one of my fav examples of Stealth in fiction, from the Starfire book series. Highly recommend it to anyone who loves Military Space Opera. 'Crusade', 'In Death Ground', and 'The Shiva Option' by David Weber and Steve White all are fantastic reads.
In the Series they frequently use ECM i.e. Electronic Counter Measures. which is split into various types. Type 1 means the target becomes harder to hit. Type 2 means it makes the ship harder to identify, and Type 3 which is stealth. Making the Ship nearly invisible to sensors.
And as said in Space you got a lot to see and keep your eyes on and in the Starfire series they frequently mark distance in Light Seconds. Which is 300,000 km/sec or 186,000 miles/sec. at that range visual sensors are pointless so you would use other means like a laser sensor or such to detect something If you can fool a sensor into thinking there is nothing there then effectively you are achieving stealth like you said. And when your fighting an enemy over a few or even dozens of light seconds away or more then yeah stealth would be crucial in this kind of combat.
The book series Expeditionary Force talks about this in great detail. In the book they use radation instead of radio waves. You cant completely block the radiation from a freactor or other events in the books so they detect radiation and bursts of light since all of that travels at the speed of light
Edit: a word
My favorite sci-fi stealth measure is the cryo-computers from Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space books. Dangerous, though.
"electronic warfare" *cuts to Spaceballs Jamming* That definitely got a chuckle out of me.