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Sensor arrays and distribution of information


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If a planet is 100Km radius, and you could cover it all with only 1 or 2 sensor, it would be too easy and without challenge to cover.

 

Having to build an array of carefully placed sensor bring the challenge of organizing the data to be able to build a human readable overview.

This is the kind of challenge I like.

 

This is also an opportunity for emergent gameplay since hostiles cannot disrupt and impair your detection ability too easily, having to seek and destroy a grid of sensor is proving to be a greater challenge than only one. But securing such a grid can be proving very costly too.

 

 

and ships 8+km in size you only want to be able to detect them when they are just about to collide with you?

like /single digit multiples of their size/ as sensor range?

 

 

hard and static maximum sensor ranges dont work with a game of such large size spreads as DU.

especially such small maximum ranges as would be required.

 

we need a dynamic system thats at least inspired by actual physics

(maybe something like i already outlined here)

 

where detection ranges are defined by the actual construction of the searching and searched object.

if you dont want to be detected build a ship with low emission systems and a lot of radiation dampening material.

do you want to detect anything thats moving out there? either build that one, giant, moon filling sensor array or fill space with a bazillion sensor buoys.

 

 

with some mechanism that includes/emulates angular resolution of sensors you get even more variation.

when your sensor can only resolve signals less than 1 degree apart from each other and those two ships are half a degree from each other, you only see one blip.

same with ground equipment, your high sensitivity nuke detector can warn you about that there is /a/ nuke /somewhere/ in the city, but cant tell you where because of its limited resolution.

(or on a smaller scale it cant tell you who is carrying it around, only that its "somewhere in that crowd" )

 

 

so a capital ship early warning system could detect anything larger than a small YT1300 transport from half a system away, but the small stealthed fighter which is landing on the other side of the planet is invisible to it, as are its debarking crew and whatever they carry with them.

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and ships 8+km in size you only want to be able to detect them when they are just about to collide with you?

like /single digit multiples of their size/ as sensor range?

 

 

Speed and size are not the same.

 

If my radar is maxed at 5km detection range, and the 8km long ship is entering this range by only 1m, my radar will detect it.

If the ship is going slow, I will have plenty reaction time. If it is going at 1km/s however, I won't be able to think before it being on me.

 

With a ship 8 km long, if you want a good radar coverage, just setup the biggest radar available on it.

If the ship is still longer than the biggest radar capabilities, then your ship is not really viable for combat. just like in real life, there is no such thing as unlimited-dynamic-expansion of radar range.

 

 

some funny pic of ship radar

 

 

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If they go with your idea of dynamic range, why not do it with engine thrust power too ? The bigger the construct, the more powerful the thrust. Making your ability to plug an engine and move a planet a reality :D

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Speed and size are not the same.

 

If my radar is maxed at 5km detection range, and the 8km long ship is entering this range by only 1m, my radar will detect it.

If the ship is going slow, I will have plenty reaction time. If it is going at 1km/s however, I won't be able to think before it being on me.

 

With a ship 8 km long, if you want a good radar coverage, just setup the biggest radar available on it.

If the ship is still longer than the biggest radar capabilities, then your ship is not really viable for combat. just like in real life, there is no such thing as unlimited-dynamic-expansion of radar range.

 

 

some funny pic of ship radar

 

 

 

If they go with your idea of dynamic range, why not do it with engine thrust power too ? The bigger the construct, the more powerful the thrust. Making your ability to plug an engine and move a planet a reality :D

 

They DO go for that. Mass is a thing in the game, but up to a limit, as inertia is also a thing.

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Speed and size are not the same.

 

If the ship is still longer than the biggest radar capabilities, then your ship is not really viable for combat. just like in real life, there is no such thing as unlimited-dynamic-expansion of radar range.

 

you seen the moon at some point, when you looked up to the skies at night, right?

the moon is about 0.5° in "size" in your field of view.

an 8km ship would be 9° in size. EIGHTEEN times the visual size of the moon. 

and you want to tell me that your radar couldnt spot that mofo earlier? :P

(to put it in more human understandable terms: go out at night and put your fingers around the moon that your fingertips are "touching" the upper and lower side of the moon and hold your hand as far from your eye that your fingers are roughly 1cm apart. and now imagine something that appears to be 18cm long for the same hand-face distance :P )

 

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to put the radar range in a different perspective.

say your fighter is 20 meters long (roughly the size of a modern fighter jet)

its radar would have a range of about 130 meters if its radar had the same relative range as the "maximum size" one you propose there.

its ridicolous.

radar would be literally useless to use anywhere in the game :P

 

also, when you look closer i never said "radar" in what i described, only sensors, which includes passive sensors.

and passive sensors have no hard maximum range, only their watt/m² sensitivity and whatever radiation actually reaches the detector surface

a gigawatt fusion torch isnt stealthy in any way, and is detectable with your naked eye probably through half a solar system

for further reading i suggest this

 

 

also: are you trying to tell me that a radar can spot a coin over the same distance as it can spot an airliner and that until a very very hard range border? :P

smaller target -> less area to reflect the radio waves from the radar -> less effective range.

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and you want to tell me that your radar couldnt spot that mofo earlier? :P

 

I can guess this is the case, very few radar can detect the moon ;)

Optical detection however, is another type of sensor I believe. Modern fighter jets and missiles are both IR and optical anyway, up to +30km i believe.

 

So the question is, will the game feature tactical long range optical detection of target ?

(And will we be able to communicate between construct using DPU scripting ?)

 

not sure what to think about accuracy and precision of detection at this point.

 

 

EDIT: very good read thx !

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I can guess this is the case, very few radar can detect the moon ;)

 

yeah, because /active/ detection gets annoying over a bit over a light second distance :P squared inverse square law and stuff :P

1/(r^4) gets very small very fast, but you are comparing the distance between your outstretched hand's fingertips with a 15km trip :P

4 orders of magnitude arent nothing, you know :P

 

and also considering that radar in modern /fightercraft/ has detection ranges of ~200km against 1m² targets, im pretty sure that that sky filling ship isnt exactly invisible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-77

 

so, the radar has a peak power output of ~20kw (P) that makes 500*10^-9 watt that actually arrive at the 1m² (A) target at 200km ( r ), makes 12.5*10^-18 watt (Pd) that make it back to the aircrafts radar dish. (detecting that probably involves a lot of signal processing and classified trickery, but lets assume thats the irradiance of its own radar beam it can detect)

P/(r^4)*A=Pd

 

so, for simplicity i'll assume a spherical/circular spacecraft to detect with 8km diameter.

the area thats towards the radar has 4km radius which gives us (4*10^3)^2 * pi/4 = 12.5 million square meters of area to radiate against.

putting the new number for A into our formula above we get a range of about 12000km at which the radar could detect the ship.

thats about the diameter of earth :P

 

nothing from a physics point of view prevents you from detecting such a large ship at anything way beyond what would be visual range :P

 

 

and the framework i outlined in the post i linked earlier already includes optical detection in it, optical detection is just a small sliver in the total available EM spectrum.

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We're going to have to have multiple types of sensors. There's been discussion mainly on ship detecting sensors.

 

What about stargate probes? We're not going to be blindly sending those out. We'll have to know in advance where to send them with some kind of long range sensor.

 

There's also other things we'd like to scan for. What about different types of ore for mining? Or perhaps an anomalous EM scan to search for alien relics? Scan for lifeforms?

 

I could see the ship detecting and the last paragraph being scannable with a single type of sensor which can use most of the EM spectrum to use. Perhaps the long range sensor could be lumped in too, at the cost of reduced angular range for such long distances.

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well there are a lot more than radar for sensors already in use, I can't even imagine what futuristic sensors would consist of, or how good they would work.  it might be something as easy as looking for "exhaust" or light displacement.

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