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It sounds to me like these people are still hung up on the idea that morality flows from religion. A lot of people seem to have trouble wrapping their minds around the idea that you can build a strong, solid moral system without making it appeal to some kind of higher power (God, karma etc.). I've ...

So our area ends up being half that of a sphere, for about 20,627 square degrees. To steal from GMT again, because of the nice telescope involved and the optimistic figures that I like: Uh . . . no. 20,627 square degrees is for a hemisphere . I wrote out my example way back when this thread was tal...

Ok, I'm going to try to create a hypothetical observation system with a few more specifics to maybe get a better idea of resource commitment vs effectiveness. Due to my status as a google expert I expect to be wrong on several points but hopefully something can be learned from those corrections. Sit...

Hmm, using GMT's numbers from earlier, I got a 4 gigawatt energy source being detectable from around 1 AU for a 1 second exposure by the New Horizons telescope, and a 60 megawatt source being detectable from around 17.5 million km. Of course this is "we're sure we've got something but it's a d...

Yeah it would be, and that kind of scenario would pretty heavily favor the defence operating on interior lines. An serious attack just can’t really develop faster then you could react to defend your key areas. Actually that brings up something that's been bothering me about the 'geography' of an in...

You're having enough trouble finding a track in the first place, even when you're staring right at it, let alone figuring out it came from an enemy staging area. I hope this is assuming the enemy is trying to avoid detection? Going to the other extreme, you're not telling me a ship scrambling from ...

Then the null geodesics in spacetime would have speed Q, rather than c. That's fine, but since c<Q, this means that light travels on timelike geodesics, and consequently photons must have mass. Electromagnetism would have a finite range. There wouldn't be anything in such a universe that you'd reco...

And how do you change the mechanics of the universe to make this beastie work when you hit the button? Well the idea is that the mechanics of the universe have been changed permanently, or that we're in an alternate universe with these different mechanics. So there wouldn't be any button to push, s...

Fakedrive being an FTL drive that circumvents causality issues not via weird special provisions but by simply saying that the laws of the universe are different than what we think they are. By introducing this FTL drive the universe by implication has a new maximum speed, call it Q, and consequently...

All these ideas about sensors are just dying to be gamed: decoy cost efficiency vs sensor network costs, and low accel stealthier ships vs faster easy to see ones, fleetformed interferometers, groundside arrays of tremendous size, sky scan speed vs detection range/surety, IR detectability of manned ...

On the point of masking approaches, if we're talking about our solar system or really standard solar systems, the example of seeing burns on Pluto from the inner system is a bit extreme.

Aren't there a few ways to maybe cold launch a fleet? How detectable is laser launching something?

*blissfully ignores the boardgame discussion* On the issue of realistic space sims, what I felt made Space Combat unwieldy, from a gameplay perspective, was the whole stability issue, or, in other words, how horribly easy it is to start spinning like crazy when there's no air to slow you down. The ...

What do you think of that argument? It made my eyes glaze over :p You spring that one someone and they're just going to go "huh"? I think I'll stick with "moral relativism is fucking retarded. You know why I'm right? Because FUCK YOU BUDDY" ..or what Darth Wong said. That's good...

Hooray more informative posts. What I'm getting generally so far: strategic stealth is possible, but tactical stealth is not. In a tactical situation around effective weapons range (a few light seconds max) you're going to be spotted. But as long as you're not maneuvering like crazy with main thrust...

I created a ship in it that handled similarly to wing commander fighter by mapping the thrusters to my joystick and placing them in a nose array. Right... either your ship was absurdly light or your thrusters were overpowered so that you could ignore angular momentum... did you bother to model thru...

Further questions...Atomic Rocket has this for maximum detection range for a ship on 'silent' The maximum range a ship running silent with engines shut down can be detected with current technology is: Rd = 13.4 * sqrt(A) * T2 where: Rd = detection range (km) A = spacecraft projected area (m2 ) T = s...

I sort of handwaved the location and processing issues because they're studying putting a 6 telescope space array out there already, the Robin Laurance interferometer for DARWIN. Figured in a couple hundred years we'd be able to swing setting up a fleet.

I guess the quantification I'm looking for would be in the difference in effective range. So let's say with a Really Big Scope I can barely see a target at 1 pixel resolution. I break up that area amongst 10 ships and spread them out to boost my resolution. Now with this diameter I can theoreticall...

Yeah it seemed odd that a lot of the statements thrown out were worse than the bit that was kept. Doesn't seem like a full quote though, maybe "religious, superstitious nonsense" was part of a broader rant :p

I think it needs to be clarified that an interferometry telescope is not actually completely identical to a physical telescope of the same size, particularly if the ratio of the small scopes is very small compared to the virtual large scope. It's not as if you can take a pair of 4 inch lenses, put ...

Would it be worthwhile to fire small sensor probes like bullets at enemy/unknown "dots" to radio back more detailed sensor information? How accurately could you fire a bullet or a missile at a "dot" 50 million km away, and how small could you make sensors, passive or active, pow...

I think it needs to be clarified that an interferometry telescope is not actually completely identical to a physical telescope of the same size, particularly if the ratio of the small scopes is very small compared to the virtual large scope. It's not as if you can take a pair of 4 inch lenses, put ...

Interferometry is useful if you're trying to simulate a larger lens with a bunch of smaller ones, but even if we assume a huge lens, the limitations are much greater than sci-fi fans realize. I've seen some pretty stupid shit posted by people who think that the whole "infrared makes you stand ...

I'm skeptical of anybody who tells me that Bush made policy based on faith, rather than on the basis of pig-headed confidence in "American might" and the supposedly universal appeal of democracy. Not that either one is good - but they are two different kinds of wrong. Religion isn't neces...

What profits? If you're talking about no copyright or expired copyright, the distributor gets nothing too. Why do you think the distributor would be reaping profits from the sale of something which has become free to copy? If you extend the 'one time payment' idea to the music company, then they ge...