Gravity Sensors vs Cloaking Devices

[Crazedwraith]

Assuming that Crazedwraith can answer for you, Illuminatus Primus, since he read the books, I will concede defeat if:

1) Corsucant's traffic was not cleared out when they scanned for the asteroids,

or if

2) The CGT (whatever that stands for) scanned Couscant's orbit from the planet's surface.

Either of these would prove that they can somehow read through intense gravitational jamming.

love to help you trackball, but we never actually hear about the use of the CGT arrays which was the basis of my earlier comments.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The orbital mirrors, docks, and skyhooks are permanent Coruscant fixtures which cannot be moved. Regardless, they'd be scanning for asteroids no larger than 100 m in-system.

The Jedi detected a yammosk as part of the task force assaulting the Jedi base at a planet known as Eclipse, in a system in the Deep Core.

[Striderteen]

Your calculations are correct, but it would be a simple matter to filter out false positives from known objects -- we do it all the time in astronomy, you take a "blank" baseline shot and subtract it from all your actual readings to cancel out optical aberrations in your lens.

[His Divine Shadow]

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Pg. 159: "Sensors, no anomalous system readings?"

"No admiral, all is within normal limits.Fine gravitational fluctuation readings do not indicate any increased mass hiding around moons or asteroid belts.If the Yuuzhan Vong are hiding ships there, they must be very tiny."
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-Dark Tide II - Ruin

So "very tiny" ships would be hard to detect on a gravity scan.

[Darth Wong]

Your objection seems to be based entirely on the notion that a small force is undetectable in the presence of a large force with a different vector. I don't see why this follows; it is a simple mathematical operation to subtract the known large force, and if the instruments are sensitive enough, you should be able to detect the remainder.

Besides, we know for a fact that cloaked ships dump hot exhaust gas into space, so a CGT sensor should not even be necessary in order to detect them.

[Rightous Fist Of Heaven]

========================
Pg. 159: "Sensors, no anomalous system readings?"

"No admiral, all is within normal limits.Fine gravitational fluctuation readings do not indicate any increased mass hiding around moons or asteroid belts.If the Yuuzhan Vong are hiding ships there, they must be very tiny."
========================
-Dark Tide II - Ruin

So "very tiny" ships would be hard to detect on a gravity scan.

I'd say by tiny they mean something smaller than an A-Wing since it seems to be pretty much routine to search for Vong ships using gravity sensors.

[Darth Wong]

One must remember the question of utility. What's a cloaking device good for? Sneaking up on somebody? That requires impulse drive, which will produce a trail of ionized gas. Lying in wait? Exactly what are they going to accomplish if they can't move? Use warp drive? Great, that produces huge gravitational distortions which can be passively detected far ahead of the ship.

[Rightous Fist Of Heaven]

One must remember the question of utility. What's a cloaking device good for? Sneaking up on somebody? That requires impulse drive, which will produce a trail of ionized gas. Lying in wait? Exactly what are they going to accomplish if they can't move? Use warp drive? Great, that produces huge gravitational distortions which can be passively detected far ahead of the ship.

Answer: Its of absolutely zero use against someone with half decent sensors. Altough i can figure out one effective way to move while cloaked, fire the impulse engines for only a very short period of time to give the ship some momentum. Altough the maneuverability of the ship when doing this would be next to non-existant it would give them movement.

[Ender]

I just want to point out that they may have been searching for the coralskipper's propulsion instead of their mass, since the microsingularities should show up more then the mass.

That said there is still detecting the Yammosk waves and the fact that the vong could pick out individual X wings by their mass signatures

[Lord of the Farce]

Answer: Its of absolutely zero use against someone with half decent sensors. Altough i can figure out one effective way to move while cloaked, fire the impulse engines for only a very short period of time to give the ship some momentum. Altough the maneuverability of the ship when doing this would be next to non-existant it would give them movement.

Don't forget the tractor beams.

[Rightous Fist Of Heaven]

I just want to point out that they may have been searching for the coralskipper's propulsion instead of their mass, since the microsingularities should show up more then the mass.

That said there is still detecting the Yammosk waves and the fact that the vong could pick out individual X wings by their mass signatures

Considering that the skips should have been hiding in the asteroid field e.g staying still they wouldnt have had their dovin basals creating singularities to cause propulsion if they didnt need it.

[Crazedwraith]

One must remember the question of utility. What's a cloaking device good for? Sneaking up on somebody? That requires impulse drive, which will produce a trail of ionized gas. Lying in wait? Exactly what are they going to accomplish if they can't move? Use warp drive? Great, that produces huge gravitational distortions which can be passively detected far ahead of the ship.

If its thats easy to pick the gas trails and warp signatures of cloaked vessels, why did picard have to go to all the trouble of a "tachon(sp) detection grid" in "Redemption"?

[Ted C]

Use warp drive? Great, that produces huge gravitational distortions which can be passively detected far ahead of the ship.

To be fair, Romulan and Klingon ships are known to be able to evade detection by standard AQ sensor even when moving at warp speed. In "Tin Man", a Romulan Warbird was intermittently detectable at high warp speed, but they're invisible to Federation sensors at cruising speed.

[Darth Wong]

If its thats easy to pick the gas trails and warp signatures of cloaked vessels, why did picard have to go to all the trouble of a "tachon(sp) detection grid" in "Redemption"?

Because their passive IR sensors are no good. "Redemption" was stupid on many levels. They only had a few dozen ships; why didn't the Romulans simply go around them? They knew exactly where they were and what they were doing, and a small number of ships can only cover a small area of space.

[Darth Wong]

Use warp drive? Great, that produces huge gravitational distortions which can be passively detected far ahead of the ship.

To be fair, Romulan and Klingon ships are known to be able to evade detection by standard AQ sensor even when moving at warp speed. In "Tin Man", a Romulan Warbird was intermittently detectable at high warp speed, but they're invisible to Federation sensors at cruising speed.

That doesn't mean they're undetectable; it only means that the people who design AQ sensors didn't do a good job. Look at ST6; they had to use a sniffer torpedo to find the BOP even though it was dumping drive plasma into space. Their sensors are good for some things and shitty for others.

[Ted C]

That doesn't mean they're undetectable; it only means that the people who design AQ sensors didn't do a good job.

I did carefully limit my statements to Alpha Quadrant sensors.

Look at ST6; they had to use a sniffer torpedo to find the BOP even though it was dumping drive plasma into space. Their sensors are good for some things and shitty for others.

Indeed, they don't seem to be able to detect plasma exhaust from a distance, nor to they seem to be able to identify the subspace distortions created by cloaked ships (we saw in "Redemption" that they can detect the distortions, but they apparently can't distinguish them from naturally occurring subspace distortions).

We're basically just reinforcing the fact that Star Trek cloaking technology is designed specifically to defeat Star Trek sensor technology, and it may have little or not benefit against Star Wars sensor technology.[/b]

[trackball]

Been gone for a few days.

Illuminatus, your responses are frustratingly vague and lacking in detail. Please give me more information when you respond, the devil is in the details, as we all know. For example, what is a skyhook? And what kind of orbits are we talking about here? Geosynchronous orbit is a heck of a lot higher than high ionosphere orbit, and that makes a big difference as far as sensor noise is concerned. The force of gravitational attraction drops off fast with distance, and the gravity source can be modeled as a point source rather than a three dimensional density map when you're far enough away.

As far as the filtering solution is concerned, it's a lot harder than it seems to be at first glance. To use an astronomy analogy, Striderteen, it would be like putting an observatory in the middle of New York City. Yes, you can filter out known sources to an extent, but when you're completely drowning out the signal you're looking for, it becomes nigh-impossible to differentiate random noise from the signal you're looking for.

In order to filter out every single source of noise in the solar system, you'd have to have a real-time model of the entire system, with masses, orbits, velocities, and (here's the killer) a complete, detailed three dimensional map of the density variation of every major object in the entire system that you might wind up close enough to have to worry about not modeling as a point source of gravity (including asteroids, comets, all the moons of the gas giants, and any other random junk of significant mass that's floating around, not to mention keeping track of the effect of all these gravitational attractions on all the other bodies). Add in the fact that your own observational platform is moving with respect to all that stuff and you begin to see the scope of the problem. Yes it is possible. Is it feasible? I don't think so. Even if you did all this, you can't filter out every source of noise perfectly, and we're looking for a tiny, insignificant blip. You're defeated by chaos theory.

The point is, the ship you're looking for is so tiny that it's indistinguishable from a noise source you haven't perfectly filtered out.

If gravity sensors were really that great, the Star Destroyers could have found Han hiding in the asteroid belt. They could have found him floating around with the junk they dumped. Han would have noticed Boba Fett following him. In The Last Command, they wouldn't have had to dump chaff to find the asteroids around Coruscant, and cloaking the asteroids would have been an expensive and mostly worthless gesture.

These gravity sensors don't appear to be the catch-all solution that they're being made out to be here. I'm not saying they're useless, but they would only be practical in deep space, away from sensor noise.

So far as the fact goes that cloaked Trek ships do emit other types of radiation and hot gasses and can be tracked by methods other than gravity sensors, I agree with all of this of course, it's been shown time and time again (whenever the writers discovered they'd written themselves into a corner). But this is not relevant to the discussion. I've seen a number of arguments that cloaking technology is nearly useless because of gravity sensors and gravity sensors alone, and I simply want to challenge that assumption.

[SirNitram]

Oy... Trackball, you are annoyingly arrogant here.

First off, Skyhooks are essentially towers that extend into orbit. The majority are Mid-High Ionosphere, but, for example, the Skyhook owned by Xizor in Shadows Of The Empire, extended far higher. These are structures capable of docking massive ships as well as serving as towers.

Orbits vary from high geosync down to high ionosphere.. Below high iono, expect the planetary shields to be in place.

Crying that 'Filtering is hard', however, is stupid and pointless. Consider, for a moment, the demonstrated capabilities of SW computing. A trashcan-shaped navigational computer/repair 'bot can carry detailed skematics of a 160km diameter battle station without a problem. They can calculate safe passage across thousands of lightyears in moments. Do I need to extend?

As for the examples you cite, these are called Red Herrings. The CGT, the gravity sensors we mentioned, are specialized units, and were not present on Vader's Death Squadron.

[trackball]

I'm sorry if you feel I'm being arrogant, I'm trying to be as respectful and polite as possible. If you think I'm being sarcastic in places, let me assure you this is not the case. I'm just asking for additional details, I don't think that's unwarranted.

I was also unaware that gravity sensors were not standard equipment on Star Destroyers, as you state, since the other threads I read seemed to take it for granted that every Wars ship had that capability. However, you did not address my concern that the actual solution to the problem of cloaked asteroids was to dump chaff rather than rely on gravity sensors, which were stated as a possibility in this case.

As for the filtering, yes, an astromech droid can hold a great deal of information and larger computer systems can hold even more, but first this information must be collected and processed. Since the scenario presented was that of the Empire invading the Alpha Quadrant, the Empire would not have detailed data on massive objects in Federation systems. It would take a long time to collect this data with the precision necessary to make any use of it, and the real-time simulation of the system would have to be running constantly, hogging computer time that could be needed for other processes. And even then random fluctuations caused by natural phenomena as well as heavy space traffic would complicate the situation to an excessive degree.

So far as I can tell:
1) There are no canonical references to a gravity sensor being successfully used in this manner, and
2) The situation is difficult enough to warrant challenging the assumption that it can be done.

[SirNitram]

I'm sorry if you feel I'm being arrogant, I'm trying to be as respectful and polite as possible. If you think I'm being sarcastic in places, let me assure you this is not the case. I'm just asking for additional details, I don't think that's unwarranted.

I was also unaware that gravity sensors were not standard equipment on Star Destroyers, as you state, since the other threads I read seemed to take it for granted that every Wars ship had that capability. However, you did not address my concern that the actual solution to the problem of cloaked asteroids was to dump chaff rather than rely on gravity sensors, which were stated as a possibility in this case.

This was the solution employed by the New Republic until a CGT was obtained. If you think this should have removed the need for the CGT, I suggest you consider, long and hard, how big an area we are discussing here.

As for the filtering, yes, an astromech droid can hold a great deal of information and larger computer systems can hold even more, but first this information must be collected and processed. Since the scenario presented was that of the Empire invading the Alpha Quadrant, the Empire would not have detailed data on massive objects in Federation systems. It would take a long time to collect this data with the precision necessary to make any use of it, and the real-time simulation of the system would have to be running constantly, hogging computer time that could be needed for other processes. And even then random fluctuations caused by natural phenomena as well as heavy space traffic would complicate the situation to an excessive degree.

Unfortunately, SW sensors have demonstrated the power to pick out tiny cloaked objects in orbit of a heavily trafficed planet. No ST planet is as heavily populated or visited as Coruscant.

How hard do you think it is to pick out the objects orbiting a world? Today, we can pick out lots of junk without trouble, why should a group able to scan everything within a hundred LY, and the entirity of Subspace, have trouble?

So far as I can tell:
1) There are no canonical references to a gravity sensor being successfully used in this manner, and

There is Official reference to something near-indentical. The primary differences are that it would be even easier: A starship with an active system on outputs more energy into it's enviroment than an inert rock.

2) The situation is difficult enough to warrant challenging the assumption that it can be done.

Only if we assume the starship is somehow not dumping lots of detectable material into space, which we canonically know it does.

[trackball]

So you're saying that Coruscant, the most powerful and important of all Star Wars worlds, did not have any gravity sensors available to them on short notice? If, despite the much quoted speed of hyperspace travel and communication, it was faster to deploy chaff to detect the asteroids than it would have been to get one of the CGTs delivered, they must be very rare items. And apparently, the chaff solution did remove the need for the CGT, since I was told in an earlier post that by the time they got the CGT up and running, it was only able to confirm that all the asteroids had been taken care of already. Since you yourself pointed out just how big an area we are talking about here, that says a lot about the availability of these things. And that's assuming they even work.

The only two references to these things being used that I have heard so far is to look for something that was not there. It reminds me of the elephant repellant joke.
"But there aren't any elephants within a thousand miles of here!"
"Works great, doesn't it?"

And again, I must reiterate that the fact that cloaked Trek vessels can be detected by other means is not relevant to this discussion. I started this thread to discuss the feasibility of using gravity sensors alone, since that was the solution I found most often presented.

[SirNitram]

Why yes, in the era when the Empire has been smashed and reduced to a fraction of it's power, CGT's, one of the technologies reserved for the powerful fleets of the Empire, are a bit scarce. Wow. And how many cloaks does the Federation have..?

I'm somehow not surprised you've thrown out the elephant repellent joke. Exposed to Star Trek for so long, it must be quite an idea that character's might know the potency of their own technology. However, there is no reason to doubt the CGT could pick up the asteroids. Hell, even Thrawn admitted it could be done, hence his elaborate ploy.. You haven't read the book, I see.

So your entire argument is to run numbers, point to a number you feel is too small, and say 'It can't be! Nyah nyah!'. I can't wait to see how you react when you realize how much 1e38J is.

[Darth Wong]

So you're saying that Coruscant, the most powerful and important of all Star Wars worlds, did not have any gravity sensors available to them on short notice?

How many AWACS aircraft does Washington DC have on short notice?

[trackball]

However, there is no reason to doubt the CGT could pick up the asteroids. Hell, even Thrawn admitted it could be done, hence his elaborate ploy.. You haven't read the book, I see.

I have a very good reason to doubt the CGT could pick up the asteroids, or I wouldn't have started the thread in the first place. What I don't have is a solid reason to believe that they can.

I have stated twice already that I haven't read the book, which is why I am asking for additional details. My knowlege of Star Wars is limited to the movies and what I have read on this web site.

How many AWACS aircraft does Washington DC have on short notice?

I'm sure that's classified information not available to the general public, but during Operation Iraqi Freedom, CNN stated that the US can get a spy satellite picture every 90 minutes.

[SirNitram]

However, there is no reason to doubt the CGT could pick up the asteroids. Hell, even Thrawn admitted it could be done, hence his elaborate ploy.. You haven't read the book, I see.

I have a very good reason to doubt the CGT could pick up the asteroids, or I wouldn't have started the thread in the first place. What I don't have is a solid reason to believe that they can.

Besides the fact that multiple competent people who know their technology fully believed it was possible, indeed, never expressed a doubt. There's no 'solid reason' to doubt it at all, at least from reading your posts, which amount to nothing more than, 'Well, it might not have done it!' and 'Wah, I don't think they are up to it, I don't care what the Official data says!'

I have stated twice already that I haven't read the book, which is why I am asking for additional details. My knowlege of Star Wars is limited to the movies and what I have read on this web site.

It might behoove you to investigate some, or at least ease off the assumptions.

How many AWACS aircraft does Washington DC have on short notice?

I'm sure that's classified information not available to the general public, but during Operation Iraqi Freedom, CNN stated that the US can get a spy satellite picture every 90 minutes.

[US Technowank="On"]And we all know a spy satellite can see through everything perfectly[/Technowank]

He asked for an AWACS, because they are specialized in much the same way a CGT is. So tell me, if America was shattered, and every member of the military and government either killed or drive into Washington/Oregon/Idaho, how many AWACS would they have in DC? In a days flight of DC?