Ziggy Stardust wrote:While your math is correct, a lot of the problems you describe can be alleviated by the use of non-stationary buoys. Instead of ensuring that every single spot of space is always covered at all times, gaps of certain sizes could be tolerated if the buoys exhibited stochastic movement within a certain orbit. It wouldn't be too hard to design a pattern that would allow gaps but make it almost impossible to exploit them (because they would be ephemeral and appear haphazardly over the grid over time).
Moving buoys would themselves be relatively easy to detect and track, and would require much greater power supplies to keep them moving. Maintenance requirements would be higher. And for a system like this, the maintenance cost is going to dominate cost of keeping the buoys running. If you have to send a drone out there to refuel the buoy once a month instead of once a year, it may well mean that you can only afford a tenth as many buoys.
Also, note that my calculations are for
one layer of sensor platforms- enough to provide perimeter warning, not to provide detection in depth. Therefore, any temporary gaps that open in the wall of buoys only need to be open for a few minutes- the ship then scoots through the hole and is 'gone.'
To create a system where fast-moving probes don't open up more holes than they close you need multiple layers to reduce the risk of a gap opening in all of them at once... and that, in turn, is several times more expensive than a mere perimeter detection system.
And that was, what,
ten years ago?
Perusing the first page, I note that
Wong, not the banned guy, comments "Actually, the ability to detect warp-driven objects from far away would logically be due to some kind of sensor interaction with the warp field itself, which must necessarily extend far ahead of the spacecraft. That would explain why ships not traveling at warp speed are actually much harder to detect from distance." It's not much of a stretch to suggest that what the sensors interact
with when detecting a warp field is the distortion of time and space (in other words, gravity).
Wong also commented "The most likely explanation is that subspace radiation is very strongly affected by gravitational fields, which would simultaneously explain both the ability to detect gravitational disturbances at long range as well as the fact that sitting in a Lagrange point can mask you from subspace sensors. Interaction with a phenomenon like gravity is a double-edged sword."
So yeah, the guy who (in that thread) was promoting the argument I'm actually advancing
didn't get banned.
Because you will note that I could not possibly care less whether subspace is involved in using gravitational detection to track moving starships. That doesn't bother me. My point is that given Trek ships' proven ability to detect gravitational changes and track them (in real time over interplanetary or interstellar distances), it would be very natural to generalize the ability into a system for tracking a moving starship, including tracking them at warp.
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And if I were to argue that 'gravity' is somehow a different thing than 'warped space...'
1) I'd have just thrown general relativity out the window. In which case any claim to HARD SCIENCE HOOAH is ridiculous puffery.
2) I'd be opening myself to the obvious counter "okay, fine, the sensors don't detect 'gravity,' they detect spacetime distortions." This completely collapses any argument about how cloaked ships can't be detected at a distance. Because warp bubbles clearly generate some kind of signature, which
must be able to travel faster than light. We know this because the warp bubble itself can travel faster than light, and can be detected and monitored by objects which are themselves moving away from it faster than light. A warp bubble cannot propagate more quickly than information
about the bubble, for obvious reasons. Therefore, the warp bubble must emit something that travels faster than light, and which can be detected by sensors.
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An example of this occurs whenever the
Enterprise flees a pursuer (or chases a fleeing target) at Warp 8 or 9, and is gaining on its adversary at some significant multiple of lightspeed. Despite this, in such a situation, the
Enterprise can still see the other ship! Clearly, the
Enterprise is either tracking the warp signature of the pursuer... Or Kirk/Picard/whoever is somehow getting visual information that would normally require the use of photon or particle sensors that
definitely travel slower than light.
Either way, something "WATCH-MAN" has arrogantly assured us to be impossible... is happening.
Moreover, the counterargument I outlined in (2) becomes, in the hands of someone who knows enough about general relativity to know that distortions in the fabric of space manifest as gravitatational forces...
"We can detect an object moving at warp using its gravitational influence."
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Batman wrote:[long range visual observation of distant targets is] Easily explained by them having a sensor probe in the area that transmitted the visuals via subspace. (IIRC that actually gets mentioned in either the novelization or even the movie itself). Same goes for Praxis. No magical FTL photon detection required.
1) If so, it's awfully convenient how the Federation so frequently
just happens to have sensor probes in whatever area they need to in order to view events taking place at a distance, and how they are apparently routinely firing off these probes all over the place, including to places like the Klingons' core territory, and nobody feels any need to comment on this or react.
2) There are also numerous instances of the Federation doing things like "scanning for life forms" while approaching a planet at warp speed, with no mention of probes being involved, and at times when launching probes would be a perfectly normal thing to do that you'd
expect them to mention in the dialogue.
Every time the
Enterprise approaches a nominally inhabited planet only to find that the population is mysteriously dead/comatose/missing/whatever, they start off with Spock/Data/whoever reporting "I am detecting no life readings from the planet." Do you mean to tell me that they always precede such a sensor sweep by launching a probe ahead of the ship, and just
don't mention it?