Heat and cloaking technology

[brianeyci]

Who the hell knows they never fired any. They only said through dialogue, suggested by Capt. Janeway's senior staff or maybe by Janeway herself. Only other time I remember anything "spatial" was from Ent, and there's no reason to suppose that spatial torpedoes are spatial charges.

If they could force a ship out of cloak, even ship with presumably a perfect cloak like the Think Tank, even with fifty ships, even if they know the Think Tank would be in the general vicinity, the spatial charge has got to have a huge radius of effect.

Brian

[drachefly]

An obvious countermeasure to the exhaust plasma would be to give it a nontrivial exit velocity. You don't need to get it into the realm of efficient thrust to get it spread out enough not to be readily detected.

[The Silence and I]

This leads me to believe Spock refered to the waste gas produced by fusion reactors--most likely helium--and not anything coming out the back of the impulse engines as thrust (If indeed anything does--Impulse is a most remarkably difficult device to explain and may be reactionless). This satisfies drachefly's slow moving gas requirement, and it also suggests waste heat is not a vulnerability, as no mention of heat was made (there is mention in the script; but the possibility is dropped because of distance.

That's fucking stupid; do you think ionized fusion powerplant exhaust gases would be cold?

I can only say: brain fart on my part I thought of the gas trail without thinking of the heat ionized helium would give off.

If this is to be used it would seem any heat released in real space is so trivial it will blend into the background radiation at combat range). When all's said and done, the "tail pipe" analogy works very well.

Do you think the tailpipe of a car that's been running for a while is not hot? Would you like to rub your genitals against one in order to test this hypothesis?

The actual mechanical device emitting the plasma need not be radiating heat; Trek has very capable cooling devices and can move the heat elsewhere to be dealt with.

I would point out this "tail pipe" has apparently been fixed in later cloaks; the Enterprise D in "The Battle" is capable of readily detecting the movement of trace gases found in hard vacuum when a starship displaces them suddenly.

At a range of a couple of hundred metres. Also, it can't be hard vacuum. Pressure waves in gas require that the particles be dense enough to behave in a pseudo-atmospheric fashion and interact significantly. The fact that it's in what appears to be space does not prove that it's hard vacuum; Trek is full of space-borne but gaseous environments, such as nebulae (not all nebulae are going to look as dense or funky as Mutara).

Actually in this case it *could* be hard vacuum; Data said they could detect trace particles speeding away from a sudden physical impact upon the Stargazer's arrival at superluminal speed--if a large object suddenly impacts a few atoms they will speed away. Data was very confident he could detect this, it need not have the density of a pseudo-atmosphere.

DATA
I have computed a possibility,
Commander. Since even deep space
contains trace gases, sir, a
vessel in the Picard maneuver
might seem to disappear, but our
sensors could locate any sudden
compression of those gases...

I suppose startrek might simple have a lot more gas than we do, but Data could have over simplified for Riker as speed was important and used the word "compressed."

Such a sensor reading would be trivial next to the volume and mass of the helium produced by a fusion generator providing the power needed to maneuver a starship, suggesting there is a tail pipe no longer.

I like the way you support your fantastic violation of thermodynamics by simply saying that your particular interpretation of events "suggests" it

Well, the exhaust from the fusion reaction *would* out mass that from trace gasses by a great deal. They can detect the one, and as it turns out they can detect the other as well (points to above posts).

Another thing, it has been suggested the ion trails often found in the wake of starships cannot be used to target and attack a cloaked ship. I would agree, the trail would be too tenuous, easily spread out in various directions and so on. However it would immediately alert a vessel to the presence of another; and as we all know only rarely is the presence of cloaked ships ever determined by anything other than contrived circumstances and AFAIK never by its ion trail.

Totally ignoring heat for now and focusing on the ion trails instead, this is my thought process:
Ship A can easily detect ion trails
Ship B is cloaked
Ship A cannot find ship B's ion trail... so maybe there isn't one?

I find that logical, but please Mr. Wong, tell me how it isn't, enlighten me!

[nasor]

Where does the heat generated by a cloaked starship go ?

There are all sorts of possibilities.

If they have very effective technology for moving heat around (ie, cooling systems) perhaps they simply transfer most of the waste heat into some small quantity of matter and then dump the extremely hot matter into subspace.

Or since they apparently have the technology to create artificial singularities, perhaps they stash their extra heat in a miniature black hole.

Or perhaps whatever trick of physics that allows the cloaking device to work also allows them to somehow hide or eliminate the black-body radiation that warm objects normally emit, which would eliminate the detection problem.

[JME2]

(thanks for the correction, BTW JME2)?

No problem.

(Can I have my card back? )

[Batman]

(Can I have my card back? )

No.

[Gil Hamilton]

StarTrek just seems to have more gas floating around in it. All their nebulae seem to be freakishly dense, enough so that ships can hide in them and it looks cloudy and murky all the time. This compared to real life where almost all nebula are so tenuous that often times they are harder vacuum than we can make in a laboratory and the only reason they are visible is that they are several hundred lightyears thick from out vantage point (even a dust particle here and there every few meters or so adds up when you are talking light years) and they are still translucent for the most part.

Considering their nebulae are damn near denser than planetary atmospheres (and thus in a final state of collaspe into a star), it would be no suprise that deep space has enough gas in it that you could see a compression wave.

Furthermore...

Totally ignoring heat for now and focusing on the ion trails instead, this is my thought process:
Ship A can easily detect ion trails
Ship B is cloaked
Ship A cannot find ship B's ion trail... so maybe there isn't one?

I find that logical, but please Mr. Wong, tell me how it isn't, enlighten me!

It's not logical because that ion trail has to go somewhere. If Ship B normally shoots ions out the back for propulsion, then the ship being cloaked wouldn't make a difference. After all, even if the ship is cloaked, it still needs to shoot ions out its arse to push it in the other direction and those ions are going to leave the cloaking field pretty quickly. In fact, if STIV is to be believed, then they'll be immediately visible, since the cloaking device was a surface effect on the hull itself. After all, when they had that Bird of Prey parked in the park in San Francisco, when they opened the hatch, the inside of the ship was visible and wasn't cloaked.

So if Ship B uses ion based thrusters are a form of propulsion, then whether it's cloaked or not is irrelevant to the point. Without shooting ions out the back, it couldn't move, it would just have to drift. Since we know that cloaked things can manuever, then they have to shot ions out the back. There is no way around it.

The logical explaination, therefore, is that Ship A isn't so good at detecting ion trails and frequently misses them unless they are right on top of them

[omegaLancer]

Where does the heat generated by a cloaked starship go ?

There are all sorts of possibilities.

If they have very effective technology for moving heat around (ie, cooling systems) perhaps they simply transfer most of the waste heat into some small quantity of matter and then dump the extremely hot matter into subspace.

Or since they apparently have the technology to create artificial singularities, perhaps they stash their extra heat in a miniature black hole.

Or perhaps whatever trick of physics that allows the cloaking device to work also allows them to somehow hide or eliminate the black-body radiation that warm objects normally emit, which would eliminate the detection problem.

Hummm mini blackholes radiate via Hawking radiation and are actually blackbody heat source. According to the size of the Mini blackhole determines the rate of radiation, but for one with even the mass of the earth the amount of energy given off would fried the ship from the inside.

Ones the size of proton decay so rapidly that their existant would be measured in picaoseconds.

A heat sink of some kind could be use to store waste heate, but sooner or later the ship will need to radiate it out or boil from the inside..

Look at stealth aircraft the best that can be done is to shield the heat exhaust so that can only be detected from the rear....

[Darth Wong]

Actually in this case it *could* be hard vacuum; Data said they could detect trace particles speeding away from a sudden physical impact upon the Stargazer's arrival at superluminal speed--if a large object suddenly impacts a few atoms they will speed away. Data was very confident he could detect this, it need not have the density of a pseudo-atmosphere.

Hey dumb-fuck, the Stargazer's nav deflector would have been pushing a goddamned bow wave of particles directly TOWARDS the Enterprise-D during its maneuver. Your logic looks like this:

"Stargazer pushes a bow wave of particles toward E-D"
"E-D can detect these particles"
"Therefore, any Fed ship can detect any particles anywhere"

That's fucking stupid.

I like the way you support your fantastic violation of thermodynamics by simply saying that your particular interpretation of events "suggests" it

Well, the exhaust from the fusion reaction *would* out mass that from trace gasses by a great deal. They can detect the one, and as it turns out they can detect the other as well (points to above posts).

So all that matters is mass? Even if we assume that Star Trek's notion of deep space is hard vacuum (and I would point out that they routinely run into "anomalies" in deep space), you still ignore the fact that a bow wave of particles being pushed TOWARD you at considerable velocity is going to be easier to detect than a bunch of particles being shot out in some random direction away from you.

Totally ignoring heat for now and focusing on the ion trails instead, this is my thought process:

Ship A can easily detect ion trails
Ship B is cloaked
Ship A cannot find ship B's ion trail... so maybe there isn't one?

I find that logical, but please Mr. Wong, tell me how it isn't, enlighten me!

Your first premise is like saying "I can detect a silenced gunshot if it hits me in the balls, therefore I can detect all silenced gunshots". Moron.

[Darth Wong]

Where does the heat generated by a cloaked starship go ?

There are all sorts of possibilities.

If they have very effective technology for moving heat around (ie, cooling systems) perhaps they simply transfer most of the waste heat into some small quantity of matter and then dump the extremely hot matter into subspace.

When have they been able to do a one-way dump of matter into "subspace", as opposed to transient suspension? And why wouldn't ships equipped with subspace sensors detect this? I already addressed this trek-wanker idea before, with no response. Learn to fucking read.

[Uraniun235]

What the hell is a "spatial charge"?

The writers probably intended it to be an analog to blue-water depth charges.

Beyond that, just another technobabble weapon.

[nasor]

Hummm mini blackholes radiate via Hawking radiation and are actually blackbody heat source. According to the size of the Mini blackhole determines the rate of radiation, but for one with even the mass of the earth the amount of energy given off would fried the ship from the inside.

Ones the size of proton decay so rapidly that their existant would be measured in picaoseconds.

Since the Romulans are stated to use small black holes for power sources, presumably they have a way to control their rate of decay.

[omegaLancer]

Hummm mini blackholes radiate via Hawking radiation and are actually blackbody heat source. According to the size of the Mini blackhole determines the rate of radiation, but for one with even the mass of the earth the amount of energy given off would fried the ship from the inside.

Ones the size of proton decay so rapidly that their existant would be measured in picaoseconds.

Since the Romulans are stated to use small black holes for power sources, presumably they have a way to control their rate of decay.

notice that it a power source? it generating power and Heat....

[nasor]

notice that it a power source? it generating power and Heat....

Right – but the Romulans are apparently able to control the rate at which black holes decay, since they can presumably control the output of their power sources. If they can control the rate of decay, perhaps they can dump excess ‘hot’ matter into a small black hole and turn its rate of evaporation down to nearly zero.

[SCVN 2812]

I seem to recall from a TNG episode with Troi aboard a Romulan ship that the Romulans do generate waste heat but it is retained temporarily while cloaked. They do have to dump it periodically and while they are doing it they are more easily detected.

Theoretically cloaked ships could be able to minimize but not entirely eliminate the threat of detection from engine exhaust by making Newton their friend and allowing their own momentum to do most of the work, using shorter, controled bursts from their engines for acceleration and maneuvering. This would not work very well for very long if the ship were to need to accelerate very rapidly or make some major maneuvers that can't be pulled off by the maneuvering thrusters which while also having emissions of their own would not create as large a trail to follow as the impulse engines.

This I think is actually reflected in the tactics used by the Klingons and Romulans in the 24th century. They use the cloaking device to give themselves the ability to choose the exact moment of engagement, to put themselves in optimum firing position and to get the all important first shot which if the first two steps were followed well, could be a crippling blow or at least damaging enough that in the following melee the decloaking ship has the upper hand.

As opposed to using it tactically, moving in under cloak, decloaking and attacking quickly then cloaking again and repositioning for another attack run ala the Romulan Bird of Prey in TOS and Chang in ST: VI minus the decloaking. The only time that I can recall that we saw the Klingons use this tactic was in their raid on a Federation convoy in DS9 where there would be plenty of engine emissions around from the Klingons maneuvering for their attack runs under cloak, the Defiant taking evasive action and trying to protect the freighters and the freighters themselves taking evasive action.

[Patrick Degan]

Hummm mini blackholes radiate via Hawking radiation and are actually blackbody heat source. According to the size of the Mini blackhole determines the rate of radiation, but for one with even the mass of the earth the amount of energy given off would fried the ship from the inside.

Ones the size of proton decay so rapidly that their existant would be measured in picaoseconds.

Since the Romulans are stated to use small black holes for power sources, presumably they have a way to control their rate of decay.

There is no way to "control" the decay of a black hole; the process is a fundamental function of its mass and radiation. That's sort of like suggesting that you can throttle the output of the sun.

[drachefly]

But you can pour matter in at the same rate as it is being decayed away, thus maintaining the mass of the BH. This of course does have the disadvantage of rapidly increasing the entropy of the matter outside the hole.

[Darth Wong]

But you can pour matter in at the same rate as it is being decayed away, thus maintaining the mass of the BH. This of course does have the disadvantage of rapidly increasing the entropy of the matter outside the hole.

Since the rate of evapouration increases with decreasing size of black hole, and we know the black hole to be very small (otherwise it would create such large gravity that it would be almost impossible for the cloaked ship to avoid detection), you would have to pour in matter at an enormous rate, and simultaneously deal with the resultant uncontrollable energy production somehow. You would be incapable of increasing or decreasing the power output of the reactor core; it would be a fixed value, and if your ship wasn't using it, you would have to be dumping it constantly.