Ha, yeah right. This has been the wet dream of the MBA since computers were first commercialised. Never going to happen, or at least not this century, there's a world of difference between development and tech support.

Herre's an octopus bringing people a present: http://youtu.be/FjQr3lRACPI

Explain this then: http://youtu.be/FjQr3lRACPI

Funny thing about luck is, the harder I work the luckier I get.

I don't really see the percentage in making something too spicy, I mean why not just eat the spices alone, you'll get the same flavour. On a related note I know a Thai woman who does exactly that, even keeps a box of antacids on hand while doing so.

And you have some religious objections to businesses or what? If you can find anything factually wrong in that article by all means point it out to me and we'll all have a good laugh about it.

They are also very, very small. A boulder heated white hot will take a great deal of time to cool off, a spark spat from a fireplace, not so much. And let's not forget this is being pushed extremely hard away from the observer.

Actually I was postulating three kilometers in radius but honestly on reflection a few hundred meters would probably do it.

Indeed, no arguments there. However this being space a savvy captain would simply burn for a while then let it cool off while he coasts, before changing the attitude of the ship to the new heading and burning again. Also keep in mind that the further away they are the more leeway they can allow in active course changes - ie the more particles they can let slip past the shroud.

At one million kilometers a six kilometer wide shiled will occlude about one eighth of the space that Venus does at its farthest from earth. That's the size of possibly actively cooled forward profile you're trying to detect, and if you're trying to detect it on a ship you're moving very fast while doing so. One million kilometers isn't all that far in space, depending on relative velocities ships could get to within fighting range in hours or days, perhaps even less. A mass driver could pump out a cold missile at extreme velocities to coast right next to a target before igniting from a million kilometers.

As another poster mentioned, such equipment doesn't tend to respond well to g-force if mounted on a ship. But okay let's run with it.

Ah now you're making assumptions about the environment, that the future consists of a tranquil hegemony of polities throughout the system, or that any putative conflict would even take place within such a system. Or that your fragile monitoring arrays won't themselves become targets in a co-ordinated attack, by their nature they need to remain relatively fixed.

Allow me to postulate a different but equally likely scenario.

Many different polities, on earth and in space, with varying relationships to one another, some cordial, some not so much. There may be corporate states involved, whatever. The interior of the system is well covered by surveillance networks but the exterior not so much, for political and physical reasons. Our space pirate heads off for the outer colonies, all well and good so far, then keeps coasting to a patchily covered location. They extend stealth shrouds, flip, and burn hard for the nearest cargo route, shutting off their engines in time to cool to background levels before they return to coverage.

The shrouds might also act to to deter active scanning. The ship itself goes into stealth mode, all non essential systems shut down, the crew are relegated to a sedentary lifestyle that many modern gamers would be familiar with. In extreme stealth mode they might even be refrigerated, which would allow the ship to cost for far longer time periods.

Once close enough to a trade lane, the pirate ship wakes up, lights up, and takes on the nearest freighter. Due to the distances involved help might be days or weeks coming. Alternately merchant ships could be heavily armed or have escorts, which leads to epic space battles. Taking the loot the pirate burns hard for the safety of the outer reaches where there's no surveillance looking in, or very little, and changes course in the emptiness, becoming once again invisible and annoymous.

I'm not saying it would be a situation which could last for long any more than the age of piracy did on earth, but it's definetely possible.

How does that make it any less effective than all the rest of the imperfect engineering (which is all of it)?

See above.

Because one is literally tinfoil and the other is fragile optics and electronics?

Okay well your anecdotal buddy should probably read this: http://www.businessinsider.com...

I say otherwise.

The hard fact here is that project rho is a scattered collection of out of context quotes, falsehoods and flat out glaring mistakes. Like in the laser weapons page, he says you don't need multiple laser turrets, you just need to channel your laser down a central tube and guide it with mirrors. Then a few paragraphs later he says you can't deflect lasers with mirrors because they'll burn out. In the x-ray lasers page he was caught out in saying there was no such thing as x-ray lenses - there are. And yet further down the same page he's still talking about the implications of a lack of x-ray lenses.

Have you seriously looked up the guy behind that? He ain't no scientist and there's precious little science on his page.

Eh at this point it's become painfully apparent that a) you wouldn't know the laws of physics if they bit you on the ass and b) there's something clearly wrong with you.

So, good luck with that.

Great yeah http://www.businessinsider.com...

There was no "them", only one point.

This is remarkable. You were the one who started banging on about interstellar distances (and then interplanetary for some mysterious reason), not me.

Not in the least, I'm arguing that the heat from the exhaust would have reached negligible levels by the time whatever miniscule amount of it got around the shield, mostly due to the vast majority of it being blocked by the ship and being blasted directly backwards. And as another poster pointed out to you, the exhaust isn't nearly as hot as some might imagine. In fact I was being wildly generous with a 3 kilometer radius shield, in all probability a few hundred meters would do just fine. And even at 6km across, at 1 million kilometers distance it wouldn't be visible to the naked eye if it was a speck of dust on the fingertip. Do you understand this?

Whatever background in physics you might have had, it's a pretty small angle of the sky by now, I would say.

And yet again nobody is talking about going from Earth to Mars except yourself. Not that that would be especially difficult mind you.

The reason I asked if you were a humanities guy is because this comes across as straight from the "how to bullshit convincingly " critical theory handbook, wherein one simply keeps throwing random barely related objections at a fact in the hopes that it goes away, also much favoured by creationists. You continually refuse to address the proper physics in the article that blew project rho out of the water (and having looked over that site there's a whole lot more rubbish in there, even the few bits that have been updated since 2004), and appear to be having some sort of meltdown.

So, good luck with that.

Who said I disagreed with them?

Not that readers need it pointed out, but Mars has mysteriously entered the discussion.

Argh. You're comparing an exhaust, which rapidly cools off in space and generally acts very differently to a laser, to a laser. I don't even know where to start with that one.

Right, yeah: http://www.businessinsider.com...

You keep using that word. It does not mean what you think it means.

jackiechanwtf.jpg

I did. It's up there, in italics, marked 5, Informative, with a link to the full article, my first response to your post.

I seriously have no idea where you're getting this stuff. At 1 million kilometers a ship with a 6km wide umbrella around its midriff would occupy about one eighth of the sky that Venus does when it's at its furthest from earth. That's the size of the dot you're saying is occluding everything behind it. That's the size of the dot with negligible differences from the background you're trying to differentiate.

Oh yes, there is.

There were two sentences out of dozens in that post that I actually wrote. You're ignoring all the others quite deliberately, because they show you're wrong.

It's like the terracotta army, except straw men.

So what you're saying is that from a million plus kilometers away, a ship with a forward profile of maybe a few score meters heading directly towards someone that isn't fixated on that miniscule segment of the sky, with a several kilometer wide umbrella to disguise the exhaust bits that weren't sufficiently collimated before they cool off and become indistinguishable from the background noise, especially at those distances, this ship will stand out like a sore thumb?

And that's before we even start talking about the way you don't need to burn thrusters until you're knocking on your target's door. No drag in space, remember?

Wow.

Our equipment can't even pick up large asteroids before they're a few days away. And they're light coloured infrared emitters moving on predictable tracks at a fairly staid pace compared to the clip our spaceships must be making in order to be useful.

That's right, it doesn't go out the front where the ship is heading. And the reason everyone in the ship isn't cooked to a crisp is because it's going out the back of the ship, away from our putative target. It doesn't magically shine through the ship like a lighthouse. You do understand this, right? Now put that together with the rest of the very simple concepts under discussion and the sun may yet rise.

No, as another poster memorably put it, "it's a painfully mis-organized page of RANTING QUOTES!!! mishandling and misattributing varoius claims." The article I linked to that you steadfastly refuse to address, that's physics.

Nope. I'm claiming it can be hidden across much shorter distances under circumstances which are broad enough to be tactically useful.

Yes, that heat the article that you steadfastly refuse to address, addresses.

You're not a humanities guy by any chance? I mean do you have any clue how small of a profile we're talking about here at these kinds of distances?

No, you're deliberately and obviously ignoring the article.

Actually the problem is you putting words in my mouth and then arguing with those words. The vast majority of the exhaust will be hidden by the ship only as long as it approaches a lone target dead on. The umbrella just gives a few degrees more leeway which decreases the closer you get to your target.

You are aware that insulators and light blockers don't need to increase in mass proportional to the source being blocked right? I mean otherwise you'd need more than four walls and a roof to block sunlight. The linear progression you envisage is grasping - a lot. Not to mention that it doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough to beat the enemy's likewise imperfect sensors long enough to get close enough to strike. Dull radiation is as good as no radiation if the enemy can't tell the difference, and don't forget about the distances under discussion here.

And off we wander down the garden path again.

Okay, so you didn't read the article. Maybe you should get on that.

It's alright to be wrong, you know. Just don't end up like a creationist or a feminist clinging fiercely to disproven articles of faith.

Not in fact a bad idea. Given that there's no shock wave in space and physically directly hitting a moving target like a ship would be all but impossible, one-shot lasers on missiles might just be the way to go.

Unexpected situations like an enemy starship might throw at you, you mean? :D Also I've a deep respect for the value of instinct and experience.