There were two sentences out of dozens in that post that I actually wrote.
They are a direct quote from you. If you disagree with them then you should not have posted them.
It's like the terracotta army, except straw men.
You are disagreeing that a ship needs reaction mass? So you are postulating a reactionless drive.
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 ...
The distance from the Earth to Mars is about 200 million kilometers.
Your example ship would be closer than Mars is. A lot closer.
... 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?
There is a reflector on the Moon. People aim lasers at that reflector. Those lasers diffuse over distance. "At the Moon's surface, the beam is about 6.5 kilometers (four miles) wide ..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
That's from the Earth to the Moon. So even if you could focus the reaction mass a tightly as a laser it would spread out over a lot more than "a several kilometer wide umbrella" would cover even if you were only as far away as Mars.
Your example ship would be a dark shielded spot in a glowing cloud of its own exhaust.
It would look like a bullseye.
Our equipment can't even pick up large asteroids before they're a few days away.
Yes it can. It does that all the time. You are confusing spotting them with projecting their course over time.
No, as another poster memorably put it ...
Quoting someone else who is not disproving it is not the same as disproving it.
It is physics. Unless you want to argue that the laws of physics do not apply ...
It doesn't magically shine through the ship like a lighthouse.
No one said it did. I've been saying that it forms a cloud behind the ship. And that cloud glows.
Nope. I'm claiming it can be hidden across much shorter distances under circumstances which are broad enough to be tactically useful.
Unless you're talking about being closer than Mars ... how did it get closer to Mars without being detected?
Yes, that heat the article that you steadfastly refuse to address, addresses.
Saying that the answer is somewhere else is not addressing my point. Quote it. Like I quoted the Wikipedia article on how much the lasers diffuse between the Earth and the Moon.
You're not a humanities guy by any chance?
Just someone with a background in physics.
I mean do you have any clue how small of a profile we're talking about here at these kinds of distances?
You are now talking about a distance less than the distance between the Earth and Mars. So something blocking out part of Mars would be very noticeable. Not to mention the Sun would be reflecting off of it. And that's not even addressing the interplanetary material that you had previously discounted.
Interplanetary != interstellar.
kilometers 350,000 is about Earth to the Moon
kilometers 200,000,000 is about Earth to Mars
kilometers 39,900,000,000,000 is about Earth to Alpha Centauri
There is no stealth in space.