Timeline for Stealth in Space: How realistic is it?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 18, 2023 at 0:22 | comment | added | cthon | So how does Parker's heat shield work? | |
| Nov 14, 2020 at 21:50 | comment | added | Christopher King | Any estimate of how hot the radiator would need to be? Pretty hot, right? | |
| Sep 16, 2020 at 17:55 | comment | added | Keith Morrison | @AlexI, now do the math. That heat absorbed by the mirror accumulates, as for metal mirrors their heat capacity increases and reflectivity decreases as their temperature goes up. As you warm the metal mirror with that trivial 1% of the energy it doesn't reflect or transmit is going to increase: the amount of heat that it allows to go through and the amount it reflects goes down. The less it reflects and the less it passes increases its temperature, which decreases the amount it reflects and passes, which increases its temperature, which decreases the amount it reflects and passes, which... | |
| Sep 1, 2020 at 19:35 | comment | added | cowlinator | It seems like if you have the ability to create these ships, you would also have the ability to detect the portion of the IR beam that gets reflected off of ubiquitous dust and gas. | |
| Jan 24, 2018 at 15:39 | comment | added | Alex I | @KeithMorrison Also, nothing in principle prevents the construction of a mirror stack, it just has to be done so the path of IR reflected by each successive mirror (mostly) misses the earlier mirrors in the stack. The only limit on the performance of a system like that is the weight/size of the mirror array that can be used. Picture parabolic reflector collimators like this static.wixstatic.com/media/… only nested so each one is at the focus of the (much larger) next one | |
| Jan 24, 2018 at 15:36 | comment | added | Alex I | @KeithMorrison Consider mirrors. In a very simple 1D example, an omnidrectional point IR source with a 98% reflective mirror immediately to one side of it will radiate 99.5% in one direction and 0.5% in the other direction. (50% hits the mirror and is reflected, 1% is absorbed by it, 0.5% of that is re-emitted behind the mirror). For metal mirrors 98% seems very possible. | |
| Jan 24, 2018 at 9:03 | comment | added | Keith Morrison | Heat doesn't work that way. The narrower the angle you want to emit the heat, the more heat you are attempting to release hits its own radiator, which makes the radiator hotter, which increases the amount of heat you need to get rid of which makes the radiator hotter which increases the amount of heat you need to get rid of which hits the radiator... | |
| Aug 26, 2015 at 18:39 | history | edited | Alex I | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 41 characters in body
|
| Aug 26, 2015 at 11:41 | comment | added | Falco | Exactly this - I also don't see why you can't dump heat and exhaust in one direction.... Sure you don't know where the enemy is, but as long as he isn't exactly in that direction, you are safe! The trusters could also fire particles with lightspeed. There are not many particles to react with in the near vaccum of space, so this concentrated particle beam will be hard to detect from another angle... | |
| Aug 26, 2015 at 10:07 | review | First posts | |||
| Aug 26, 2015 at 10:50 | |||||
| Aug 26, 2015 at 10:02 | history | answered | Alex I | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
