Maintaining the element of surprise on a featureless plane?

Question

I've been toying with this idea for a while now, it's by no means fleshed out yet but here we go:

So there's this featureless white plane. It stretches on infinitely in every dimension and is made of an unbreakable, impenetrable material. Situated above this is an equally large ceiling with a massive, gaping hole in it that almost reaches the horizon. No matter how high you go the ceiling never gets any closer, and no matter how far away you run the hole's always perfectly above you. This basically means that without another object to compare to there's no real sense of direction or distance.

Good thing there's objects, then! Random things, from teddy bears to oak trees to alien moons, randomly fall out of the hole and land in random locations around this world. They're pretty spaced out, though, and after some time left untouched "melt" back into the floor so there's always lots of empty space. Sometimes animals (some from Earth, some not) fall down too, and while most perish the humans and aliens that live tend to band together and form massive forts made of salvaged material. Since there's no curvature or landmarks to cover your view, these exist in plain view and everyone miles around can see their activities.

Finally onto the question: Let's say one of these forts wanted to attack their neighbor. They want to send an army to invade, however, the enemy would plainly be able to see the approaching soldiers against the white and prepare accordingly. If they theoretically had infinite resources of all types from the hole, and all the time in the world to prepare, what can they set up to hide their army's location or otherwise maintain surprise?

Answer 1

Camouflage against the planes

Every now and then white sheets fall down. These are conveniently the same exact colour as the plane, and the uniform lighting makes it hard to spot the horizon - which is uniformly white.

You might look like that halloween when everyone dressed as a ghost, or a KKK march, but they will struggle to see you.

Trojan horse

Conveniently a large hollow horse will spawn at some point, as well as some gold paint, a giant bow, and Hallmark "Sorry we were at war. Hugs?" card. Put your soldiers inside it, and offer it to the enemy as a surrender gift.

Camouflage against settling newly spawned objects.

The world is filled with random movement, objects randomly spawn and fall, and when they fall, they will take time to settle. When a giant, mobile object (I'm thinking big inflatable toys) arrives, stockpile it, and connect it to a big stick thing so you can manipulate it without having to show hands. When you wish to attack, move the random objects towards to fort with your men behind.

Wait till better weapons arrive.

Sit back in your fort talking peace and being all diplomatic, while your scouts are out searching the world for the best weapons. Eventually something that falls down will be an epic weapon - be it a pallet of sniper rifles or cruise missiles.

Bright lights.

Rather than hide in the dark, hide behind light. Like a cop holding a torch towards someone at eyeline so they can't identify them, you can overwhelm their eyes with bright lights.

Just wait for some very powerful floodlights to arrive. Or powerful laser pointers. Or a sun.

Distraction.

A nice pallet of fireworks arrived. Lug them over to the far side of the enemy camp, and start them on a timer. As the show is going, and all your enemy are watching the pretty fireworks, march in.

Don't - spread out and let the spawn process wipe them out

The impact of an occasional moon into the plane will be very energetic and destructive. So spread out - try to take fortifications far away from each other. Eventually, something nasty will randomly spawn (a moon, a bomb with 10 seconds left, a fragile canister with a nasty plaque in it, asbestos, a chemical which sucks oxygen out of the nearby air, etc), and the more surface area you have for your forts, the less likely you are to be totally wiped out.

Answer 2

One word: Mirrors

Angled correctly, and assuming the random stuff laying around really is spaced very wide, a mirror will hide a (small) force from prying eyes at ground level.

They used this trick in the movie "Now you see me", but I can't find a good video of it.

Answer 3

I'm assuming a low-tech environment, because "featureless white plain running into infinity" seems like a poor starting place for a high-tech society. This still WORKS with modern/futuristic tech, it's just easier if we're talking 1800s or earlier tech level.

The basic problem here is that the enemy can see you coming, but only the front of your formation without any elevation change it becomes insanely hard to figure out just what's going on behind a group of people/things. For example, I've been to the Pennsic war, where thousands of people from the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) get together and beat each other with padded weapons. I've seen forces outflanked and beaten because a second enemy formation was "hiding" behind the troops you could see. With no elevation change, three rows of humans makes the stuff behind them near-invisible to other humans!

All it takes is a group of people coming along the normal trade route who look like merchants, and they can screen an entire army behind them. The flat plain allows for no dust, so you can't even get a sense of how many people are behind the first few wagons/men. Add in some sheets or banners and the enemy is even more in the dark. If the enemy has watchtowers that does make life harder, but something as simple as "painting your helmets/shoulders the same color as the ground" can be remarkably effective until you troop are fairly close.

Answer 4

Collections of stuff.

New objects, untouched, melt back into the surface. But these forts persist as do the people. I take that objects that have had some sort of intelligent interaction persist. The humans themselves do.

Your humans collect everything and bring it to caches. That stuff is the raw material they have to work with and you never know when something might be useful. The caches mile up. Maybe there are collections of animals in improvised pens as well. These humans have to be eating something and it does not sound like they will be farming.

Your soldiers are disguised as salvage parties, going out to collect items to bring back for the caches. They fan out in all directions. It is not really a disguise because this is in fact how these individuals actually occupy themselves day to day so there is nothing suspicious about them doing it on this particular day. On battle day, they converge on their target when there is a signal.

Answer 5

If you're allowing borderline science fiction material, active camouflage methods might be perfect for your needs. There's a few various accepted methods on handling it, involving wrapping light around objects or something as basic as projecting the scene behind the object you want to hide on top of it, depending on how science fiction you want to get with it. So you could in theory do something as basic as using displays with 'faked lighting' to hide their shadows to something as advanced as true active camouflage like you see in the Halo series or like the Predator Aliens use in movies if you're familiar with either. The fundamental idea is to cloak yourself by making an optical illusion facing the intended viewer, more advanced options allowing for more flexibility in the angles you can hide yourself in. (IE fooling multiple targets instead of a few that happen to be facing it)

Basically it can be as basic as a big screen with a camera on the other side intended to fool people to something advanced enough to simply bend light around your object in question, hiding it. The drawbacks for using advanced camouflage usually involves something like increased heat generation or something like that, at least in Halo's universe.

It can also be a slower kind of active camouflage like SPI armor camouflage in Halo or Octocamo from metal gear, where the surface reacts to whatever you're standing on to perfectly match it(SPI)/match the general texture(Octocamo) as long as you stay still, being much less useful if you happen to be moving. Basically, it could be jerry-rigged from modern materials or you could have someone with the knowhow to be making true 'active camouflage' devices or something along that line.

Also for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking_device

Some good material on known methods of 'camouflage devices'.

Aside from that, if the stuff that falls down doesn't always fade away immediately, could enough fall to make actual terrain occasionally? If one could predict or react to that in enough time, you could in theory use it as terrain to hide yourself. I'm pretty sure a moon falling would likely leave a very large pile of debris, considering the mass and size of it.