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I read somewhere that this was a source for the excellent world building in The Expanse and also later seasons of For All Mankind. (Personal fan theory: For All
by api 3y ago
I read somewhere that this was a source for the excellent world building in The Expanse and also later seasons of For All Mankind. (Personal fan theory: For All Mankind is the unofficial prequel to The Expanse.)
The Expanse plays artistic license a little though with stealth. Even with the drive off you’d have to shut down pretty much everything to have stealth in space. Anything using energy lights up in the infrared due to the second law. Also those big fusion rockets would stay hot as hell for a long time after being shut off, so even if you tried to go cold you’d probably have to wait weeks after using the drive to have much chance of hiding.
- ben_w 3y ago> stealth in space Absolute stealth isn't possible, because infra-red and thermodynamics, but IIRC being indistinguishable from the noise is fairly plausible — so long as you have a direction you're confident you can beam the excess heat in with a laser or something similar (if you're wrong and there is a sensor that way, you show up like an even bigger sore thumb).
- api 3y agoThe problem with that idea is that waste energy is by definition high entropy, so it's hard to get it all to go in one direction. It's conceivable that you could spend additional energy to pump it one way, such as having an active heat pumped shield between you and the direction you think your observers will be looking from.
- ben_w 3y agoYes indeed, this requires a substantial use of power to maintain the illusion, and the illusion only works from some directions. But that's probably fine in practice, especially in fiction like The Expanse where everyone has so much fusion power at their disposal that they can waste it on gravity-by-accelerating-the-entire-ship.