Stealth in Space Warfare | Expanse Lore

How does stealth really affect how war will fought in the Expanse, and is it really the holy grail some claim it to be?
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[@christophergroenewald5847]

I think when people think of sifi stealth ships. The ships that often come to mind are the Amun-Ra from the Expanse and the Normandy from Mass effect. They are the 2 best examples of stealth technology done right The Systems Alliance Space Vehicle Normandy Stealth Reconnaissance 1(SSV Normandy SR1) was an experimental stealth frigate. It actually had a stealth system similar to the Amun-Ra, in the form of the Internal Emissions Sink(IES) stealth system which consisted of 3 parts: It had lithium heat sinks built into the ships hull that could store its excess heat In Mass effect, ships fly by using a mass effect core that uses mass effect fields to increase or decrease the ship's mass. The Normandy had a unique design called the Tantalus drive. Proportionally it was double the size of a standard core, making the Normandy the fastest ship in its class and it also gave it a unique ability. The Tantalus could create mass concentrations that the ship could "fall into". From an inside perspective it appeared as if the ship was in free fall but from the outside the ship appeared to be flying without thrusters. This meant that there was no heat or light coming from the ship's thrusters during flight The final part was the hull. In mass effect, battles are rarely ever faught within visual range, as such the ship doesn't need to blend in like the Amun-Ra, but what it does have is active hull refrigeration. With the IES, the ship can fly undetected for hours or drift passively for days. The only flaw is that the ship can't use FTL. Cranking up the FTL blue-shift's the ship's emissions, pushing them in to frequencies too high to capture, as such jumping to FTL is like setting off a flare. The Normandy can be tracked every time it entered or exited FTL but for Sublight, its invisible. The Normandy SR1 was so useful that it sparked creation of an entire line of Normandy class stealth frigates and even a predecessor, the Normandy SR2. The SR2 was nearly twice the original size but had a core that was 3 times bigger. This made it the fastest ship ever built and solved its FTL problem

[@aguilacahc000]

Can't wait for *season* *5*

[@JoaoSoares-rs6ec]

Most military commanders agree that stealth in the expanse is the most realistic of all

[@Aniket2712]

Expanse it’s self is the the most realistic SCI-FI

[@infrestitucho8721]

@@Aniket2712 if we Remove the Alien Stuff (Protmolecule) then Yeah it will be one of the most Realistic Space Operas.

[@Aniket2712]

@@infrestitucho8721 still better that star trek & star wars

[@TheRogueX]

@@patrickhenry1249 If you shunted heat into internal heat sinks and flooded the hull plates with liquid helium you could *temporarily* hide your heat signature. But not for very long.

[@j-twd930]

@@TheRogueX You would still run into the issue that you would be on the same orbital path as before and people tracking you could just easily extrapolate your future location based on your earlier path. Using thrusters to change directions won't work either, because once you fire one at any time, you will immediately put out a very hot heat signature and from the exhaust plume, the enemy could track your new path as well

[@noahcederlund7660]

I really like the new style Keep up the good work

[@brooklyn560]

Glad to see your channel growing

[@FirstPassOfficial]

It took it long enough, but I’m happy with the progress all the same lol

[@stalwartteakettlepotato9879]

Have you considerd looking at ships from "Legend of the galactic heroes". It's a really good space opera anime and the ships in it have a really nice design. I find it to be a good combination of industrial and practical disgine with enough artistic freedom to make the ships still look sleek and distinctive from one another. The only problem is that there isn't much lore or explanation given about them.

[@danielpoirier868]

Nice video, though there scientific inaccuracies concerning stealth. Now, while I could be 'that guy' and tell everything wrong about the video; instead, I'll direct you to the excellent blogsite ToughSF which has several posts discussing this very topic. And on that note, keep up the good content! This channel has potential.

[@tedarcher9120]

I was looking for this video, nice

[@mack643]

cool video

[@JeanLucCaptain]

Hey Yarrick, did Gazskull ever use stealth on you?

[@GG-si7fw]

I look at current tech used in autonomous driving vehicles. LiDAR is good for range detection but cameras is the eye in the details. A LiDAR can tell you that there is a hexagonal sign but you needs cameras, which can tell if a shape is hexagonal too but read the word 🛑. I would figure that the military and astronomical cameras in the Expanse is really advanced and could see the stealth ship from a distance away. Remember, the cameras can see beyond our vision in spectrum and distance. The supercomputer that these ships use, can see 360 degrees at the same time, does not need a break, use bathrooms, eat, etc. the quantum computers in the expanse would be able to process images at an incomprehensible rate compared to today supercomputers.

[@koiyujo1543]

You can actually counter LiDAR with painting a ships outer hull black like vantablack, blackest black, or super black would be able to absorb a lot by over 99.96 or something or more percent of light but it really depends, if I were to do what the expanse did is very accurate like cooling your outer ships hull with cryogenics like liquid nitrogen or helium and by also keeping your ship insolated and having retractable turrets like the zumwalt class or something like that is a good example and heat sinks are very useful but also having your fuels to be used to cool your engines exhaust and nozzles with something like liquid cooled metallic hydrogen and liquid helium or something and be used to cool them and cool critical components is very useful like how the SR 71 did and if it simply got too hot it would go to the fusion reactors/engines for combustion now there are two ways to power your engines one is using a tokamak reactor and sending the plasma it makes down through magnetic conducting pipe into the engines or the engines themselves could have the same thing in the engine itself without using pipes and such to be sent down to the engines and can basically be done in a chamber that's the engine itself and be send down in a very short path out the nozzles or do all both but it depends I think also AI would monitor most of the systems but still have a crew sense they are there to monitor and keep track of the systems but only have like a small crew like the zumwalt does. But either way there are tons of ways to detect a ship and the stealthily way to do it is use passive systems when under silent running including the ship's engines could be aerospike and linear aerospike engines to reduce the amount of fuel needed while also having the same amount of thrust but have problems with heating up issues and such could be solved, but then again I think also it being able to have stuff like cold gas thrusters and things like that would be useful sense it doesn't use hot plasma or anything but has very weak acceleration and thrust. Anyway I think there are many ways to design a ship in a way to be stealthily enough to not be seen for thousands to tens of thousands of kilometers before detection and making the ship out of a lot of non metal material could also reduce that like graphene is a good example.

[@GG-si7fw]

@@koiyujo1543 good point but the ships in the expanse are metallic as to weld repairs and so the crew can walk around on the outside with magnetic boots. The heat sink soaking the heat vs internal volume of ship ratio ratio would be high as to the amount of energy to fly as fast as they do would leave a heat signsture while ducting the heat off the the ship. It's like using James Webb telescope for cqb in just visually looking for cloaked ships. I know about vanta black as BMW is using it.

[@koiyujo1543]

@@GG-si7fw exactly but I've been studying a ton of ways to prevent heat built-up while also reducing the produce of it and everything else, the website atomic rockets explains this amazingly well and I know infrared radiation would be a bit of a problem as well, but being able to cool your engines while also dealing with heat is complicated however atomic rockets explains that there are very efficient and massive amounts of energy stored in heat, for example sense the ship's engine nozzles are thousands of degrees we need cryogenics to cool them but that would take megawatts of electricity if the stealth ship were 2200 something foot long with a 60-120 crew, we could use the heat generated from the ship's engines run them through a type of process of I forgot what it was called but atomic rocket explains that using the engines heat and thrust itself as a way to generate megawatts of electricity is very plentiful and could be used for cooling critical components now of course the expanse needed stuff in the series for crews deck floors to be magnetic for there mag boots to even work which is a problem because if you can't completely get rid or lower the magnetic signatures on a ship than its more likely being able to be detected however there are technologies which could possibly over come that problem which we could use eletromagtizem or something I think it was that allows you to use electricity to turn on and off magnetic fields or power in certain materials which could be useful for when not underway and not under trust as well as running in stealth running, but I don't remember if that's what it is or not sense I know I've heard or it but I know you can run electricity through certain materials to make them magnetic and then they would work but idk of that's what I'm thinking is a real thing or not but if it is than that also means Cosuming power as well

[@koiyujo1543]

Let's not also forget that yes ship could leave behind a heat trail or whatever if that's what your saying and that it's also difficult to prevent heat built-up and producing heat in the first place is challenging so insolated hulls and such with high performance materials is very important but it would be difficult how I myself can get around that sense I know rn it's hard for me to fully understand everything I can for my future sci fi series

[@tedarcher9120]

I don't think that sensor jamming will help much while maneuvering. What could help is burning enemy scopes with a super -powerful laser

[@auxencefromont1989]

If you know where the enemy scope is they probably kniw where you are though

[@tedarcher9120]

@@auxencefromont1989 but they won't anymore

[@auxencefromont1989]

@@tedarcher9120 fair

[@JeanLucCaptain]

be interesting to talk about UNSC Prowler type stealth ships

[@brooklyn560]

Good stuff

[@uchiha_murilo3148]

wide vs tall basically stellaris

[@auxencefromont1989]

Would a RCS course correction break stealth ?

[@auxencefromont1989]

Also during space battle, why are pdc fired into a predicatble stream insteead of a shotgun like cone to avoid evasion ?

[@FirstPassOfficial]

To answer the first question, RCS course correction wouldn’t be easily detectible, as shown by Alex when he piloted the Roci through Jupiters moons to give the crew a stealthy pick up, he used only RCS thrust and gravity slingshots. Realistically, the colder the thruster the better, as it needs to be closer to match the ambient background radiation. Second question, point defense weapons need to lead the target to try to land a hit, so as the guns tries to fire in the path of missile or ship, it stays pretty confined. A shotgun system would could work, but be better on a larger dedicated flechette munition.

[@jeffreyr4560]

@@auxencefromont1989 I would say that the reason for these streams of fire is the fact that you can fire thousands of rounds per minute, and that with the highly advanced targeting computers of the MCRN's Nariman PDC, these bursts of fire are a better alternative to a shotgun style weapon which would likely have lower muzzle velocity and would also lack the high rate of fire which I believe is probably more effective.

[@MilkT0ast]

:)