Can I detect one ship arriving in an otherwise abandoned solar system?
My setting is more Space Opera than science based, but I am attempting to keep a consistent set of rules for space travel. I'll try to narrow down my question to a "lowest denominator" for the benefit of Worldbuilding"“SE.
In an otherwise unpopulated solar system, can I detect the arrival of another spaceship? I'll have a variety of engine types in my story, but I'll omit their specifics for this question and ask that you imagine "common" sci-fi tropes.
My constraints are:
- Detection within the solar system only (in Star Trek they inconsistently "scan" ships that are light years away in other star systems. That seems ridiculous even for space opera)
- All engines are "noisy". There is no special stealth technology. This one is braking from FTL and probably the noisiest it will get. Decelerating from interstellar speed to in-system speed takes days from the point of view of the traveling ship, longer from the point of view of an outside observer. (Traveling star-to-star takes weeks, if not months).
- Ships range in size from cargo freighters to battleships. Compare roughly to modern ocean ships plus space engines. (The ship I need to detect is a military destroyer, not enormous like a colony ship, but large engines and heavy armor)
- The "listening" ship is in the inner solar system orbiting the star. I have made no decisions about the composition of the solar system other than it is uninhabited.
- The scenario is a one-on-one showdown between two ships. The "listener" has arrived early and is actively attempting to detect the other ship.
As you see, I am aiming for making it easy but I leave the method of detection open. I realize that asking if something is "possible" in Space Opera isn't a valid question, but what method(s) can I use to detect the ship?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83333. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I'd say yes; in the scenario the listening ship can set up sensors that are literally miles long; like the gravity wave sensors that have recently made headlines.
Think, as an analogy, about motion detectors used in alarm systems: They have a pattern of data they are sensing, the electronics are very simple and do not "interpret" this pattern to figure out what it means: The key is they can detect if it changed, and that sets off an alarm. Your waiting ship needs to do something similar; say with gravity waves, radio waves or just plain light (including infrared, or red shift (different if something starts moving fast), etc. Once you know something is different, you can narrow down precisely where it is different with more effort or analysis.
So your listening ship can deploy a few dozen relatively inexpensive sensors in the sphere of concern; covering all sides of the sun and planets so nothing can use them for cover coming in; and those that detect change can help pinpoint the general direction and distance of a disturbance, then you can train the big telescopes on that vector.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads