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Q&A

How best to use a celestial body to hide a space station?

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In science fiction secret space stations typically seem to exist inside of a nebula or an asteroid. However it occurs to me that in warfare space stations hidden in nebulae would likely be discovered by enemy scouts. (Intel is key in war, and a conveniently located nebula is the obvious hiding place everyone would scout.)

So my question is if you were looking to hide a secret space station, how would you hide it? Or to be more specific, what celestial body would you hide it in/on/behind?

Edit: In this question I am more interested in what celestial body it would be best to use to hide a space station in. You can assume soft-science teleportation style FTL if you need to in order to reach a specific celestial body, but in this case assume also soft-science detection methods to allow for the searching of vast areas of space.

The general idea is to identify what object would make for the best cover/camouflage, not to simply lose the space station in the vastness of space. (For instance dropping it light years from any solar system, hiding in the emptiness.)

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Behind a star or planet would be a good place; not in orbit but powered to remain behind it from the perspective of some other POV. However, any kind of "behind" implies a single direction or location of viewing. I can easily stay behind the Earth's Moon from the POV of Mars, taking all those orbitals into account: At any given point in time Mars and the Earth's Moon form a line I can be on to put the Moon between me and Mars.

That breaks down if we add Venus to the mix. Generally Venus and Mars are not both on the same line as the Moon, so hiding from one may not hide me from the other. If the enemy has a lot of scouts, hiding behind the star might work, but if they are on all sides of it, even something that big wouldn't work.

A better idea would be a disguise: Disguise the space station as an asteroid (or several of them) in the asteroid belt, or Oort cloud, or as a chunk of rock orbiting a planet like a Moon. Remember in space the disguise is weightless; so it could be an actual shell of rock or asteroid ice, perhaps even manufactured from the asteroids and dust in the belt (or wherever it is hiding); glued or netted together.

An even better approach would be a station that could land on small low-gravity moons and disguise itself as a natural terrain feature.

The strategy is to become a mottled brown needle in a haystack.

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