Cynthia brought up the issue of installing sensors on ships.
Well, I'd guess that there outta be a limit on the number of sensors
installed on a ship, but once you've hit 100 tons, you are going to be
able to pack on just about as much as you want.
Densiometers and neutrino sensors will work through the hull, so they
don't need external mounts. Some might say that a densiometer might get
some attenuation due to the fact that it if it is inside a hull, it has
to look through the hull metal, and there is the issue of the artificial
grav stuff.
I would say that a densiometer would be calibrated to ignore the
effects of the hull it was in. Rather like an aircraft compass has to
be corrected to take the metal in the plane and it's electronics into
account. Sure, it's not quite as simple, but the computers should take
care of that with no trouble at all.
I've heard folks say that superdense hulls produce a neutrino
shadow. I say this is garbage. A neutrino can pass through the entire
mass of the earth without any trouble. If superdense was THAT tough,
then you can forget it ever getting scratched by something as puny as a
250Mw laser.
But then we have the EMS band stuff. Yup, that's gotta have external
mounts. But look at the size of the stuff in the design tables. It's
pretty small. Sounds like the emmitters and recievers are spread out in
small spots over the entire hull. That would give you a larger area for
your antenna, so you can pick up better signal. When you've got the
surface area of a 100 ton ship or so to put it on, I think you've got
plenty of area.
A question *I* have been thinking over recently is the utility of
EMS-Jamming. Virtually all ships that have an active EMS to jam also
have a passive EMS system.
Ok, scenerio. Craft A makes an active scan of craft B. Craft B doesn't
particularly like this and turns on the EMS-Jammer. Craft A then gets
an automatic lock on Craft B by their passive EMS. So, just how useful
is the Jammer?
Ah! What about Jamming the active sensors on incoming missiles? Well
the missiles got home on jam stuff too! (The TL 8 AIM-54 Pheonix has
home on Jam capablity.)
I was trying to figure out how you might use the jammer to fool both,
but I know very little about Electronic (Counter)^3 Measures. My first
thought was that perhaps 2 jammers working in concert could make things
rough on the Passive EMS systems. However it sounds that this is not
really the case.
Anybody got any ideas how to make the EMS-Jammer a useful object?
Scott Kellogg
BTW, there are TWO G's in Kellogg. Come on, Cynthia, you see it on your
breakfast table every morning! :-)