History Main / StealthInSpace

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* [[http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3t.html#misc This]] little gem:
--> So which one is you, Joey, and which are the aluminum balloons? ('''Seven''' dots grew on the screen, all had slightly different vectors.) Now you know [[FrickinLaserBeams my heater can take you in one flash]] and you also know that one zap is all I'm going to get. And if I take it you've got a perfect excuse to blow me up for the honor of the company rather than recapture valuable property for the accountants. So what's it going to be? I think you shot off too many balloons too early Joey -- cause the other ones aren't making the course correction you just did. Ain't that you, Joe?
--> [[UnusualUserInterface Ulans squinted and tapped his foot.]] (firing guns)

** In an early episode, the Serenity crew ''stumble'' across a derelict spacecraft, not actually detecting it until it's nearly close enough to be seen out the window with the naked eye. While a derelict would be ''cold'' to thermal-infrared sensors, such an object would still reflect light from the local sun and would still show up on radar sweeps. Perhaps they knew ''something'' was there, but guessed that it was a small asteroid until they got close enough to see surface details.

** Nevertheless, the distance at which a spacecraft can be detected seems woefully short. In an early episode, the Serenity crew ''stumble'' across a derelict spacecraft, not actually detecting it until it's nearly close enough to be seen out the window with the naked eye.

** Nevertheless, the distance at which a spacecraft can be detected seems woefully short. In an early episode, the Serenity crew ''stuble'' across a derelict spacecraft, not actually detecting it until it's nearly close enough to be seen out the window with the naked eye.

* ''SwordOfTheStars'' features cloaking devices, which are {{hand wave}}d as a series of counter-sensor arrays and a light-masking system that render ships with a cloaking section undetectable except from ships with deep scan arrays. Unfortunately, it only takes one deep scan ship to detect a whole fleet of cloakers and cloaked ships are extremely expensive and cannot fire while cloaked. Still, cloaked ships can be very devastating in the right situation, especially when used as a first strike against someone who lacks cloak-detecting capability, as cloaked fleets cannot be seen on the tactical map.
** Actually, there is a rare technology that, if researched, allows ships to fire while cloaked. This gives them a tremendous advantage against fleets without deep scan arrays. However, the game's AI is quite adept at spotting where the fire is coming from and shoot at "empty space" (missiles and torpedoes will not lock, though).

** Since they're using PsychicPowers, though, the physics don't apply on the other end, either -- they just prevented ''people'' from noticing their ship using MindControl, which doesn't require fooling instruments or actually masking their heat.

** Since they're using PsychicPowers, though, the physics doesn't apply, either -- they just prevented ''people'' from noticing their ship using MindControl, which doesn't require fooling instruments or actually masking their heat.

* ''SupremeCommander'' has three kinds of counterintelligence: cloaking masks the target from visual detection but is worthless against radars; stealth masks the target from radars but doesn't affect visibility; jamming creates about two dozen false radar signals that disappear from line-of-sight. Omni sensors defeat all three.

** The original example, from "Balance of Terror", was essentially so the show could do a wartime submarine drama InSpace, with the cloak substituting for submersion. The original movie was ''the Enemy Below''(1957) and during the initial contact the dialogue between the ships captain and the sonar man is almost identical to the spaceship allegory, including the initial bearing of the shadowy contact, and the ship's course change to determine whether the contact is genuine or a sensor malfunction.

** The original example, from "Balance of Terror", was essentially so the show could do a wartime submarine drama InSpace, with the cloak substituting for submersion.

* ''{{Starcraft}}'' has cloaking that renders units invisible to the naked eye and to non-specialized sensors. The Terran Wraith and Ghost can cloak temporarily, while the Protoss Observer and Dark Templar are permanently cloaked (they can cloak indefinitely, so they don't bother to put an off-switch into the game). The Protoss Arbiter can cloak other units, but not itself; this tends to strain WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief - who the heck would make a unit that can't cloak itself? Yeah, yeah, gameplay mechanics, we know - but still. Also, almost all Zerg ground units can burrow underground (even if that ground is the hull of a space station), which has the effect of immobile cloaking. The Protoss explain cloaking with psionics and reality warping. The Wraith's cloak is never explained, nor is burrowing.
** actually as I recall it's "AllThereInTheManual" as it's explained that what the Arbiter does is just creates a reality warping field that makes their allies invisible, but to make such a big field it has to anchor itself in space-time making it immune to the fields effect.

** Another method for ships to cloak is to send them 5 seconds into the future. You cannot detect something that is not here yet. It even works with whole planets, as done with earth itself.

--> ''What do you want me to do, stupid, go outside and paint the ship black?''

--> ''Stealthiness in space was a bit like playing hide-and-seek while naked in a brier patch: it could be done, but it was a thorny business that depended upon the fact that nobody would believe you were crazy enough to actually try to pull it off.''
-->-- J. Daniel Sawyer, ''Free Will and Other Compulsions''

Finally, if the concept involves an InvisibilityCloak, there is the fact that expanding it to spaceship size will not eliminate its core problems, covered in more detail at that trope and reproduced in summary here. Long story short, ships will still rely on electromagnetic radiation to find their way around. Remember, sensors shoot some form of electromagnetic radiation at a target, wait until that radiation comes back, and interprets the return to yield data. (Sonar does the same thing, but with sound.) The enemy ship will probably have ''passive'' sensors which will detect your incoming sensor beams; this means that, when you scan him, he'll know you're there, even if he doesn't know where. Of course, ''you'' could turn off your "active" sensors and rely on your passives... But the whole point of an InvisibilityCloak is to ''deflect'' EM radiation away from your ship, meaning your passive sensors won't be ''receiving'' anything, be they your sensor beams, his, radio telemetry from your non-invisible pals, or even just ambient radiation from stars. Long story short, if the InvisibilityCloak is working right and/or according to the laws of physics, he can't see you, but you can't see ''anything''.

!!Examples

[[AC:{{Anime}} and {{Manga}}]]

* Oldina's ship in ''[[{{Figure17}} Figure 17]]'', which orbits Earth for the better part of a year, avoids detection with some sort of cloaking device despite at one point firing a gigantic ''laser cannon'' at Hokkaido while trying to blow up an alien.

* The ''{{Macross}}'' universe features passive stealth systems (design shape and materials to absorb and scatter sensors away from the enemy) in the VF-17S Nightmare from Macross Plus and Macross 7. However, in Macross Plus, the VF-19X and the VF-22X both feature an "Active Stealth System", which bends electromagnetic waves around the fighter, effectively making it invisible to all but optical targeting systems. The VF-25 in Macross Frontier does not appear to have this system, but Macross Frontier is a little squicky on the technical details of their mecha.

* ''{{Gundam}}'' gets off somewhat easy by {{Minovsky Particle}}s that scramble electromagnetic sensors, reducing detection to heat sensors and the old Mk. I Eyeball. It doesn't have too much in the way of actual stealth, but it is possible to sneak very close to an enemy if you know what you're doing.

* Kirk manages to avoid detection by Khan in [[StarTrek Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan]] by directing the Enterprise into a nearby nebula which was flooded with sensor-jamming electromagnetic radiation and severely limited visibility.
* In ''StarTrek VI: The Undiscovered Country'', the Enterprise rigs a torpedo to follow a Klingon Bird Of Prey's exhaust trail, seeking it out despite its being cloaked.

** "Stealth-field generators" in KnightsOfTheOldRepublic appear to use chameleonic techniques rather than outright invisibility (and no one has tried using them out of atmo, at least in canon), but Goto's Yacht still has some explaining to do... (granted with all the traffic at Nar Shadda, hiding in plain sight isn't hard)
*** I think that it probably had more to do with G0T0's mass robot controller. Considering how robots are essentially just a different type of computer system, it was most likely something along the lines of "I will control your ships' computers so that they don't report that they detect me, and I will camouflage myself so that you don't see me with your own eyes." When [[spoiler: The Exile destroys the robot controller, the hold on the other ships were relinquished and the camo failed, so both the computers and the humans could 'see' the ship and thus destroy it.]]

*** If you are thinking of the same thing as I am, he used small cloaked drones, basically a turbolaser with an engine, to simulate Star Destroyers firing through planetary defense shields, by placing them so that it appeared the turbolaser beam fired straight through when in actuality the beam impacted on the shield then the cloaked drones fired from their [[XanatosGambit meticulously]]-[[ChessMaster planned]] positions.

** Just change infrared with Hyperenergy radiation. Most space faring civilisation in the perryverse can detect five dimensional wavelength.

*** The tsunami division uses this concept but it needs two ships to be effective, the one hidding under the CTF field is blind.

** In a later installment Dame Honor confronts a hero-worshiping cadet attempting to praise her ingenuity for the afor-mentioned gambit by [[LampshadeHanging explaining]] just how stupid and desperate the tactic was. All Honorverse ships include numerous conventional sensors, radar, lidar, passive EM and IR detectors of all kinds; any one of which could have seen Honor coming from light-minutes away. Her trick worked simply because her enemy's sensor-techs were too lazy to check anything but their gravitic sensors, and apparently they had no automated monitoring sytems.
** Of course, the reason they use gravitic sensors is that gravity sensors are FTL, and all other sensors are speed-of-light. Not to mention the distances involved are usually several AU, which is rather extreme to expect any other sensors to work in time to be useful in combat. She just closed close enough to fire on them before they noticed she existed, which resulted in their instant destruction because ships have to 'roll' to protect themselves or people can shoot straight down their unprotectable weak spot between their gravity wedges. (Which also means that Honor's ship was also completely unprotected, because she had them off.)

* In the ''{{Halo}}'' ExpandedUniverse novels, there are "Prowler" stealth craft that minimise their emissions and dump their nukes before returning to realspace, so as to avoid the Cherenkov's radiation giving their reentry away.
* ''Broken Angels'' by RichardMorgan. A UN force fighting a planetary war puts its most important assets on space platforms in far-flung eliptical orbits so the enemy can't find them. Space, as the protagonist points out, is very big.

* ''Tomorrow War'' has "X-Cruisers", essentially space submarines. Instead of passing through [[strike:hyperspace]] X-matrix into normal space again they can "hang" on the border, so they aren't here for locators, but close enough to sniff out ships with mass-detectors. The good news is that they drop out of this state slowly enough to prevent micro-{{telefrag}}s through the whole volume which plague normal jumps, up to popping up in the atmosphere, but can emerge, fire and "dive" back fast enough to prevent a strong retaliation. The bad news is that this mode continuously wastes FTL fuel, about the most expensive matter known. Also, they can't move fast there and even if they re-emerge, they aren't going to accelerate well, because engines that keep the ship a proper 3D object where it shouldn't be take up to 9/10 of the ship's volume, so the normal equipment, even propulsion and defence, is severely limited.

* The new ''BattlestarGalactica'' has the Blackbird, which use carbon composite plating to avoid [=DRADIS=] detection, and is painted black to reduce the sunlight deflected. Both it and Stealthstar (different craft) got destroyed pretty quickly, though.

*** Compounding their problems was the fact that the Minbari gravimetric drive systems were much faster and more manueverable, making them very hard to track manually, and that the Minbari main weapons could essentially one-shot even the biggest earth ships. So they rarely got enough time to acquire visual targeting. The Minbari were also fully aware of their advantage and used various means of blinding Earth Alliance pilots, by attacking with the sun/star behind them, or the glare of a jump engine, etc.

** The series favors misdirection over outright stealth. In TheMovie, ''Serenity'' slips past Alliance ships twice in one go; the first time, they descend toward a planet, presumably losing themselves in the traffic above it, but the Alliance follows their "pulse beacon" and locks onto it with a missile....only for Mal to reveal that he'd removed said pulse beacon and was carrying it with him to keep the Alliance ship from launching a missile at ''Serenity.'' Later, as they escape the planet and slip out in the orbital traffic again, the Operative tries to track them via their navigation satellite's trajectory, as ''Serenity'' is a registered transport, only to discover ''seven'' different nav-sat trajectories belonging to ''Serenity'', six of them being decoys (we were treated to six barrels with blinking lights and thrusters being jettisoned from Serenity as it broke orbit).

* The {{Stargate}} verse has all kinds of cloak generators. For example, the Sodan personal cloak is said to shift the wearer out-of-phase with this reality. Some Goa'uld ships can also cloak themselves but they can't hide reentry heat. Asgard ships can mask their presence from just about everything except visual detection. The kings of this field were obviously the Tau'ri who figured out how to invert Ancient shields, exchanging protection for total undetectability.

* In ''{{Traveller}}'' TabletopRPG, it is impossible hide a ship. There's always a blip. That blip, however, might be a bathtub with engines or a fleet of warships. [[AppliedPhlebotinum Electronic Masking]] can make ships stealthy, and the rules address the thruster issue. The trope kicks in however with sensors, stolen wholly from the [[SpaceIsAnOcean submarine warfare]] playbook.

* Hiding a starship in ''{{GURPS}}'' is essentially impossible without [[SufficientlyAdvancedAliens superscience]], instead you have to rely on being so far away that sensor locks are nearly impossible.
** But making a spaceship harder to find is quite possible without [[SufficientlyAdvancedAliens superscience]].
*** But making a Starship requires superscience anyway so what are we complaining about?

* ''MassEffect'' has a prototype system on the ''SSV Normandy'' that works by storing the waste heat into its internal heat sink, which can only be done so for a limited period of time, or else the personnel will be cooked. The ship's own mass effect drive is then used to create mass effect fields that the ship "falls into", thus propelling it without needing to generate engine emmissions. The ship is thus rendered "heatless" and invisible to scanners, but still visible to anyone peering out a window, and because the stealth system is extremely new and extremely secret, no one has yet developed countermeasures against it.

* At the beginning ''MassEffect2'' however, they run up against the new baddies of the game and their stealth systems are completely useless against them. This results in [[spoiler: the Normandy getting all blowed up and getting you killed.]] Note: This is all in the opening movie.

** actually as I recall it's "{{All There in The Manual}}" as it's explained that what the Arbiter does is just creates a reality warping field that makes their allies invisible, but to make such a big field it has to anchor itself in space-time making it immune to the fields effect.

** Which is funny when you remember that, in the prequel ''{{Starlancer}}'', the Coalition has Basilisks flying around everywhere. The game's "Attack on Pearl Harbor" is carried out exclusively with them. (Of course, the premise of ''FreeLancer'' is that the nations in the Coalition didn't ''go'' with them to Sirius, so there is a HandWave, but...)

* Averted in ''{{Civilization}} 2: Test of Time'' - the most advanced stealth unit can move unseen through the oceans of an Earth-like world, the dust oceans of a Mars-type planet and even the clouds of a gas giant, but not through the fourth map, which uses [[SpaceIsAnOcean Space as the equivalent terrain type of Ocean.]] Its Civilopedia entry explicitly states that "it cannot move in space; there's nothing to hide beneath."
* ''SwordOfTheStars'' features cloaking devices, which are HandWaved as a series of counter-sensor arrays and a light-masking system that render ships with a cloaking section undetectable except from ships with deep scan arrays. Unfortunately, it only takes one deep scan ship to detect a whole fleet of cloakers and cloaked ships are extremely expensive and cannot fire while cloaked. Still, cloaked ships can be very devastating in the right situation, especially when used as a first strike against someone who lacks cloak-detecting capability, as cloaked fleets cannot be seen on the tactical map.

* A few space vessels in ''Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption'' can cloak. The ''Vengeance''-class frigate and hero ship ''Merciless'' for the Zann Consortium, and the TIE Phantom for the Empire. As well, the original Empire at War mentions cloaking in the profile for one of the planets.

** Much like the F-15 vs F-22 note below, whilst it is quite possible to ''see'' the [[http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/GTF_Pegasus GTF Pegasus]] and [[http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/GVF_Ptah GVF Ptah]] yet be completely unable to acquire a lock on them. In fact, you cannot even ''target'' them, which means you must gun for the fighters on manual rather than relying on the guidance/lead reticle. Of course, you can still hit them with your main guns and unguided secondary weaponry such as rockets.

* Averted in a section of the podcast Novel "The Crypt". A stealth ship is described as only being able to go a few weeks undetected (which seems like a long time, except they're observing a science vessel and it's escort looking for something in space, which also would take a long time), during which the heat rises to uncomfortable levels and almost all systems (including most of the AI, and even their holographic display) must be shut down to prevent that time from lowering even more. When a [[spoiler: fire occurs, they're forced to flee immediately]].

* Decoy balloons used in ballistic missiles - since all objects fall at the same speed in a vacuum regardless of mass, a balloon made of aluminum foil looks just like a warhead until it hits the atmosphere, making it harder to either predict the target or shoot down. That is, when and if anyone will spend outrageous amounts of resources on orbital weaponry - such things were already ''possible'' in 1980s, but how to make them efficient is a much more complex issue.

* Although StealthInSpace [[RealityIsUnrealistic as viewers are used to seeing it]] (I.E., a total InvisibilityCloak) is virtually impossible, don't forget that modern-day real world Stealth In The Air doesn't turn planes invisible, either. What modern stealth technology does is reduce the radar signature of planes so that they are mistaken for something much smaller than it really is. Depending on detection methods, it ''is'' possible to make a spaceship less noticeable, but it won't be ''invisible'' by any stretch of the word.

** Metamaterials are working well enough to hide microwave signals already. Scientists are positive that in a matter of decades they can be used to hide any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, including infrared and visible light frequencies. Ofcourse you still can't be entirely invisible, unless you want to both be blind and slowly cook to death.

<<|SpaceDoesNotWorkThatWay|>>

*** [[RammingAlwaysWorks Sinclair did.]]