Would there be any point in making a stealth spaceplane? Current ones are gliders as they are boosted by a rocket. (2024)

>stealth space plane
There is no stealth in space

At what height above sea level does stealth stop working? Please be specific.

stealth sats maybe exist. with a spaceplane you need to think reentry which makes it too complicated.

mitwit alert. we are not living in the edge of scifi possibilities.

Your mass and dV are known. It's trivial to compute where you can be, so even if you had a magic invisible rocket we could simply look at the manifold of possible trajectories over time.

x-37 has a lot of dv and does whacky orbital maneuvers over places where there are no observers so it gets lost. it does get found again but it takes a while. combine this with radar and ir stealth pointing to earth and it makes things pretty difficult for countries that don't have america tier space observation.

Not making it out of giant fricking mirrors would be a start.

Setting martainwumao conveniently ignores Anubis Class

>better stealth
>spinal mounted railgun first in class
>better torp guidance than muh red planet
>out ECMs your flagship
>Mercs rape your marines and grabs your F.L.A.G.S.H.I.P.
>without an hero-ing earth would have had everything of intelligence value in the hulk that WAS the Donnager
>all this done by a private company.

Earth wins again.

>compare small dots from tonight to the night before
>see that this one wasn't there before
>every observatory in the world suddenly swivels towards it in a race to be the first to discover something new in the Solar System

https://i.imgur.com/Wc2gHfn.png

Just read about this thing - NEO Surveyor, planned to be launched in 2027. Its wiki page says: "In the nominal survey the telescope is expected to detect ⅔ of asteroids with a diameter larger than 140 meters in the first 5 years". Why does it take scientists 5 years to detect 2/3 of asteroids >140 meters in diameter if seeing things in space is so easy?

because an Asteroid that's been there since the forming of the Solar System is nearly the same temperature as everything around it

To expand on the opinions about the F16, SEAD planes are expendable a bit.... especially in a real war against major powers.

As the first Gulf War showed, stealth planes only exist to open up a gap in enemy air defense (anyone remember that one f117 ace combat mission? Xbox360 Era/ literally how the F117 was used irl) so that the f-16's can roll in and mop up the rest. Granted this was against like S-300 class systems, but again a hypersonic air defense is hard to make a lot of and maintain, and most countries can't or won't do that, except China, maybe. At that point, unmanned stealth units, or literally unmanned f-16s might be better (see current AI F16 experiments) to lead with to hit the hypersonic systems, and send the conventional jets in to mop up the rest.

My whole esoteric weapons fetish is that the F4 was the greatest strike plane ever devised, and we should replace the entire conventional bomber fleet with a modernized version of that. Since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, CAS has switched to precision strikes instead of mass carpet bombing. Mach 1ish fighter bomber, that's cheap as sh*t and basically the A-10 but a fighter bomber? Where do I sign!

Just park it on the far side of the moon

To expand on the opinions about the F16, SEAD planes are expendable a bit.... especially in a real war against major powers.

As the first Gulf War showed, stealth planes only exist to open up a gap in enemy air defense (anyone remember that one f117 ace combat mission? Xbox360 Era/ literally how the F117 was used irl) so that the f-16's can roll in and mop up the rest. Granted this was against like S-300 class systems, but again a hypersonic air defense is hard to make a lot of and maintain, and most countries can't or won't do that, except China, maybe. At that point, unmanned stealth units, or literally unmanned f-16s might be better (see current AI F16 experiments) to lead with to hit the hypersonic systems, and send the conventional jets in to mop up the rest.

My whole esoteric weapons fetish is that the F4 was the greatest strike plane ever devised, and we should replace the entire conventional bomber fleet with a modernized version of that. Since the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, CAS has switched to precision strikes instead of mass carpet bombing. Mach 1ish fighter bomber, that's cheap as sh*t and basically the A-10 but a fighter bomber? Where do I sign!

This is just reformers sh*t

Radar is active, IR sensing is passive. It is way easier and quicker to scan an entire area with passive IR sensors then it is to scan it with active radar. It also has the added benefit of not giving away your position, which is one of the reasons people don't constantly scan the sky with radar all the time.

Additionally you don't need to be able to get the same resolution you would for atmospheric detection, because its really really hard to mistake a space ship for anything else. Do you see something small, hot, and actively moving that wasn't there the last time you checked? Then it's a fricking space ship and you track that sh*t. I don't need sensors accurate enough to pick out the exact shape of your ship from 10 million miles away, it's enough for me to know that *something* started throwing off heat in that direction that wasn't there before.

Once I've got a rough location and heading, which can be done with much cheaper and wider range equipment, *then* I can turn my high power stuff on and start getting a good picture of exactly what kind of ship it is. You don't seem to understand the order of magnitude difference there is between how hard it is to track stuff in atmosphere and how hard it is to track stuff in space.

>It turns out scanning every patch of sky, constantly, forever, from multiple angles and with various types of detection equipment, is extremely difficult and costly and nobody can do it.
Let's do some math here anon. A full spherical sky is about 41,000 square degrees. A good wide angle lens can cover about 100 square degrees so that's 410 pictures to get a complete view of the sky, you probably want some overlap between them so let's bump that up to a nice round 500 pics. Additionally let's say each photo requires a full 30 seconds of exposure in order to capture all the IR data you want.

So that's 500 pictures at 30 seconds per capture, or 2 pictures per minute. 500/2 = 250 or a little over 4 hours to capture a complete view of the sky using ONE wide angle camera. Slap 10 cameras on a device and you can get a complete image of the entire sky in 25 minutes.

Now my Samsung phone has a 200 megapixel camera, and I'd assume you'd want to use something better than a cell phone camera, so let's say your camera is 400 megapixels, twice as good. That's 500 photos * 400 megapixels per photo = 200,000, so once you've scanned the whole sky you've got a 200 gigapixel image to process.

For reference if you've got a good gaming PC that can run 4K at 60fps it's processing about 500 megapixels a second, so it could churn through 200 gigapixels in about 400 seconds, roughly 6-7 minutes. Granted image rendering is not the same as image comparison, which is what our sensor will be doing, but with a decent PC you can probably scan the entire sky in like half an hour.

Obviously you'd need multiple sensors if you wanted up to the minute data but the point I'm trying to make is that these are absolutely workable numbers, if you had the money you could built a network like this with off the shelf components. It is completely feasible to expect the military to be able to make something like this. And they'd have way wider range and lower power usage than radar detection.

Yes. Because get this, wide-area scanning for thermal anomalies in space is a TRIVIAL challenge with fricking 1980's technology, let alone anything from this century.

>sky
The mere presence of Earth's atmosphere increase the difficulty of this same task by roughly a couple hundred degrees of magnitude. Looking for thermal anomalies IN A VACUUM is fricking easy mode compared to doing the same inside an atmosphere, let alone one with an active weather system.

i'll give you a hint as a spacegay:

it's literally just a little bus with experiments on it that has to be a spaceplane because they want to bring the experiments back intact with as little g-forces on them as possible and have an easier recovery proces (something you can't do with a capsule as it's gonna garuantee some decent G-forces and either a splashdown dealing with salt water and ocean recovery or on land with a possible hard thunk if your final slowdown mechanism (either times explosives or airbags) don't work perfectly.
it carries and tests sensors and electronics in space and takes them back right to a runway where they can be analyzed. it's not a fricking weapon, it doesn't drop fricking weapons, it's probably not even spying on the chinese (probably), you homies all need to calm down and understand that not everything being done sneaky is some metal gear solid superweapon.