On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

> [umbrella sensor hide]
> won't help you at all against detection via visual occlusion (the fact that
> your ship+umbrella will be blacking out a section of the starfield from the
> opponent's POV).]

> Basically, in space if you can see it, you can shoot it. And you can almost
> always see it.

Yes.  Presumably, distant occlusion is harder to spot (smaller black
dot) than a nearby ship.

OTOH, if you're fighting over it, presumably, the local government has
reasonable resources.

You may be able to catch a ship coming out of jump, if you're already
in ambush position, and they are in range.  The longer it takes to get
in range, the more likely the target will detect you, and the less
likely you will be successfull.

Also presumably, most advanced civilizations have, you know,  small
recon satellites in deep space, around the likely jump emergence
points, with passive sensors and some sort of line of sight long range
comms, laser, maser, or meson, that record ship arrivals and transmit
basic data back to system defense HQ and/or system traffic control.
Speed, heading, general location of jump emergence, transponder ID,
approximate Dtons, maybe an image...

Presumably, they also go quiet if you jump in without a transponder,
or if your transponder and ship profile do not match.

Add a bunch of cameras to watch starfields and compare at intervals to
look for moving objects in the near field that aren't in the system
charts, and alert traffic control or SDHQ if anything shows up moving
toward the homeworld and/or moving over some particular speed.

(And that can be done on a series of priorities, fast movers get more
attention sooner than slow movers, objects moving towards important
locations get more attention than things drifting through away from
important things....

--

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
kook." -Alan Morgan