Timote Wrote:One of the several story ideas that I have had bouncing around my head for a couple years is for the assault on Boskone Prime.Sounds workable. The easy way to do such a shield would be to know where the Boskone active and passive sensor arrays were, and deploy physical shields that masked the fleet and sent the enemy sensor arrays something close to the signals they had been receiving which the fleet would have affected.
In the (current) plan, the Starhawk is carrying a load of assault Marines (along with all 3 of Babylon.5's APE units) on the way to the Boskone station's surface.
After you started posting your Brains stories, I mentally added:
Quote:The assault fleet had met up in the middle of nowhere above the elliptic before getting the coordinates for the target.
At the same time, some sort of waved shield had been deployed. Scuttlebutt said it had been made by some unknown Mad with a talent for stealth tech.
Whoever made it, it had obscured the fleet's approach until we started getting close. The target saw us coming, but only with minutes of warning instead of hours.
Once you get close, it would be very difficult to do this for optical sensors, particularly if there are things like laser trip wires with complex signals running along them (say reflecting back off a net of slowly moving drones). Or, if the enemy had magnetic or gravimetric passive sensors that would pick-up metal ships or distortions caused by almost all ships' boat and bigger speed drives (not to mention the electro-magnetic radiation put out by all non-stealthed craft). For real paranoia they have short-range handwavium detectors, too. [grin]
Don't forget that there are likely Boskone ships coming and going reasonably often, and probably patrol ships. Even if you can hide from the base then hiding from these is going to be really difficult.
A more difficult way to do a stealth approach would be to have a short life-span specialised ship which deployed an immense sensor warp field around the entire fleet. This would likely make everything darker for the fleet ships inside it, both optically and on sensors; the "Dark Cloak". Fleet ships would have to shut-down active sensors, like radar and lidar, and rely on accurate navigation (maybe with tight-beamed instructions from a flag ship). Probably the flag ship would get a sensor feed from the cloak ship of what was going on outside the cloak. The big advantage of the cloak is it would work against Boskone passive sensors that you didn't know about, including any Boskone ships that didn't fly too close or even through the cloak.
Just a few ideas...
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"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind