Modern Tech VS Scifi Jamming

[Spacescifi]

Anyone who watched Babylon 5 knows the Minbari were feared because their spaceships did not show up on human sensors despite being visible.

According to the lore, the actual reason is that they jam human sensors so bad they don't detect them.

Main Question: If there were an alien scifi sensor jamming device that jammed ALL eletromagnetic sensors we have from detection other than eyeballing it, would we even have any hard counters to that?

Because it seems to me dogfighting with fighters would be the only way to take down flying enemy craft with devices that jam missiles from locking on.

Wait...sonic seeking missiles might work, but the enemy could easily counterthat to if they were at least as creative as us.

Making noise is not hard.

I cannot think of any effective counters...can you?

 

EDIT:

Oops..laser guided missiles would work, since the target is visible.

Babylon 5 5 got that wrong. Even LIDAR would work great.

So we could still counter them...with LOTS of retrofitted AI LIDAR missiles.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Spacescifi

[Kerbart]

For starters you  could build missiles with passive radar, that target multi-band targets. Or use IR gyided missiles that, instead of IR frequencies look for the jamming frequencies? Because clearly there are some big honking sources of that out there.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Kerbart

[Spacescifi]

24 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

For starters you  could build missiles with passive radar, that target multi-band targets. Or use IR gyided missiles that, instead of IR frequencies look for the jamming frequencies? Because clearly there are some big honking sources of that out there.

 

Clearly you just defeated another scifi trope. Good job!

Even invisbility cloaks that deflect ALL radiation including visible light are not safe, although they would be harder.

Sonics are about the only way I can think of to track invisble enemy whooshing through the sky.

Since radar and IR would be useless, even multiband spectrum scanning.

Perhaps wide laser sweeps could still work? Simply by sweeping the sky where you hear the sound and noticing when the laser beam is deflected.

Not perfect, but it is a start. At least lets you know what area in the sky to blow to smithereens.

With enough ground sweeping lasers you could track invisibke craft just fine...until they struck them with airstrikes via missiles of their own anyway.

[KSK]

I'm slightly confused by the terminology here. If we're positing a jammer capable of defeating all electromagnetic sensors, what's stopping it from jamming visible light? Light is just  electromagnetic radiation after all. 

But yes - if you can see it, you can kill it. If you can track your incoming bad guy optically, then you can put a missile up its tailpipe. Alternatively, as @Kerbartpointed out, some kind of home-on-jam technology should work. 

More speculatively, if your sci-fi setting is soft enough to allow it,  you could sidestep electromagnetic detection altogether and go for neutrino detection or gravimetric sensors, or whatever weird and wonderful systems that your setting can accommodate. Star Trek's 'warp signatures'  for example.

Minor nitpick - invisibility cloaks don't deflect radiation, they bend it around the cloaked target.  Picture a planet transiting across a star for example - you see it by the light that it blocks. An invisibility cloak would bend the light coming from the star around the planet and send it onwards towards the viewer, so that the viewer is effectively seeing behind the planet, making it invisible.

The bizarre thing is, that this isn't entirely science fiction. Cloaks (based on metamaterials) have been built and do work, albeit imperfectly and only for a very narrow range of wavelengths at a time. As far as I know we don't yet have metamaterial cloaks capable of cloaking across any sizeable portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

 

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

For starters you  could build missiles with passive radar, that target multi-band targets. Or use IR gyided missiles that, instead of IR frequencies look for the jamming frequencies? Because clearly there are some big honking sources of that out there.

Some ways to jam: best way is to mess up the signal, if you transmit and pulse from an radar signal you can distort the return signal giving wrong information, you can  jam an remote transmission so you don't get the message. 
Both of this is pretty easy, you defense is to you wider frequency and frequency jumping and obviously an stronger signal helps. 

Now you can also jam passive sensors but this is much harder, either use an decoy or overwhelm the sensor, yes you can target the transmitter but if you get temporary blinded looking at the target its hard to hit it. 
Obviously if the attacker is set up to handle this they can reduces the sensibility and aim for target. 
 

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, KSK said:

I'm slightly confused by the terminology here. If we're positing a jammer capable of defeating all electromagnetic sensors, what's stopping it from jamming visible light? Light is just  electromagnetic radiation after all. 

But yes - if you can see it, you can kill it. If you can track your incoming bad guy optically, then you can put a missile up its tailpipe. Alternatively, as @Kerbartpointed out, some kind of home-on-jam technology should work. 

More speculatively, if your sci-fi setting is soft enough to allow it,  you could sidestep electromagnetic detection altogether and go for neutrino detection or gravimetric sensors, or whatever weird and wonderful systems that your setting can accommodate. Star Trek's 'warp signatures'  for example.

Minor nitpick - invisibility cloaks don't deflect radiation, they bend it around the cloaked target.  Picture a planet transiting across a star for example - you see it by the light that it blocks. An invisibility cloak would bend the light coming from the star around the planet and send it onwards towards the viewer, so that the viewer is effectively seeing behind the planet, making it invisible.

The bizarre thing is, that this isn't entirely science fiction. Cloaks (based on metamaterials) have been built and do work, albeit imperfectly and only for a very narrow range of wavelengths at a time. As far as I know we don't yet have metamaterial cloaks capable of cloaking across any sizeable portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

 

 

Hmmm...I stand corrected. Harder to detect true full spectrum invisibilty cloaks.

Coincidentally it would make a perfect fit to use in conjuction with a radiator or heatsink in space, since it is a way to shield ship parts from heat...although that now means that at least some of your ship on the inside will be invisible LOL.

So a pure invisibilty cloak has no counter unless it leaves behind exhaust emission trails in the air? Sonic tracking would be problematic since decoys would be too easy.

You and others have defeated the jammer.

How would you defeat the invisibity cloak if it had no emissions? Or would we all be doomed by invisible flying death machines launching misslies like they are going out of style?

Here I am really curious? What if the pilot is an idiot and shines a flashlight while within the cloak field?

Will the light be visible from within the cloak field?

Or will it be invisible? Making all inside the cloak slowly cook to death if they don't turn the cloak field off?

Like I said...such would make a great heatsink.

But apparently even scifi tropes when mixed with a little reality has it's limitations.

Edited December 20, 2020 by Spacescifi

[KSK]

Well the 'cloak field' is a physical material that you can wrap around a non transparent object. So unless you shone that flashlight out of the window, it wouldn't be visible to the outside world. 

The one drawback to the cloak is that it would need gaps in if you want to see out. Any light hitting the vessel is diverted around it, so that pretty much sucks if you're relying on using that light for seeing things! In practice you'd probably keep the gaps in the cloak to a minimum and use cameras to see out, rather than a big transparent, uncloaked, canopy for the pilot.

So hypothetically, you could track those gaps in the cloak although that would be considerably more difficult than tracking the whole vessel.

[Spacescifi]

52 minutes ago, KSK said:

Well the 'cloak field' is a physical material that you can wrap around a non transparent object. So unless you shone that flashlight out of the window, it wouldn't be visible to the outside world. 

The one drawback to the cloak is that it would need gaps in if you want to see out. Any light hitting the vessel is diverted around it, so that pretty much sucks if you're relying on using that light for seeing things! In practice you'd probably keep the gaps in the cloak to a minimum and use cameras to see out, rather than a big transparent, uncloaked, canopy for the pilot.

So hypothetically, you could track those gaps in the cloak although that would be considerably more difficult than tracking the whole vessel.

 

Fictionally you can do it other ways...I am also familiar with the image projecting 'cloaks' used IRL.

A fictional scifi cloak is far better, since camouflage cloaks won't stop missile tracking.

Fictional will.

You would probabky use scifi grav sensors if the cloaked pilot.

[Nuke]

as someone who dabbles in electronics, let me say that radio is frikkin voodoo.  voodoo i say!

the fact that humans were capable of making it work in an era before computers is absurd.  let alone use it to detect objects or bent it away so that objects cannot be detected. to intentionally cause interference to the already voodoo radio communication, and then for us to somehow counter that is freaking amazing. nothing in the sci-fi space could possibly compete with the amazing accomplishments in using radio to do stuff that we as humans have already done. 

 

[Spacescifi]

29 minutes ago, Nuke said:

as someone who dabbles in electronics, let me say that radio is frikkin voodoo.  voodoo i say!

the fact that humans were capable of making it work in an era before computers is absurd.  let alone use it to detect objects or bent it away so that objects cannot be detected. to intentionally cause interference to the already voodoo radio communication, and then for us to somehow counter that is freaking amazing. nothing in the sci-fi space could possibly compete with the amazing accomplishments in using radio to do stuff that we as humans have already done. 

 

 

True. Reality is wilder than fiction because it is real.

Still...how can you beat a true cloak flying aircraft that somehow can see you and manually target you but you can't see them?

Not even with thermal IR. Nor any other EM spectrum band.

Sonics can be tricked easily...might work the first few times but once they catch on they would just deploy decoy noise makers.

Perhaps I finally made up something that is not over the top overpowered but challenging enough that no one knows an optimal way to neutralize it for once...besides carpet nuke bombing the area LOL.

Edited December 21, 2020 by Spacescifi

[YNM]

Honestly, I wonder how useful would it be if you send out a signal so strong that it'd break up an opponent's radar/transmitter system completely. Much like solar flares or something... I've heard that at least one actual military operations on Earth was spoiled by flare-induced comms/radio blackout already.

While it wouldn't conceal your location (at the very least it divulges relative direction to the source), it will conceal who you are, kind of like shining very bright light on someone in the middle of the night I suppose. Then again that same light could be used to detect and destroy the source itself, but if the source is just one out of several, and fairly cheap ? (and located nowhere near the important parts)

 

EDIT : On second reading though, seems like solar flares only affects HF (3 - 30 MHz) radio bands by making the ionosphere non-reflective when they normally are, so I supose this is only a problem for beyond-curvature transmission, as well as only for specific frequency band. Probably not quite as dangerous then because we've done more UHF and VHF since...

Edited December 21, 2020 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

Once SpaceX gets the Starlink fully deployed, they will be able to detect an alien jammer by silent hole in the Starlink sphere, where it's jammed.

Then they can launch a Starship with a smoke generator to see, where the cloud of smoke starts enveloping a nothing. The enveloped nothing is the Minbari cruiser.

Edited December 21, 2020 by kerbiloid