[geeks] engage your cloaking devices!

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 @ 01:35 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > You don't just fire on everything you cannot identify.
> 
> In peacetime, no.  If you can see a metamaterial cloaking ... thing, but
> you can't see what's inside it, but you *know* it's not yours, the
> obvious assumption is it's the enemy's.  And if you're at war, and you
> can't identify it but you're pretty certain it belongs to the enemy, you
> fire on it *in case* it's a tank or a SAM launcher.

*IF* the battle lines are well defined, sure.

But the primary use of cloaking and deception is specifically in
situations where that isn't true, and things are not neat and clean.

That's where firing on anything you see and don't recognize can be such
a huge disaster, or a waste of ammo.

I think you are looking too much at the limits of this experiment from
the technologies infancy, rather than looking at what it would be if
perfected, or what other uses it might have.

> > We have been using decoys for millenia, and until recently they were all
> > physical, and it certainly didn't bankupt those who used them. Closer to
> > the opposite.  
> 
> A plywood-and-canvas decoy, or an IR flare, costs a hell of a lot less
> than a complex nano-engineered metamaterial structure.

Actually, one of the goals of nano-engineering is to drop the cost of
production to nearly nothing but raw base material.

It's expensive right now because we barely know how to do it.

It might easily cost *LESS* than plywood in the future.  Only time will
tell how all that works out.  It's all very new.

It's also worth noting that the decoys used by the stealth fighter are
very, very expensive.

To be effective, they don't need to be cheap, only cheaper than what
they are protecting.

> >> If the enemy has the ability to cloak one of your own units without you
> >> ever becoming aware that they've done so, you are *SO* screwed your only
> >> hope is to surrender right now.
> > 
> > That's an assumption you don't have enough information to make.
> 
> I can see we're going to have to just agree to disagree on this.

I would point out though, that history shows the above statement is
wrong.

That leaves the future, and since this technology will radically change
before it is every used in practical fashion, you really can't say much
about it.

Most especially, you can't declare it a failure.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak
is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime
literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express
it. -- 1984, George Orwell ]]