[TML] Hiding ships in plane view

[Richard Aiken]

On Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 4:31 PM, Jerry W Barrington
<jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/8/08 3:19 PM, "Knapp" <magick.crow at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> We have talked a lot about how easy it is to see ships in space but maybe
>> with advanced forms of this they will all be clocked and not easy to see at
>> all.
>> http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080607/sc_livescience/cloakingdeviceconc
>> eptmovesbeyondtheory;_ylt=AnSAwti.vycdCLAIAlOFWQ6s0NUE
>
> Well, it only works on 1 frequency.  And it's bigger than the thing it's
> cloaking and reflects light hitting it, so at best you'd get an image of the
> cloak with the image of the cloaked thing subtracted from it.

Well . . . assuming it can be made to work on more than one frequency
. . . it would definitely be useful for keeping one ship from knowing
exactly where another one was.  Re: The missile defense debate.  If
you put out a swarm of decoys which were superlenses and turned them
on/off randomly, all the enemy could ever see was the location of the
currently-active superlense.

> And if the
> lens isn't directly between the object and the viewer, it's useless.

Not true.  At least, not as I read it.  The effect is based on the
light emitting body, not the light-receiving body.  Light coming in
from anywhere and bouncing off the cloaked item gets "sucked into" the
superlens - once the item is within the boundary line of the effect -
rather than radiated outward.  There is a link to a video that shows
the projected effect.  It's a polar view of three points approaching a
superlense.

When they get close enough, they simply seem to disappear (although
for visualization purposes, you can still see them as very faint
circles).  As they pass it by and emerge from the other side, they
reappear.  It's a phased effect: they're faint close to the boundary
and only "normally" bright further away.

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein