The article linked claiming there's no stealth in space purely talks about drives, I pointed out you don't thrust. Thereby negating that entire argument. It kind of works like this, any drive entering a system will be seen for donkeys. It also gives means such large and obvious momentum means even if you shut off WAY out, it's not hard to figure out where you'll be. So inbound craft need to use planetary bodies for slingshots and then shut off the drive. This turns the incoming trajectory into a wide parabola arc. Still not ideal, but a sufficiently large region of space that stealth has meaning.
Not only drives. ANY radiator. The life support system of a ship, the nuclear/fusion reactor. And if FTL exists, than the signature of that propulsion(if any, but no one knows yet) will give away the ship.
If your trying to be stealthy in a sufficiently huge region of space, keeping FTL and sublight drive off, then you have no Delta-V and if you see an enemy with your passive sensors, you either open up your engines to intercept and get seen, or fly past harmlessly. It would be a bizarre coincidence if you're already on intercept course.
Also there are propulsion mechanisms that will be invisible to the observer anyway such as any kind of particle stream drive, ion drives etc. This isn't much thrust, but it can be used to alter trajectory after main drive shut off sufficiently to add another random element. The combination of the two ends up creating a sort of a curved sausage of space of possible trajectories. Of course only part of that ends up coming near the target but it's pretty much needle in haystack given the size of the vehicles.
Ion drives are visible from 1 AU(according to that article at least) with
existing sensors and will still take a while to change the direction of a craft larger than our existing ion drive spacecraft.
Secondly, lasers are free all you want weapons. The heat generated is comparitively little given the mass of the vehicle. Typically one would use a ballast of significant heat carrying capacity such as plain cheap H2O, useful as reaction mass and an excellent energy weapon ablative too. You'd have to fire a lot for a long time before you had to worry about needing a radiator. That's not something a weapons probe has to worry about, it wont be firing much. A defensive operation such as moon or orbital station would use radiators, but they wont care.
If you're going to have a huge Kol anyway, you may as well carry tons of missiles or kinetic slugs as well. True that you won't get as many missiles/slugs as you will get laser shots, but each hit(from a fusion-warhead missile) will be more deadly than a burst of laser light.
As for a combat drone(the term "weapons probe" doesn't have as good a feel to it), you're right, it won't be firing much. So it won't have to carry too many missiles/shells either.
A moon-based weapons platform doesn't need to care about supply. They can use the moon itself as a laser heatsink and they probably have an in-house missile/shell factory to boot. A moon would also have provision for some serious heavy-duty kinetic-kill hypervelocity weapons, and a decent supply of slugs from the factory would keep them running well.
I get the impression you're talking about medium sized vessels zipping around firing lasers at eachother. This is not a realistic scenario.
No. I think you're getting the impression that I was talking about Advent strike craft. They are medium sized vessels, not zipping around, but still beweaponed with lasers and missiles. Probably ugly too, unless the designer intended them to be for atmospheric entry as well.
The cloud idea is pretty tested by folks who think about such things a lot, I'm afraid it stands up to more than your 30 second analysis It doesn't work with thrust again for obvious reasons, the cloud goes one way, vessel goes another doh. Stealth probes work just peachy. They're extremely cheap and highly numberous. There's no effective way to destroy them all. Again this is a pretty well thought out concept, it's not something I invented.
Give me your source. It's an inflexible idea that puts your ship into a purely defensive role.
Again, the sensors probes aren't all killable in that time frame. They're about the size of a tennis ball and they'll be spread out thousands of kilometers.
I don't see how this will work for a very long time without nanotech. And how do you plan to spread these drones?
The size of Sputnik sounds more realistic, but the spreading problem remains to be answered.
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Your ideas sound like the enemy has no offensive at all, and all your drones("probe" just doesn't sound right, again) are ominously cruising, with their drives, reactors, and all their other heat-emitting stuff turned off, towards the hapless planet with a half-dozen orbital turrets in place, with the poor turrets being engineered, programmed, and controlled by such inept morons that they can't even stand up to a bunch of Voyagers surrounded in a tin foil cloud, with lasers and nuke missiles, and their mega-stealthy tennis ball companions(*gasp*).
What if the enemy also has tennis balls and battle-Voyagers heading the other way? What do you do then - change course(allowing yourself to be seen) to intercept while the enemy does the same, or try to race for the enemy planet?