I'm thinking that you'll have the initial radar detection on YOUR ship; lightspeed means that you won't be seeing any other sources on the data yet. Sure, a couple of hours later, HQ will have yottabytes of data on the intruder. But the ship, station, or satellite first sighting them has only a quick, approximate fix at the time of detection. 


From: "shadow@shadowgard.com" <shadow@shadowgard.com>
To: tml@simplelists.com
Sent: Wednesday, June 24, 2015 11:58 PM
Subject: Re: [TML] sensors and ops (was berthing)

On 25 Jun 2015 at 5:38, William Ewing (via tml list) wrote:

> This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of
> emails via email lists. Therefore the sender's email address
> (dw_ewing@yahoo.com) has been replaced with a dummy one. The original
> message follows:
>
> More likely approximate. Radar and other tech is only going to get so
> good. 

Keep in mind that you can get a lot of precision by having multiple
sensors spread out. As long as you know their relative positions
(laser links can give that to *high* precision, for example) you can
combine them to get relally accurate data.

And don't forget that given Traveller tech, amatuer astronomers will
be orbiting homemade telescopes that make hibble look like a pair of
binoculars.

Now, for STC (and other) purposes, you don't necessarily want a
Hubble type sensor. But the same size "mirror" with different options
can be very useful for tracking.


Optical (especially IR) sensor are likely to be more important than
radar, anyway..

Radar can (probably) do better at ranging, but multiple optoical
sensor can get pretty good bearing info. And get decent range info by
triangulation.



--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com





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