TCS?

[Girlinhat (OP)]

What is it?  I know it's "Target Cross-Section" but what unit does it follow?  Square feet?  Square meters?  An OH I made has a TCS of 30,194 - how impressive is this?

[blue emu]

Hull Squares. One TCS equals 50 tons.

[Girlinhat (OP)]

Ah, so is there any comparison of HS to surface area?  I'd like to imagine/portray a ship of a given scale.

[blue emu]

I assume that a space-ship would float on water (just as a Battleship does), so each metric ton would be more than one cubic meter displacement. How much more... that's debatable.

My own estimate: one HS = 200 cubic meters ~= 6 meters ^3

[Steve Walmsley]

What is it?  I know it's "Target Cross-Section" but what unit does it follow?  Square feet?  Square meters?  An OH I made has a TCS of 30,194 - how impressive is this?

TCS equates to active sensor resolution. So a TCS of 50 would mean you needed a sensor with a resolution of 50 or less to detect it at the maximum range of that sensor.

In terms of physical size, Standard Aurora tends to gloss over that . Newtonian Aurora assumes ten cubic meters per ton of mass, so a 5000 ton ship would be 50,000 cubic meters. From that you can derive the diameter of the ship in spheroid form and from that you can play around with the length based on whatever aspect ratio of length to width/height you want to use.

Steve

[sloanjh]

TCS equates to active sensor resolution. So a TCS of 50 would mean you needed a sensor with a resolution of 50 or less to detect it at the maximum range of that sensor.

In terms of physical size, Standard Aurora tends to gloss over that . Newtonian Aurora assumes ten cubic meters per ton of mass, so a 5000 ton ship would be 50,000 cubic meters. From that you can derive the diameter of the ship in spheroid form and from that you can play around with the length based on whatever aspect ratio of length to width/height you want to use.

And as far as I know Steve glossed over (for simplicity of mechanics) the power of (2/3) needed to go from volume to (rough) area.  So a ship with 8x the HS has 8x the cross section, not 4x. On the same front, the range vs. power doesn't follow the expected power law behaviors either (i.e. returned signal strength should go down like at least the square of the range) - the range is linear with the power.  Not a big deal, just making sure people don't get confused when they don't see the answer you'd get for radar.... 

John

[Steve Walmsley]

And as far as I know Steve glossed over (for simplicity of mechanics) the power of (2/3) needed to go from volume to (rough) area.  So a ship with 8x the HS has 8x the cross section, not 4x. On the same front, the range vs. power doesn't follow the expected power law behaviors either (i.e. returned signal strength should go down like at least the square of the range) - the range is linear with the power.  Not a big deal, just making sure people don't get confused when they don't see the answer you'd get for radar.... 

John

I'll probably revisit this for Newtonian Aurora so active sensors use the actual diamater of the ship rather than its mass and the returned signal strength is also modelled correctly

Steve