Confederation low observability fighter

kingmakeress

kingmakeress

Ensign
Since Blair explicitly mentioned to Melek that Kilrathi were always better at cloaking, it is probably safe to assume that the Confederation has long been trying to build a working cloaking device. Still this does not exclude low observability as a parallel or even complementary line of research. Such a fighter or a group of fighters emerging from asteroids could pose a serious threat to any Kilrathi capital ship or convoy. Probably the black Hellcat mentioned in the WC4 novelization was the result of such a research effort. What do you think would be the ideal LO Confed fighter in each game? I think in WC1 would be the Hornet and in WC2 the Ferret or the Epee.
 
Might be interested to think about how Kilrathi eyes works; maybe visual camo for a space fighter is totally different when your enemy sees in infrared (or similar)!

The air show article in Victory Streak mentions that Confed has a stealth fighter in the works in 2669. I imagine this is based on the USAF revealing the F-117 and the B-2 to the public in the late 80s/early 90s: "This annual show of skills featured the first-ever appearance of the Confederation stealth fighter prototype, along with its integral MX-27BC guided-proton warhead."
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I imagine this is based on the USAF revealing the F-117 and the B-2 to the public in the late 80s/early 90s:
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That was in early November 1988. In fact it was the very same day where Microprose announced its F-19 game based on the Testors model. The latter was totally different from the actual plane
 
FWIW, in reality stealth in space is nigh impossible to achieve. Consider those milli-G ion drives we have today can be detected one AU or more away, and you can consider the difficulty of your endeavor. Basically any burn of tactical value is a beacon for everyone to see, regardless of other factors.
 
It makes perfect sense. If I had to guess, by then masking technology would have been developed, along with countermeasures of course from the Kilrathi side, but I see your point!
 
I think that's true, but also if we apply that standard pretty much nothing about space combat in Wing Commander makes sense. Real space battles will be fought with drones spewing ball bearings at each other from millions of kilometers apart. :D

We do see the Kilrathi with an F-117-inspired low observability fighter on Academy. And we hear about fighters with ground camo in End Run, so there must still be some benefit to that in the 27th century!

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Pretty much. There are definitely ways to be somewhat stealthy in space, but it’s mostly laying in wait aboard a low observable craft with a cryogenically cooled outer hull, minimal power so radiators aren’t blasting out infrared radiation, etc.

Planet side, where there is a horizon and other sources of IR, etc., stealth would still be a factor.
 
It is! It's kind of the Strakha's equivalent of the Have Blue proof of concept demonstrator for the F-117. It's adapting a Sartha with low observability/low emission technology but it lacks the phased photon cloak the later Strakha prototypes will have (this is about two years before they're first tested).
 
Do we know if the Confederation and the Kilrathi have developed similar cloaking technologies? I mean after the war it would make perfect sense if the Confederation had launched its own operation Paperclip, but during the war do we know how the cloaking device of the Excalibur was made? Has the Confederation managed to recover any downed Strakhas?

If the Confederation used parts from captured Kilrathi fighters, could the Kilrathi somehow detect Excaliburs, even partially? 🤔🤔
 
They did capture and disassemble a Strakha shortly after their existence was confirmed but they had difficulty reverse-engineering it. The captured cloaking device ended up being used on (and destroyed with) Paladin's scout ship that discovered the Hakaga fleet. Paladin talks a little bit about how he can't say how the Strakha was captured despite the Kilrathi thinking it had been destroyed and I like to imagine there's a cool Red October style story that happened there!

The Excalibur's cloaking device (called Blackfish) was supposed to be inferior to the one on the Strakha; it blocked all sensors but didn't completely obscure the ships up close. It wasn't until after the war that Confed's full Strakha-style cloaks came online... and by the time of Prophecy they were just an assumed feature! (There was a cutscene recorded for the first mission of Prophecy where your Piranhas cloak but it's totally ineffective against the Nephilim... but they didn't have time to get the shader right for the cloaking effect that would only be used once and cut it late.)
 
Got inspired by the mere thought of Sean Connery playing a defecting Kilrathi pilot. I do think he would’ve made a decent Hobbes in a live action remake.

I hope a real human writer picks up this thread.

satin-music-2f5.notion.site

Shadow of Honor | Notion

I crouched in the cramped cockpit of the Strakha stealth fighter, my fur damp with cold sweat. Outside the canopy, an endless starfield stretched in silent vigil. I had cut the engines and engaged the cloak—now I was little more than a shadow, a phantom drifting in darkness. Through the void, my...
satin-music-2f5.notion.site satin-music-2f5.notion.site
 
Although I read only the first few paragraph, it is great work! Particularly I like Varrik's inner monologues and the name of the outpost, Theta Seven, is very sci-fi-ish in the good sense.

Kudos!
 
It was all AI, pretty impressive though. It actually read through a lot of wcnews before crafting the story.
 
I disagree, it is not. The only interesting thing with the AI stuff nowadays is how many people forget that it is not making sense, you are making of it.
It is all very impressive statistical analysis which works, for example, really good when producing text, since languages follow sensible models and semantics. But try asking the AI how many rs there are in strawberry and it all falls apart.

Statistics! It is all statistics. Recombining and recombining and recombining things that are already there.
 
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Vidmaster said:
I disagree, it is not. The only interesting thing with the AI stuff nowadays is how many people forget that it is not making sense, you are making of it.
It is all very impressive statistical analysis which works, for example, really good when producing text, since languages follow sensible models and semantics. But try asking the AI how many rs there are in strawberry and it all falls apart.

Statistics! It is all statistics. Recombining and recombining and recombining things that are already there.
Click to expand...
Yes, there is no reasoning at all in LLMs, they just compute the most probable next word which in turn depends critically on the document collection a particular LLMs has been trained on (similar things can be said about VLMs generating images). Thus LLMs can only imitate thinking at best.

Also yes, we should be fully aware that what we read or see is synthetic.

However, from a cognitive perspective it is interesting how the human mind does make sense out of this synthetic input, even perhaps by ignoring minor syntactic or linguistic irregularities and repetitions which in the end leave us with a feeling that something is wrong, especially if the conscious part of our mind does not catch these discrepancies.

About recombining, scale is important. We may count things that as you said are already there, but now can actually see latent patterns and make use of them. So if by "[...] recombining things that are already there" you imply we just shuffle data around, I must respectfully point out this is not the case with LLMs.
 
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