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XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Radar Tricking


Gene$|s

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Imagine your radar picks up a signal, and it indicates a small ufo, so a scout of some sort. You send out a light armed interceptor and... oops? Turns out the little scout was actually a battleship wich neatly tricked your radar in believing it was something else.

 

Call it a sort of ambush, ofcourse this shouldn't happen alot, because your interceptor wouldn't stand much chance after that.

 

Or perhaps it would be better if landed ufo's could mask their radar signal, to make them look unimportant. Would really make you go out there for every ufo.

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Yeh, I think it could be great.

A ufo that landed, you think its one of those silly scouts so ya send in your rookies for some basic training. OOPS, its a terror ship, and you got 10 green donkey rookies with rifles and a wet diper. Don't you dare press that abort button :cussing:

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That's going to be tough to do. The modern radar facilities are going to use neutrinos to detect UFOs. Any large UFO would have to hide a lot of neutrinos to be mistaken for a small UFO. Neutrinos go through everything, only occasionaly touching matter, so it's going to be difficult pretending to be a different UFO.
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If they can travel from the other side of the galaxy they can fool our radars

I can't argue with THAT :D.

 

I have to agree. They fool everyone elses radars, so ours should mistake a few once in a while (not with the hyperwave decoder, unless its on the higer levels. Then it shows diffrent stats then it really is. So a very small ufo, with sectoids on a reaserch run could be...a big loaded battleship with etherials.)

 

but it shouldn't be on the 3 easiest levels.

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UFOs, at least some of them, ought not only to be able to trick our radar, but also to scatter our returns (those neat little shields they use would be the cause), so that one ship would return about a dozen reports, but you wouldn't know till you went up to see them with a fighter whether it was one scout our a scout and three terror ships hiding in its radar shadow.
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A standard radar which uses radio-wave detecting is actually quite easy to trick. It shows multiple signals as one large if they are relatively close to each other, it shows "phantom planes" when multiple radars operate in same area, it points further than effective range targets as close ones, it sees echos from ionosphere and stationary targets, its dection cone has limits... List goes on.

 

Advanced military radars are more accurate, but their detection is still far from exact. They are likely to detect any target in its effective range (even stealth planes nowadays), but even they are not too precise in what they see. When outside of effective area (Too high, too low or too far) it can only point general direction, if anything at all.

 

 

I suggest that base and craft radars would offer relatively reliable detection, but size, exact location and speed would be pinpointed when you get interceptor close. With advanced radar systems this information would be available readily.

 

Also i´d like to see some other sources reporting UFO:s they occasionally detect.

 

Sgt: Local military radar has detected an unknown craft near Newfoundland, sir.

Cmdr: Send a firestorm to check that out.

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It's also very hard to build craft capable of travelling vast distances through space in a reasonable amount ot time, but the aliens managed that one damn well. If something's possible, I'm sure they've figured out how. Edited by Magstar
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It's also very hard to build craft capable of travelling vast distances through space in a reasonable amount ot time, but the aliens managed that one damn well.

They didn't do THAT good. The only ship the aliens have (in Xenocide) that can do that is their mothership, and that crashed into Mars. None of their ships that they send can go faster than light, so they either can't do it anymore, or don't have the resources.

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It's also very hard to build craft capable of travelling vast distances through space in a reasonable amount ot time, but the aliens managed that one damn well.

They didn't do THAT good. The only ship the aliens have (in Xenocide) that can do that is their mothership, and that crashed into Mars. None of their ships that they send can go faster than light, so they either can't do it anymore, or don't have the resources.

Or they don't want to bother building it into ships that might get shot down.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hmmm, a radar based on neutrino emissions...

 

I can think of a way to make small UFOs look like large ones, but making large ones look small...

 

Basically, it's the same trick of flying too close to each other. As long as they fly awfully close to each other, you can't be sure about the source of the neutrinos, just their concentration, so you could say "something big is out there" but you can't be sure if it's different craft flying together or one big one.

 

The neutrino thing bugs me though, because these guys go through everything and all, come from all over the galaxy, and thus your radar would have a lot of background "noise" to filter out in order to detect something based on neutrinos.

 

I wonder why you didn't pick laser radars? Lasers seems to be a good detection device (not now, but they look promising for the future). The problems with current lasers are the energy cost and the diffusion of the rays. The energy cost is not that big of a problem, since lasers used for detection don't require that much power, but the diffusion of rays is. The atmosphere is a terrible medium for lasers, and they end up getting scattered all over the place at long ranges.

 

If somehow you took care of that problem though...

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Actually, some physicists at MIT managed to figure out how to get a beam of light to continue on forever without ever spreading out. Now they didn't do that to a laser beam, but I don't see why it couldn't work.
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Actually, some physicists at MIT managed to figure out how to get a beam of light to continue on forever without ever spreading out.

Could you provide a reference? I remember reading in a physics book that that would seriosly conflict energy conservation.

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As long as they fly awfully close to each other, you can't be sure about the source of the neutrinos, just their concentration, so you could say "

 

X-Corps also has a bunch of satellites at their disposal. Anything they find with their neutrino detector, could later be verified by satellite. Tricking the Corps is going to be pretty tough for the aliens, unless they start blowing satellites up.

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As long as they fly awfully close to each other, you can't be sure about the source of the neutrinos, just their concentration, so you could say "

 

X-Corps also has a bunch of satellites at their disposal. Anything they find with their neutrino detector, could later be verified by satellite. Tricking the Corps is going to be pretty tough for the aliens, unless they start blowing satellites up.

its +10 years from now. For what we know, a war might have banned the use of satelites.

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Hmnmm. Lemme look into that continous light of the MIT thing. It sounds strange enough (it's kinda against the whole medium thing for light, I think only vacuum prevents light from spreading out...)

 

Anyway I'm no physics student, so I'll need to check that one...

 

About the satellites thing: I mostly think of X-Com as a stand alone corporation (or combat force) and independent of other countries and their resources (except funding).

 

Unless X-Com has satellites of it's own...

 

Wait a minute, why don't we have improved satellite launchers instead of radars? I remember this being suggested in another post somewhere, but the guy was all about satellites that could attack alien bases with beam of light and so on. Why not just plain simple radar satellites?

 

BTW: The aliens could just have blown up all the satellites prior to the invasion of the earth or smt...

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  • 3 months later...

XCOM should be getting a LOT of help from its sponsors. I'd say it'd get satellite coverage.

 

Anyway, this would have to be only on the very hard difficulty levels, and even then, it'd probably be best to keep it until later on in the game, when you have the resources to actually tackle a large UFO :)

 

Also, it'd eventually have to be rendered mute when you started discovering how the aliens send signals and how their crafts work, etc... so it wouldn't last for all that long a period anyway.

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I don't think satellites would be of much use due to them being unprotected and in space where the aliens have virtually complete control. If one were to put some weapons on the satellites... perhaps like one places weapons on their bases... they would stand a chance.
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  • 4 months later...
X-COM probably hires the best hackers in the world and knows where all the spy satellites are. THey could easily up-link quietly and get data that way. Satellites are vital to the economy and stability of Earth, so aliens would not attack them. Also, I imagine X-COM would use their channels to have a mini-HWD installed on future commercial satellites that are launched.
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Very good point Qonfused. I have another idea to make tracking alien infiltration more difficult.

 

The aliens figure out that they can build Earth aircraft looking UFOs and fit them with transponders. With appropriate infiltrators in the airtraffic system, they could fly UFO missions using 737 Infiljets, etc.

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I think the topic has strayed from the point at hand. I suggest we think more gameplay and less science/realism. This is not a simulation its a strategy game (from the planetview mode), and a science fiction one at that. I don't think we should be rejecting ideas because the science in the backstory does not support it...

 

My suggestion to genisis' initial comment is that perhaps some UFO's at random will not provide complete information about its size. This hidden information will cause the player to be more cautious in such an event and provide tension and an interesting decision: play it safe and send both your <Interceptors> or send one and hope its a small UFO.

Another benefit to this approach is that the player will not feel cheated when this event occurs. He will be given full information (which incidentally is that there is not full information) and must therefore make his own decisions. Simply throwing a switch-up in the middle of the game to "trick" the player will not be fun for him and he will most likely simply reload to an earlier save (kinda like when you get suprised by blaster bomb in the battleview, you know you reloaded don't lie).

 

 

Note:The chance of incomplete info could decrease with amount of radars, difficulty level, time UFO has existed, etc. The missing info could be replaced by ?s.

Edited by JakeDrake
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