Tachyonic Radar

Tachyon radars are a very advanced type of radar system commonly employed by the Hyperion Federation on most military starships.   Following the Suon Unification War, the suons have realised the huge advantage of Tachyon Cannons, with their ability to strike an enemy at superluminal velocity, which would theoretically give them a huge advantage in space warfare. These types of cannons would be limited by their ability to detect enemies. At the time, all detection methods relied on subluminal methods. Some extremely smart suons managed to convert a component of a tachyon cannon and direct the resulting tachyon beam in many directions without causing the radar to melt itself and make an effective radar system using it. If the tachyons travel at extremely high speed, such as several lightyears/second, they gain the ability to determine the position of the enemy to an extremely precise degree and have a reasonable chance of hitting a target using a tachyon cannon.   Tachyonic radars have also proven to be an exceptional intelligence tool; a scout starship in one system can detect objects and enemies in other systems and constantly track variables such as hull shape and velocity, allowing the user to construct images with the data and identify a ship before it enters the same star system as the HF ship.   After the suon-saelian war, the design of the Tachyonic Radar has improved significantly. In modern radars, the tachyon waves are quantum-entangled with particles within the radar mechanism itself, which results in the positional error being halved as the tachyons do not travel beck to the reciever, and most forms of RCS reduction and stealth become useless. To become hidden from a modern tachyon radar, one would have to become transparent to the tachyon frequency of the EM spectrum, which is almost impossible to do for a starship comprised of many different materials. These types of radars are extremely common in the HF and continue to be upgraded with higher power, higher velocity tachyons, causing improved range and reduced error.   They would still need to filter some smaller tracks out though - such as rogue asteroids. Due to its sheer range, a tachyon radar would be holding a massive number of tracks simultaneously and filter a huge number of objects. They use an extermely complicated algorithm that accounts for velocity changes in order to determine probable enemy spacecraft. They run this algorithm on every track it holds, but they use some very large and powerful computers to run this very edmanding piece of equipment. This way, it is very hard to hide from a tachyon radar when moving, but becomes much easier when not moving. As the radar can obtain a better track on objects closer to it, due to not having to apply as many filters, it can become very difficult to hide from one when not moving and while in the same star system as the radar ship. Tachyons require a massive amount of power to create, and require very powerful fusion reactors or something even more powerful just to operate, making them fairly inefficient to use on every ship, but the HF uses them on virtually every ship anyway.


Cover image: Atmospheric Frigate by Tankium

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