There are technical dialogue bugaboos that we can't explain, but in general, the question on Spock's screen fits with what little else we know about their technology.Keiran wrote:Given that terms such as "anti-photons" and "gigawatts of particle energy" are used, relying on dialog being technically accurate may not be wise. (The question Spock was answering may have been somewhat of a trick question, given that it was referring to "anti-gravitons" in the first place.)
Vibrations of the ship due to people walking around (and banging on the wall, etc) tend to occur at particular known ranges of frequencies. Really, it's not that hard to filter out the vibrational motion of the sensors - you don't even need to know what exactly the vibrational noise "looks" like before you send it through the filter. For the vast majority of the vibrational noise you'll get? Fourier transform, zero the noisy bits, inverse Fourier transform, done.Including vibrations due to people walking around? If the internal sensors had this level of detail, nobody could ever hide while on a starship.
The problem with gravimetric sensors when you have gravimetric shielding is that a source can also be shielded from you. (I hadn't brought this up before. It creates all kinds of complications related to cloaking.)There's a strong implication that gravimeters aren't used for [a primary method of] detecting masses in TNG's "The Survivors," however. A ship that appeared out of nowhere was assumed to have been hiding in a Lagrange point.
If the Enterprise were equipped with with gravimeters as sensitive and precise as you would require to get around the interference I have mentioned, then a ship could not hide in a Lagrange point, because its own gravity well would not be affected by the Lagrange point. The suggestion that a ship could hide in one would be outright silly with sensors that capable.
Direct graviton detection would have the same problem: the gravitons being emitted by the starship would not be affected by simply originating from an L-point, so again the suggestion would be very silly.
There are some really quirky things associated with Trek sensors failing to see things (e.g., the magnetic pole issue) which make as little sense as tracking interstellar hydrogen in realtime in "The Battle."
However, the bit about the Langrange point is actually well taken.
Think about it carefully for a minute, going back to what I said about filtering out predictable bodies. L4 and L5 points are stable equilibria and tend to collect matter (most famously the Trojans). Accordingly, if you wandered in-system and picked up a million ton blip sitting more or less stationary in the Lagrange point, you would assume it was part of the random collection of debris normal to such points and discount it accordingly.
If anything, reliance on gravitic sensors would help explain why the Langrange points can be a hiding spot - of all the kinds of sensors, gravitic sensors are the most likely to ignore a ship sitting in a loose cloud of dust and asteroids. A ship is usually optically very distinct from loose clouds of dust with the occasional larger rock.
The only way you can detect gravitation "FTL" is if you're invoking some kind of subspace transmission component. Gravity propagates at c.And the amount of work is completely unnecessary if gravimeters are being used, because the effects of gravitation can be detected FTL.
Depends on how much resolution you have. In general, range at which you can fix an object is a particular variety of the basic parallax problem.Then what is the range of the system?
Two ships near each other ("near" relative to the angular resolution of the system) moving similarly will often be resolved as a single source, yes.And how do you handle two starships near each other? Your sensors will, at best, only see a single blip because the gravity is pulling to the center of mass of the system.
A MOE for distance, position, and mass, yes. That's how it would be for any sensor system.The alternative to phantom blips appearing and disappearing to fit the data would be a margin of error listed for each detected object.