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Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/7/2021 6:18:13 PM

KnightHawk75

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So it appears any sensors attached to a satellite ignore EMCON settings.

In the attached scene you can see Blue USA-218, the rest of the scene can be ignored. You can not make USA-218's sar radar go in-active during play. Additionally if you throw on say a generic jammer it'll go active as well, this goes beyond just ignoring the unit-status buttons. Even if you uncheck unit obey's emcon and try to turn off the individual the sensor(s) it will reapply it's own override as soon as your un-pause.

Expected behavior: Sat units (honestly all units) to act as instructed and obey the emcon settings applied to them.

att: NonEmittingSatsInvisable-and-SatsDisobeyEMCON.zip

Build 1147.37 db3k491

Attachment (1)

Post #: 1

RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/8/2021 6:14:45 PM

boogabooga

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It's been that way since CMANO.

You've been spoiled by living in an atmosphere that conducts/convects waste heat away and works to stabilize electronics at a reasonable temperature. ;) In space, this is not the case, and I highly doubt that these things can be turned on and off so arbitrarily without some kind of reconfiguration of their thermal management system, etc. What purpose would you have for EMCON on a satellite, anyway? Their positions vs. time are easy to predict; they can't really hide anywhere.

The current behavior is realistic, IMHO.

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Post #: 2

RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/9/2021 7:32:38 AM

KnightHawk75

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quote:

ORIGINAL: boogabooga
...
What purpose would you have for EMCON on a satellite, anyway? Their positions vs. time are easy to predict; they can't really hide anywhere.
The current behavior is realistic, IMHO.

It's not though in-the-game when combined with my other post. The only current detection, and targeting means for that matter for sats is via emissions.

Purpose.. At the moment Detection and Targeting of the unit as it relates to current implementation in CMO, consistency in UI and how units can be commanded in the game, and overall flexibility to model what ifs. Why would control work any different than anything else? I was trying to simulate say two sensors on a unit, with a self imposed limit of only enough power to run one or the other at a time, wanting the unit in question to be in mode1 over one area and mode-2 over another area (where it was not emitting and in range of opponents detectors), lets say sar in one area and cameras in another. I often do non-typical stuff, with custom gear (be it modded or separate db) and having to destroy components in this case just to turn them off is less then optimal as it can effect how things play out if they take real damage. My opinion is it's fine to default these to 'active' upon insertion, as that's going to be desired behavior 95% of the time, but they should obey the passive setting, at the very least when check don't follow emcon and turn things off at the sensors level it should not override what the user specified.

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/10/2021 11:19:19 PM

boogabooga

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It seems that the auto-detect setting is working, that can be used for detection and targeting.

Satellites are operating on a whole different timescale than any CMO scenario. They are up there for months or years in highly predictable orbits (even the X-37 has its limitations). And the means to track them are all over the world. If your scenario platforms have the ability to track the satellite now, then they would be long ago "auto-detectable" by now, anyway.

Why model satellites differently than other units? Because for the purposes of what you are talking about, they are much more like large buildings than airplanes or submarines.

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/10/2021 11:33:02 PM

boogabooga

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oops, 2x post

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/11/2021 4:07:00 AM

Fido81

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quote:

ORIGINAL: KnightHawk75

quote:

ORIGINAL: boogabooga
...
What purpose would you have for EMCON on a satellite, anyway? Their positions vs. time are easy to predict; they can't really hide anywhere.
The current behavior is realistic, IMHO.

It's not though in-the-game when combined with my other post. The only current detection, and targeting means for that matter for sats is via emissions.

Purpose.. At the moment Detection and Targeting of the unit as it relates to current implementation in CMO, consistency in UI and how units can be commanded in the game, and overall flexibility to model what ifs. Why would control work any different than anything else? I was trying to simulate say two sensors on a unit, with a self imposed limit of only enough power to run one or the other at a time, wanting the unit in question to be in mode1 over one area and mode-2 over another area (where it was not emitting and in range of opponents detectors), lets say sar in one area and cameras in another. I often do non-typical stuff, with custom gear (be it modded or separate db) and having to destroy components in this case just to turn them off is less then optimal as it can effect how things play out if they take real damage. My opinion is it's fine to default these to 'active' upon insertion, as that's going to be desired behavior 95% of the time, but they should obey the passive setting, at the very least when check don't follow emcon and turn things off at the sensors level it should not override what the user specified.

It would be great if optical sensors and lasers had an EMCON tab setting to enable better modelling of payload duty cycles, even if they're not really emitting anything.

Also, emission detection for satellites would be critical in a scenario where the other side had spacecraft that could maneuver!

Such behavior can be modeled today with a special action commanding an instantaneous orbit change in Lua using the updateorbit() function with a TLE argument expressed as a single string.

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Post #: 6

RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/12/2021 6:25:20 AM

KnightHawk75

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quote:

It would be great if optical sensors and lasers had an EMCON tab setting to enable better modelling of payload duty cycles, even if they're not really emitting anything.

If not a button, maybe at least could be enabled\disabled in the sensor panel (similarly via lua) like other sensors when follows-EMCON is disabled, comes down to having a disabled (but not destroyed) state for the sensor. At the moment to 'disable' those types of units one must 'fake-destroy' them and keep track of the 'fake-destruction' vs real destruction in one's own state data. It's very doable (pm if needed) with some rare side effects like when a unit gets hit for real but not yet destroyed at the same time as 'faked-damage' is currently applied. In cases like that if it would have or did take real damage, it will be restored to operational when one's subsystem goes to turn it back on at it's next scheduled time for instance.

quote:

Also, emission detection for satellites

Sats who emit in 1147.37 are detectable from those emissions - so long as detector is in range, as mentioned in a different post it's actually the only way that sats are detectable atm, is if they emit.

quote:

It seems that the auto-detect setting is working, that can be used for detection and targeting.

First I don't want auto-detected, nor emitting when instructed not too, that was the point. And no, at the moment auto-detected makes little difference for targeting, as there is no weapon in database that will clear DLZ issues, that's been reported for a year. Try it. Without editing the database try to get any unit you can think of to actually launch on a sat in 1147.3X with db48X-491. If you can generate such a scene I'd be surprised (and want to see exactly how), but that's not what this post was about.

quote:

.... If your scenario platforms have the ability to track the satellite now, then they would be long ago "auto-detectable" by now, anyway.

---
Yeah...But they don't have that ability, (see other tech support thread about undetectable sats, which seems a bug), beyond emissions atm. You're also assuming I'm giving the opponent a means to detect them visually,radar etc (even if that gets fixed and worked) and I might be, but maybe I'm not, maybe they've been destroyed, maybe they were launched 24 hours ago, maybe they changed orbit. Maybe I'm trying to provide information to a side in a way that gets around other game-engine limitations that aren't always real, desired, or produce some other creative effect in a scene that doesn't deal in sats (yet does for the desired effect behind the scenes).

quote:

Why model satellites differently than other units? Because for the purposes of what you are talking about, they are much more like large buildings than airplanes or submarines.

Large buildings thankfully follow a users EMCON control instructions, as they should be expected too, as I think sats should too.

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/12/2021 1:07:00 PM

boogabooga

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I'm not opposed to a fix for your issues, but if you check the signatures of all the satellites, they are all the same arbitrary values. The space radar tracking model is obviously not fully fleshed out. In the meantime, IMHO the assumption that satellites are either auto-detectable or not detectable at all is perfectly reasonable considering the timescale of real-world satellite operations and the vast opportunities that there are to track them. Even 24 hours after launch (and rocket launches are about the least subtle thing in the world), satellites still have to go through a long process of checkouts and commissioning.

But some of what you are talking about is the satellite equivalent of having instantaneous aircraft turnaround.

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/12/2021 3:50:00 PM

thewood1

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Out of pure curiosity, what is the tactical and operational impact of knowing a satellite's emcom status? Do militaries at any point in time know what the status of radar is on a satellite? If they do know and it varies, do they react to that or prepare for that? Are there satellites out there or have been out there where no one knew its emissions or could do anything about it? Are there or have there been radar-capable satellites that are hidden to the major space powers?

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/13/2021 1:05:24 AM

Fido81

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quote:

ORIGINAL: boogabooga

But some of what you are talking about is the satellite equivalent of having instantaneous aircraft turnaround.

I disagree - most spacecraft with active EO sensors or cameras that I've heard about have duty cycles well under 100%, so they definitely turn their payloads on and off. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is something of an exception in that it has the battery capacity to support a duty cycle of 100%, which is notable because it is believed to resemble the KH-11 satellites. However, I've no source saying that's how HST operates, and HST and KH-11s use substantively different orbits, so a duty cycle comparison may not be a direct analogy. Additionally, neither HST nor the KH-11s are radar satellites.

Now aside from the KH-11 and its analog, these sources are for spacecraft that are typically smaller than those in the DB (although I think a Capella vehicle is in DB3K), but they're also for much newer spacecraft than the average DB satellite, and likely some of the most relevant comparable data available to the public. For all spacecraft sensors, I would be surprised if it took any longer to power than a comparable device the ground (after all, they should be substantively similar), and since CMO models those with instantaneous power on/off, I think instantaneous power on/off is an acceptable model for spacecraft. The scope of these sources excludes non-optical passive sensors (ELINT/SIGINT/MASINT/IR), but those aren't covered by the current EMCON features anyways.

Citations:
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4105&context=smallsat#:~:text=Conventional%20SAR%20satellites%20have%20adopted,attention%20to%20its%20thermal%20design.
https://vekom.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Capella_Space_SAR_System_Performance.pdf
https://simera-sense.com/cubesat-optical-payloads-7-earth-observation-bottlenecks/
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-space-telescope-electrical-power-system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN
https://github.com/cbassa/satellite_analysis/blob/master/nahid1_launch_failure_analysis.ipynb

< Message edited by Fido81 -- 12/13/2021 1:06:21 AM >

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/13/2021 1:06:41 AM

Fido81

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quote:

ORIGINAL: thewood1

Out of pure curiosity, what is the tactical and operational impact of knowing a satellite's emcom status? Do militaries at any point in time know what the status of radar is on a satellite? If they do know and it varies, do they react to that or prepare for that? Are there satellites out there or have been out there where no one knew its emissions or could do anything about it? Are there or have there been radar-capable satellites that are hidden to the major space powers?

If you know when an enemy satellite is passing over you with an operating payload, you could probably undertake deceptive actions (like changing a CVBG's course before a RORSAT pass [which happens in Red Storm Rising] or putting out dummy aircraft to fool an imaging satellite) to try to make the enemy draw incorrect conclusions from the data it collects or make them unable to draw meaningful conclusions at all. Sometimes this impacts things more at the strategic level, but it certainly can have operational impacts. In Best of the West, Worst of the East, 1982 (in the CSP), the player relies on satellite cueing for SS/SSG/SSN attacks - a human opponent who's paying attention could cause the player in the scenario to draw false conclusions about the location of the target from the data collected.

Does the end user of the data need to know the spacecraft state? Probably not, unless the satellite is also downlinking data in their AO and they need to deconflict RF spectrum usage. Does the vehicle operator (which may be a military unit) need to know? In real-time, not necessarily for most spacecraft (my impression is that the vast majority of operational spacecraft [which at this point just means 'Starlink', but that's a rant for another time] are not in constant contact with control centers on the ground), but the ground station should know whether a payload is planned to be on or not at any given point and be able to check that against what actually happened during the next communications pass. I have no clue whether or not it is possible from the ground to know whether an unfriendly radar satellite passing overhead is actively collecting data or not.

I also don't know if there've been satellites doing things people don't know about...because I don't know about them. It's not really possible to do anything about most satellites launched by unfriendly or hostile nations once they get into space (if it's in a low orbit, the US/Russia/India/China could try to kill it, but that's never been done before, and jamming is only going to impact a limited region of the sensor's footprint). Zombie satellites (which appear to dead bus [run out of power, so the bus dies] but then spontaneously resume communication after a very long period of silence) are a thing, and that might meet the criteria for your 3rd question.

This is speculative, but I imagine it's possible for a radar-capable satellite to be hidden, although it's probably not worthwhile. The only things I think you could hide it as are debris, a spent rocket stage, or another satellite - none of them are likely to be convincing once systems power up and start generating heat or adjusting the satellite's orbit. Objects in and around Low Earth Orbit are tracked with precision, by both commercial operators (such as LeoLabs and COMSPOC) and governments (the US coordinates the Combined Space Operations Center) - and that's exactly where you want to put a radar payload. My understanding is that if its big enough to stick a radar on, its big enough to track - it's almost certainly bigger and likely operating at a lower altitude than an ICBM RV, and we know governments can track those. Now once you leave LEO (for Medium Earth Orbits, highly inclined orbits like the Molniya orbit, or for GEO), I've heard that tracking isn't as thorough, but I haven't got a source for that. If you wanted to hide a satellite as another type of satellite, you're probably better off with a passive sensor as its payload - I want to say that's the first gag in Spies Like Us.

< Message edited by Fido81 -- 12/13/2021 1:07:34 AM >

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/13/2021 10:25:09 AM

thewood1

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"If you know when an enemy satellite is passing over you with an operating payload, you could probably undertake deceptive actions (like changing a CVBG's course before a RORSAT pass [which happens in Red Storm Rising] or putting out dummy aircraft to fool an imaging satellite) to try to make the enemy draw incorrect conclusions from the data it collects or make them unable to draw meaningful conclusions at all. Sometimes this impacts things more at the strategic level, but it certainly can have operational impacts. In Best of the West, Worst of the East, 1982 (in the CSP), the player relies on satellite cueing for SS/SSG/SSN attacks - a human opponent who's paying attention could cause the player in the scenario to draw false conclusions about the location of the target from the data collected."

But this has nothing to do with emcom state, does it? Thats been a standard counter to satellite and air recon since early military flight. And as to hidden satellites...they don't stay up forever. I was asking if satellites launched decades ago had been unknown and then found later on de-orbiting.

So I come back to the original question of the applicability of emcom state for satellites in CMO.

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RE: Sats ignoring EMCON settings. - 12/21/2021 8:12:51 AM

jannas34

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community id's and investigates bug, nada from devs

sad!

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Post #: 13