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Originally Posted by Sinestra
IM going to agree with 4tran on this one. As we all space is vast finding something something is not easy so if one did come into close or a decent proximity to something it would stand out especially if you are actually looking for soemthing. Even taken into accont that there is debris floating you would still investigate quite simply because its there. The best way to avoid something is space or anything for that matter is distance, closing the distance between an object is your best for locating a target hence recon missions. I dont see a problem in how AEU found the Ptolemaios.
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Distance in space is entirely different from distance in anything else. There's no atmosphere to give depth perception, for example, so it really is impossible in space to tell if something is close or far away. It's impossible to draw references of scale in space, so visuals won't tell you if something is huge and distant or close and small. For example, one of the Apollo astronaughts almost walked into a canyon the depth of three Empire State Buildings because the other side looked less than a hundred feet away, rather than closer to a mile or more. You can't look at an object in space and say "that anomaly is at X,Y,Z."
Might it make sense to create a computer program that synthesizes the feed of visual and radar scanners, with any appearance on one and not the other triggering a flag of some sort? It would be an incredibly clumsy system. What do you do about all the things that are big enough to be picked up by sight (meteors passing between a star, small debree deemed too insignificant by the radar to register) but are too small/too far away to be picked up by radar? How would you know that something was having radar cloaking, and not just too far?
Sight-reliant search strategies in space bug me, and they really shouldn't matter to anyone to anyone who wants to be realistic about "stealth" in space in the first place, because stealth in space is bogus. Commercial off the shelf technologies can pick up the heat signatures of the smallest heat sources from the other side of the galaxy, let alone the planet.