Great “this is how the world ends” feel to the opening sentences. A hint towards a greater purpose and some slick terminology.

You certainly haven’t lost the touch.

I just wish I could remember what inspired it. I’d had those first two paragraphs sitting in my draft folder for over a year, and only just decided to finish it the other day.

Does it really matter what inspired it? I can’t say I think about that kind of thing a lot.

Well, I remember that something specific I read or heard served as the seed for this little stealth draft and for the universe it lives in. So of course, now I can’t remember the ideas that spawned from that. :-)

The second time I read it, it strikes me that such an ultra-absorbent material would almost certainly show up on sensors quite clearly – it would block out background radiation and appear as an ultracold entity in space.

Interesting point. I guess I was thinking that, in terms of the vastness of space, a single ship is actually quite small and difficult to detect — unless it was giving off large amounts of energy, which this ship is designed to minimize.

I’ll have to put some thought into this. It’s something I could certainly use and build on. I’m going to have to think about how enemy technology might change to detect moving, cold pinpricks in space.

It’s briefly mentioned in some of Alastair Reynolds’ books and it’s something I’ve done a lot of thinking about for application in the HSAR universe – ultra-absorbence is absolutely fine in the micro scale, but stealth is very hard to apply with broad strokes.

Absolutely it will be hard to detect a “small” ship in the context of a solar system, but that would be the case even if were unstealthed and just using passive radar. You would need to actually be mimicking the background radiation as best you can in order to improve on that – and even then, gravimetric sensing would still pick you up as the most-dense object for several million miles.

Point.

There may be a little hand-waving from here on out. :)