Project ECHELON

[Liberty Security Force]

ECHELON Sensor System

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Interdictor-class AN/SPS-303

Eff. Range (P): 19.7 KM

Eff. Range (A): 10.1 KM

The Liberty Security Force's wide inventory of sensors and scanning equipment suit a variety of purposes; aboard the largest classes of vessel, as the many Interdictors of her fleet or even the Fidelity or Freedom, the most powerful tool is that of the AN/SPS-303 and its derivatives: an all-purpose, heavy duty sensor suite that performs incredibly short-range yet highly detailed sensor sweeps of the nearby area, thereby being able to pluck out even the tiniest strike craft in a dark matter hailstorm.

Developed just after the Nomad War at Juneau by a team of LSF-led scientists, the passive/active EM telescope and radar combination represents the bulk of tactical sensors for the Navy and Security Force; however, it has also become outdated and outmoded. Recent developments, especially research undertaken by those same teams at the LSF's Kodiak and the Navy's Radford and Willard Research Stations, have proven that there are advancements to be made both in the SPS-303 array's target-finding and tracking capabilities. Presently, the maximum effective range of such an array is approx. 19.7 kilometers when operating in passive mode, which can detect actively running sensors, engine and weapon emissions, as well as running IFFs. In active mode, the radar array can define targets more accurately down to individual power signatures and components at 10.1 kilometers, although this increases the detection radius of the ship beyond the maximum range of most vessels' passive scanners. It is the hope of the ECHELON project to either increase one or both of these effective ranges, while either reducing the maximum detected range of the craft or at least minimizing the effective information that can be gathered from such detection.

In addition, work is hoped to be completed on the typical long-range passive EM array found alongside the 303, designated the AN/SPR-307 Passive Listening Array. Currently, this array can detect faint engine signatures and sensor transmissions of any craft inside a system, but the fidelity of such operation is quite poor, and false negatives and positives are quite common. The goal of Project ECHELON is to look into the improvement of this sensor's fidelity, if necessary at the sacrifice of some of its excessively long range; while such passive detection is irrelevant when operating in friendly space where the use of ground-based or orbital telescope arrays is possible, it is the hope of ECHELON to eventually be deployed far outside the traditional area of operations of the Security Force, much as FIDELITY already does. In such a case, it would be exceptionally advantageous to detect and classify a threat long before it entered visual range.

Finally, other detection methods have been but an afterthought to both the Navy and the Security Force, and it is development into these new (and old) methods that should also be prototyped as part of the Project, time and budget permitting; most crucially the development of gravimetric sensors, that may detect and classify targets that are undergoing different forms of visual cloaking; in addition, research into passive thermal scopes and other forms of detection, such as neutrino-based detectors and LIDAR, should be considered if they prove to be a significant boon to the signals detection and classification capabilities of capital ships e.g. Project ECHELON.

This dossier will be edited and updated, and will be marked as such as cooperation with other organizations both within and outside the LSF fill out the developments and requirements necessary to complete this section of the project.