heating and cooling a starship?
- Thread starter drychlick
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would there be any problem heating or cooling a star ship this size of the E-D? Like of they right by a sun would that take a lot of power to keep it cool? Thank you for your time!
My guess is the shields 'magically' protect the ship's hull from heat. If the shields prevent EM radiation from ever hitting the hull, then it won't heat up at all.
I think that deals with some of it, but when they get to close to a star you often hear them talk about the hull temp rising.
As for deep space, that almost seems simpler.
I remember reading something a while back that said the transfer of heat in space is very inefficient, to the point where moderate insulation is enough to keep the heat in. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it makes sense considering we can keep the shuttles and stations we send up warm with today's tech.
As for deep space, that almost seems simpler.
I remember reading something a while back that said the transfer of heat in space is very inefficient, to the point where moderate insulation is enough to keep the heat in. I'm not sure how accurate that is, but it makes sense considering we can keep the shuttles and stations we send up warm with today's tech.
Vacuum itself is a wonderful insulator, as anyone who's ever owned a thermos bottle has experienced firsthand. There are three ways heat is transferred, which in decreasing order of efficiency are convection (a flow of matter taking heat progressively away), conduction (heat transferred by contact from one material to another), and radiation (EM radiation carrying heat energy away). In vacuum, with no significant amount of material around, radiation is the only heat-transfer mechanism that operates.
So what you see in fiction about people instantly freezing in the vacuum of space is total BS. If you're in shadow, you'd cool off very gradually, much more gradually than you would in air or water. If you're in sunlight, the danger is overheating, and what you need is a way to lose heat rather than keep it.
Cooling is a big problem for spaceships, because they're flying around in a thermos bottle the size of the universe. And it would be even harder for a starship, something massive and slow to cool, with lots of crewmembers and powerful engines and equipment all generating tons of heat. The one thing that all starships would absolutely need, but which virtually all fictional starships lack, is heat radiator fins. (In real life, the space shuttle keeps its radiators inside the cargo doors, which is why it always keeps the doors open while in orbit.)
So you wouldn't really need any heating mechanism for a starship, since even if you don't have a star to heat you from outside, you have your engines and your own bodies to heat you from inside. We planet-dwellers don't tend to realize how much heat our existence generates, since our environment carries it away (conduction and convection again). But our machines, our cars, our buildings, our bodies, they're all pouring out waste heat. Cities generate so much heat that they actually alter the weather around them. And heck, look at nuclear reactors. How do they generate power? By generating huge amounts of heat, which turns water into steam, which drives turbines, which generate electricity. Now, just imagine how much heat an antimatter reactor would generate. Really, the whole Trekkish idea of a warp reactor sitting right inside a populated section of the ship is thermodynamically absurd. It would roast the entire crew in short order. Realistically, the reactor would have to be in a separate, uninhabited module, insulated from the rest of the ship by the vacuum of space. And that module would still need enormous radiator fins to cool it.
So, it's rather insightful that the design of the original Enterprise included little doohickeys on the aft ends of the nacelles called intercoolers.
I wouldn't really call the secondary hull a populated section, but that's not quite the point. It's a matter of being able to get to that reactor in a timely fashion should something go hinky, which would almost certainly mean a matter of seconds could make the difference between main power being down for a few hours and an expanding cloud of debris being where the ship used to be.
So, assuming the heat problem can be licked with some 22nd, 23rd or 24th Century technology, there shouldn't be a problem with having the main reactor right where you can get at it. And we do have TNG references to coolant and how a leak pretty much ensures a core breach, so, while things can, and presumably do, go wrong on occasion, I think it's safe to say that they've, more or less, solved the problem.
You can always cool it down using an interdimensional bridge. Oh wait, that was Stargate.
Given the size of the radiator fins on the ISS, which generates much less heat than a matter/anti-matter reactor would, I think it's safe to say that those dinky little intercoolers wouldn't do much.
As Shaw is fond of saying, you're looking at it from a Victorian view of science.
Besides, I think the intercoolers are just for the nacelles, not the main reactor. The M/ARC uses some other cooling system we haven't seen (and something I'd better address in my deck plans....).
Besides, I think the intercoolers are just for the nacelles, not the main reactor. The M/ARC uses some other cooling system we haven't seen (and something I'd better address in my deck plans....).
Well, first of all there's always the "emergency flush vents" on the nacelle pylons. These almost certainly flush coolant through heat exchangers and then dump that coolant into space in order to rapidly expel excess heat from the ship.
Second of all, it's entirely possible and even likely that modern starships use some method to reclaim some of their waste heat instead of just radiating it uselessly into space. Some type of internal refrigeration system would allow you to move all of the ship's internal heat into a designated heat exchanger that feeds a power conversion turbine, or even use it to generate hot water for crew use (bathrooms, galley, ship's laundry, etc).
The intercoolers are probably just a component of the engines' internal cooling systems, as the warp engines obviously generate alot of heat when they're active. These, too, probably operate by flushing coolant through heat exchangers rather than simple radiation.
Second of all, it's entirely possible and even likely that modern starships use some method to reclaim some of their waste heat instead of just radiating it uselessly into space. Some type of internal refrigeration system would allow you to move all of the ship's internal heat into a designated heat exchanger that feeds a power conversion turbine, or even use it to generate hot water for crew use (bathrooms, galley, ship's laundry, etc).
The intercoolers are probably just a component of the engines' internal cooling systems, as the warp engines obviously generate alot of heat when they're active. These, too, probably operate by flushing coolant through heat exchangers rather than simple radiation.
That's not possible. You have to release heat. You can not use heat without having a cold side to transfer the heat to. Turbines have a hot side and a cold side. To keep the cold side cooler than the hot side you need to radiate heat into the environment. If you do not radiate your ship becomes a giant heat sink and eventually melts.
Then again, they have magically mastered replication: they are constantly transforming energy into matter. They might use the heat radiation for that somehow. Problem of overheating solved.
^Replication is not turning energy into matter. It's rearranging the particles within a stored matter supply.
Besides, you can't game the laws of thermodynamics like that. Every process loses energy in the form of waste heat. You can capture and repurpose some of the heat, but not all of it. And any machinery you use to try to reprocess heat is going to produce its own waste heat. You can't beat entropy in the long run. No matter how magically advanced your tech is, you're still gonna have waste heat.
Besides, you can't game the laws of thermodynamics like that. Every process loses energy in the form of waste heat. You can capture and repurpose some of the heat, but not all of it. And any machinery you use to try to reprocess heat is going to produce its own waste heat. You can't beat entropy in the long run. No matter how magically advanced your tech is, you're still gonna have waste heat.
I suspect the heat dissipation system is somehow related to the deflector shields. The system soaks up the heat, transfers it outside of the ship, and radiates it away.
At least it fits with the established technology as we presently know it.
At least it fits with the established technology as we presently know it.
That's why I specified a REFRIGERATION system, since refrigerators are specifically designed to move heat from a cold region to a warmer one. In this case, all you have to do is move the heat from a cold region (the ship's interior and machining spaces) to a warmer region (hot water heater). There are various heat pump designs that excel at this type of operation, and refrigeration is only the most well known.
And all you have to choose is which "environment" you radiate that heat into. There's nothing in thermodynamics that precludes the capture and/or storage of heat in another vessel for use by another part of the ship's systems; it only becomes impossible in a closed system where you're trying to run the heat pump entirely off the waste heat being reclaimed, which requires greater than 100% efficiency. In this case, the heat pumps are being powered by the ship's fusion reactors, and enough of that thermal energy can be converted into other forms of energy that it no longer becomes necessary to radiate all of it.
But the fusion reactors themselves generate huge amounts of waste heat, so that would be a major part of the heat you're trying to convert. So it's basically the same situation. And even if you do recapture much of the heat energy, you're then going to use it for other processes that will themselves generate waste heat. You can add a few extra steps along the way, but ultimately you're still churning out waste heat and it all has to be radiated into space. A starship simply couldn't function without some kind of radiator surfaces. And the fact that most fictional starships don't have them is a mistake, plain and simple.
It's only waste if you're not using it. If you reclaim most of it in a heat sink, it becomes useable energy. Since the heat generated by the ship itself is just a drop in the bucket, it wouldn't be complicated to have both the ship and the reactor's output use the same heat sink.
And then you simply reclaim it again. It's basically the same situation with, say, waste water: even if you keep recycling your pee into drinkable water, drinking the water simply produces more pee that has to be reclaimed yet again. Sooner or later all the crap you keep filtering out of the water cycle has to be either dumped overboard or converted into something else; if you have a source of material outside of the loop, though, you can reclaim close to 100% of that material back into useable stuff.
In this case, we have a source of energy outside of the termal loops. You can keep reclaiming that heat energy through the ship's coolant system pretty much indefinitely. To go back to the water analogy, it's like living under a giant water tower with a thousand leaks. If you don't want your building to fill up with water, you can either build a drainage system to pour the water into the sewer, or you can pump that water back into the tower so you'll waste less of it. Obviously, even the piping from the pumps will have a few leaks, but in order to efficiently reclaim that water, they only need to pump the water faster than it leaks out of it again.
Not at all. Once again, you just need to get the waste heat out of the habitation and machining spaces. If you're worried about cramming that energy into a heat sink (which can only take so much before it either spills or melts down) the simplest solution is to extract some of that heat for use in other applications, saving the trouble of having to use electrical power for heating.
Again: radiator surfaces is a function of some fictional starships and speculative starship designs, the utility of which has never been demonstrated beyond the primitive 20th century designs that inspired them. The fact of the matter is, without very good thermal insulation, the skin of a space craft ITSELF behaves as a radiator and the internal temperature drops insanely the moment the craft looses internal power. Essentially, heat dissipation only becomes a problem for starship designs with pseudo-realistic limitations like weight/energy/power restrictions. Starships have none of these, so heat dissipation is a non-issue.
