No but the design and AG system define local up and down.
Why is the Bridge on top?
- Thread starter Slappy The Vulcan
- Start date
I'm not sure which Stargate ships you are referring to, i.e., Asgard, ect... but I agree that windows don't make much sense for an advance race.
By the same token regarding Trek ships, why do shuttlecraft have a large window instead of something like a viewscreen? Why risk having a large part of the hull more fragile than the rest of the hull? It would make some sense in the case of sensors going out, but unless you are in battle or landing, there's absolutely no reason why the shuttle occupants need to see outside the vessel.
I don't think the material the windows are made is anything like the hard plastics or glass we are accustomed to today, nor is there any reason to think they are fragile.
For example the windows of a shuttle are huge in respect to the size of the shuttle, yet there is no mention of loss of heat in the shuttle (I suppose the shuttle heater could be set at 500F to compensate), or that it is colder by the window.
They could be made out of the clear aluminum that Scotty used to house the whales, or something even stronger. Something that is strong and insulated.
A viewscreen takes energy to run, and can be fooled in some case more than a window.
Actually heat loss isn't a problem. Space is cold, yes, but vacuum is just about the ideal insulator. With no medium to conduct or convect heat away, the only method of heat loss is radiation, the least efficient by far. It's like being inside an immense Thermos bottle. Spaceship occupants actually have more to worry about from overheating than freezing. Windows might actually help provide necessary cooling, provided they're transparent to infrared. (Realistically, any sizeable vessel would need large radiator fins to cool itself. This is why the Space Shuttle always keeps its doors open in orbit -- the shiny surfaces inside the doors are the radiators. This is a basic fact of physics that essentially every spaceship design in the history of film and television has ignored.)
The problem of large windows would probably be about the radiation they let in. Including thermal radiation, if there's sunlight shining in. That would heat things up pretty quickly. But ionizing radiation would be a concern as well.
^^It's something that few people realize. Our instincts are based on living in an atmosphere, so when we think of someplace cold, we think of it as taking the heat away from us rapidly the way a cold atmosphere or ground will do. It's counterintuitive to think of being someplace really cold and needing a cooling system.
Of course, a body in space will eventually cool down to near absolute zero, but only very slowly, and if it's generating heat (whether the body heat of its crew or the waste heat of its engines, computers, etc.), it'll probably generate it faster than it loses it, unless it has sufficient heat radiators.
Of course, a body in space will eventually cool down to near absolute zero, but only very slowly, and if it's generating heat (whether the body heat of its crew or the waste heat of its engines, computers, etc.), it'll probably generate it faster than it loses it, unless it has sufficient heat radiators.
Christopher is completely correct here.
On the 1701, I always assumed that the "gridwork" on the inside of the pylons were radiators. (Last time I mentioned that, someone here decided that I really meant "vents"... so just for the record, I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT VENTS... got that?) Also, it's entirely clear that the "intercoolers" are radiating cooling devices as well.
Now, in reality, there are "laws of physics" reasont that, no matter what it's made out of or anything else, you're limited to a maximum amount of heat you can reject from a given surface area, irregardless of what it's made out of... but let's assume that the TOS ship is relatively thermally efficient, and that these radiator panels are far more efficient than anything we have to day.
This might ALSO be what the primary hull "underside triangles" were... and even the black "arcs" on the WNMHGB 1701.
Now, for the TMP ship, you've got more power being generated and probably more heat being necessary to reject. And look at what you've got... radiator elements on the OUTSIDE of each nacelle, and larger radiator elements on either side of the pylons.
Oh, and on the TNG Enterprise, there's a row of darker colored panels along the leading edge (top and bottom, as I recall, but DEFINITELY on the top) of the thin "pylon-ish" secondary hull structure extensions leading to the nacelles. In this case, these are the ships main radiator panels (which means that they SHOULD have been black... black is the best receiver for radiated heat but also the best emitter for it... again, this is a laws-of-physics thing that is irregardless of what material you're working with).
As Christopher correctly pointed out, there is no medium in space to conduct excess heat away from the ship, and no medium to flow past (ie, to cool by "convection" which is, essentially, a modified version of conduction... conduction is the primary medium but the math is different since the external medium isn't static). That leaves ONLY radiation as a means of rejecting excess heat.
So, no ship is space really needs "vents" at all... venting into a vacuum is a TRIVIAL problem so you'd never require anything large (or VISIBLE) to let you do that. But EVERY SHIP needs largish, dark-colored panels which will reject excess heat through radiation.
It is not(may not be) canon, but I thought that the waste energies get dumped into subspace.
You're talking about the nacelle struts here? Yeah, it occurred to me yesterday that those would be a pretty good place to put radiators -- although ideally the whole pylons should be covered in radiator surfaces and be a lot wider (but maybe that's why the upgraded design had wider pylons).
Having the radiators on the insides of the pylons would be a major problem, though -- because then they're radiating toward each other and partly cancelling each other out. No two radiators should ever be at less than a 90-degree angle from one another.
And there are still all those other starship designs that don't have comparable structures that could do the job (even inefficiently). It's a shame Hollywood doesn't design spaceships with nice big radiator fins, because they'd look so cool, like sailing ships or '50s cars. Plus they could glow red when the ship was using a lot of power.
Not very good ones, though -- just little pipes stuck on the sides of the nacelles? They're cylindrical, which is about the lowest ratio of surface area to volume you can get, which is about the worst design you can have for radiating heat into space. Radiators need to be flat and thin.
Radiators flush with the surface are a problem because they only radiate in one direction.
Trek weapons have been shown as more than capable of punching all the way through a starship's hull. Placing the bridge deep inside the ship would really afford it much extra protection from someone who is trying to target it.
Might as well put put it on top where it's easily accessible for upgrades and the like.
Might as well put put it on top where it's easily accessible for upgrades and the like.
Yep.
Agreed.
Ah, but on the 1701 (and 1701r for that matter) they ARE, really.
The trick is that this sort of radiator simply "beams" photos out, almost 100% of them are perpendicular to the radiator panel.
So... put a non-paralaxing camera (ie, put the camera REALLY far away so there's no perspective involved in the view) and look perpendicular to the surface where the radiator is mounted (ie, in this case, at the inside surfaces of the 1701r's pylons). If any portion of the radiating surface is occluded, or CLOSE to being occluded, really (since the radiated photons aren't always exactly 90 degrees from the radiating surface) and you have a problem. Otherwise, you're fine.
The 1701 and 1701r work peachy. Other non-canon ships may not, however. But those two ships, in particular, work VERY nicely. Oh, and the Reliant, with the surfaces on the TOP of the "rollbar" also works nicely (though... doesn't it have some on the underside of the rollbar as well??? THAT's not so good...)
Well, I'd want them to behave like a real material as it gets hot... that is, it might start off with a dull red, and eventually be blue-hot. But NOT "red" in the "LED color scheme" sense we've had ever since TNG came out.
Yeah... there are flat surfaces added into the middle of them with the TOS refit (ie, they weren't present in the Cage or WNMHGB versions), but yeah, they seem remarkably inefficient.
Who knows... maybe what we're seeing is a big SPOOL, and it unwraps into an emergency radiator device? That's not "canon" but it's also not inconsistent with what we know. All we know for sure is that we've never SEEN it do that... not that it CAN'T do that.
Not at all. ALL radiators only radiate in one direction.
See, for instance, the radiator panels inside of the contemporary Space Shuttle doors.
Still, your POINT isn't incorrect... a fin, with two radiators mounted back-to-back, is probably more effective than a single one. They do this, for instance, on the ISS. The radiator panels consist of a shared coolant loop, with radiator panels mounted to either side of that coolant loop. And yes, THAT is more effective. But it's also very DELICATE. So there's a balancing act between getting the most cooling and having the most robust structure.
More or less. I just checked my Franz Joseph blueprints and I get 88 degrees for the angle between the nacelle struts. Of course those aren't entirely accurate to the filming miniature, so I'm not sure if that figure is right. But from the TMP blueprints I get a 110-degree angle. Except there are no dark surfaces on the refit nacelle struts that could fit the bill, unless you count the "emergency flush vents" on the outsides.
That would be bad:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3e.html#radiator
Actually all radiators would radiate in all directions, being blackbodies, but if there's a ship hull or a set of coolant pipes along one side of it, it would only practically radiate in one direction, which is presumably what you mean. But of course I'm referring to flat fins perpendicular to the hull of the ship, which would be able to radiate from both faces.
Hmm, a valid point.
^^Sure, that's possible; they're already developing a kind of gizmo that turns heat into acoustical energy and then into power. But the laws of thermodynamics require that it be a less than 100 percent recovery of the waste energy. There's always going to be some waste heat, so there's always going to be some need for radiator surfaces. And the bigger and more powerful the ship, and the more heavily populated it is, the more waste heat there will be, even with a percentage of it reclaimed.
(As mentioned in the site I linked to yesterday, a ship would need two separate radiator systems, one for the life systems/crew compartments, one for the engines. Of course, in Trek you have the rather ludicrous setup of the engine reactor being right in the middle of the populated section of the ship, with people walking around it and working right next to it without being charbroiled, so we're dealing with a pretty fanciful treatment of heat management to begin with.)
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