Well, to be fair, it is a spaceship with some manner of gravity plating. If something can render inert the atomic energy pile and demagnetize magnetic bottles, why no let it reverse the polarity of the tractor plating that holds the crew down on the ground?
And who knows what these weird mysteries will do to the morale of the pet cats and dogs on the ship. They might decide to put aside their differences for the common good.
And for all we know… okay, I don’t really understand that last point.
Oooh, now there’s an interesting twist.
And a worrying one. The colder the ship gets the harder it’s going to be to see at range. Normally that would be offset by the fact that any rescue ship would be seeing light from it that was hours or days old (and still hotter) but if warp drives let them skip over that it might get hard to separate the Hood from her own drifting debris or engine exhaust.
Really liking this story!
Since a spaceship without a radiator system is like a giant thermos, even with all equipment off, a living crew should make a space ship heat up to a deadly temperature. It’s a neat idea, but the above means if the inhabited parts of the ship get that cold, then the crew would be long dead.
Why do you assume a starship doesn’t have a passive radiator system when current spacecraft do? Star Trek has always been a little silly about using über tech when simple solutions would do fine (force fields instead of bars in the brig for example), but It would be a little ridiculous to use heat creating energy in an effort to radiate heat.
Well when you have a starship producing hundreds of gigawatts of power in a warp reactor it’s hard to imagine a passive radiator system that would work. I could imagine that the neck and engine pod pylons might radiate heat a little due to their flat shape, but the Enterprise probably has some kind of exotic way of ridding itself of the heat. Maybe the heat energy is stored in the dilithium crystals or something.
Although a part of the story where they decide to fashion some extra radiators and extend them off the sides of the Hood would be really cool and I am going to draw that scene right now!
After taking a look at my Enterprise model, I see a few places that could be radiators. The grids on the engine pods, the “intercooler” rods may be an attempt at that as well, and there are grids on the engine pylons.
Unfortunately they’re really too small to function in that capacity. Even if the entire hull were a radiator, and even if it constantly dumped hot gas overboard, it still wouldn’t have enough thermal output. Well, maybe it would just drifting, engines ticking over; if it’s wiping out all life on a planet, or otherwise in combat, or just going really fast under impulse then it could easily vaporize itself with waste heat, thanks to the equivalent of many thousands of nuclear bombs going off at once each second.
I usually just wave my hands, mumble space magic, and pretend they have energy generating air conditioners which work without a heat gradient.
It was mostly an attempt to figure what might be an attempt at being a radiator by the designers. And yeah, I LOVE Atomic Rockets. Great website. Read pretty much the whole thing. Remembered about 50% of it. Any sci-fi writer should take a look, even if not striving for hard sci-fi. (Then they will realize how much they should be writing hard sci-fi! :P)
I imagined a heat dissipation technology that opens a small wormhole to some place like Titan, and just disperses the heat by cooling a heat transfer fluid inside the methane lakes. Maybe the Enterprise does something weird like that. Some small compact supersource of hella-cold-stuff. Or, perhaps, the actual purpose of Dilithium Crystals is to handwave away the heat, rather than being some kind of catalyst/modulator/cheese-flavoured-macguffinite.
Wormhole based cooling would be, well, cool. It seems too early for that tech though.
I like to think dilithium is some sort of super dimensional energy collector and amplifier. It handily explains the super antimatter in TOS: “Obsession” That small amount of antimatter should not have been capable of rocking the Enterprise, which is orbit, from the surface.
I don’t know enough to say whether a passive one could exist, so sure, why not. The ship would have to have a separate life support radiator system anyway, since an engine radiator system would be too hot. I think the latter would actually heat the life support coolant if they were connected.
Next, rain falling up, cats and dog in harmony, reality with a conservative bias! No no, I actually love the two additional mysteries.
Well, to be fair, it is a spaceship with some manner of gravity plating. If something can render inert the atomic energy pile and demagnetize magnetic bottles, why no let it reverse the polarity of the tractor plating that holds the crew down on the ground?
And who knows what these weird mysteries will do to the morale of the pet cats and dogs on the ship. They might decide to put aside their differences for the common good.
And for all we know… okay, I don’t really understand that last point.
It’s a Steve Colbert quote. He said it to imply conservatives are at an unfair disadvantage, in order to poke fun at conservatives.
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/716/623/38b.jpg
Good story so far. One little quibble. I think what she want in two hours is a,”report.”
Not a,”reprot.”
Oooh, now there’s an interesting twist.
And a worrying one. The colder the ship gets the harder it’s going to be to see at range. Normally that would be offset by the fact that any rescue ship would be seeing light from it that was hours or days old (and still hotter) but if warp drives let them skip over that it might get hard to separate the Hood from her own drifting debris or engine exhaust.
Really liking this story!
Since a spaceship without a radiator system is like a giant thermos, even with all equipment off, a living crew should make a space ship heat up to a deadly temperature. It’s a neat idea, but the above means if the inhabited parts of the ship get that cold, then the crew would be long dead.
Why do you assume a starship doesn’t have a passive radiator system when current spacecraft do? Star Trek has always been a little silly about using über tech when simple solutions would do fine (force fields instead of bars in the brig for example), but It would be a little ridiculous to use heat creating energy in an effort to radiate heat.
Well when you have a starship producing hundreds of gigawatts of power in a warp reactor it’s hard to imagine a passive radiator system that would work. I could imagine that the neck and engine pod pylons might radiate heat a little due to their flat shape, but the Enterprise probably has some kind of exotic way of ridding itself of the heat. Maybe the heat energy is stored in the dilithium crystals or something.
Although a part of the story where they decide to fashion some extra radiators and extend them off the sides of the Hood would be really cool and I am going to draw that scene right now!
After taking a look at my Enterprise model, I see a few places that could be radiators. The grids on the engine pods, the “intercooler” rods may be an attempt at that as well, and there are grids on the engine pylons.
Unfortunately they’re really too small to function in that capacity. Even if the entire hull were a radiator, and even if it constantly dumped hot gas overboard, it still wouldn’t have enough thermal output. Well, maybe it would just drifting, engines ticking over; if it’s wiping out all life on a planet, or otherwise in combat, or just going really fast under impulse then it could easily vaporize itself with waste heat, thanks to the equivalent of many thousands of nuclear bombs going off at once each second.
I usually just wave my hands, mumble space magic, and pretend they have energy generating air conditioners which work without a heat gradient.
I found this neat page on staying cool in space.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast21mar_1/
Also, Atomic Rockets is always great, too.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/basicdesign.php#id–Heat_Radiators
It was mostly an attempt to figure what might be an attempt at being a radiator by the designers. And yeah, I LOVE Atomic Rockets. Great website. Read pretty much the whole thing. Remembered about 50% of it. Any sci-fi writer should take a look, even if not striving for hard sci-fi. (Then they will realize how much they should be writing hard sci-fi! :P)
I imagined a heat dissipation technology that opens a small wormhole to some place like Titan, and just disperses the heat by cooling a heat transfer fluid inside the methane lakes. Maybe the Enterprise does something weird like that. Some small compact supersource of hella-cold-stuff. Or, perhaps, the actual purpose of Dilithium Crystals is to handwave away the heat, rather than being some kind of catalyst/modulator/cheese-flavoured-macguffinite.
Wormhole based cooling would be, well, cool. It seems too early for that tech though.
I like to think dilithium is some sort of super dimensional energy collector and amplifier. It handily explains the super antimatter in TOS: “Obsession” That small amount of antimatter should not have been capable of rocking the Enterprise, which is orbit, from the surface.
I don’t know enough to say whether a passive one could exist, so sure, why not. The ship would have to have a separate life support radiator system anyway, since an engine radiator system would be too hot. I think the latter would actually heat the life support coolant if they were connected.