Another Heat Handwave

[Hecateus]

Hi ho,
recently thought of another excuse on how to dissipate the gross amounts of heat that ships generate. Last time I suggested that heat buildups could be shunted to the gravity drives and 'transfered' to gasses used up from the fusion powerplants, and these would be used to supplement the thrust of the gravity manouever drives.

Today, I suggest that JumpSpace is very very cold...quickly sucking out whatever heat is present on a ship's surface. Occupants would freeze without adequate insulation and turning the AC off.

Oviously this doesn't help outside of jumpspace.

Is that plausable enough to get past the munchkins in a group?

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi,

regarding environmental and energy saving aspects I would suggest that also heat could be transfered back into some form of energy, which is storeable in a better way.
At least also the fusion power plant must perform a heat - electricity conversion somehow in order to feed ships systems...so why shouldnt be there secondary converters as in todays power plants, too.

From an engineering point of view this would be logical, because it could reduce fuel consumption.

OTOH it could quite a good way of recycling to use heated high pressure fusion products as secondary reaction thrust material for ships position control...

To use jumpspace for cooling may be difficult because of the jump grid / jump field normally is something to protect the ship from any interaction with jumpspace.
(Hmmm, you remember the cartoon with the sign in the ships interior: "Protect Your environment - dump in jump" ?)

At least You know Your players. So try to sell them the concepts they may like the most

Regards,

Mert

 

[signless]

I seem to remember a nifty solution David Brin came up with in his book "Sundiver". He used a gizmo called a "refrigeration laser" to pump waste heat from the body of a ship.
Perhaps a low-power solution like that could work...and possibly offer some exciting mishaps for PC's in transit.

 

[Anthony]

Originally posted by signless:
I seem to remember a nifty solution David Brin came up with in his book "Sundiver". He used a gizmo called a "refrigeration laser" to pump waste heat from the body of a ship.

It happens to be thermodynamically impossible, but it was a nifty device. The problem is that you can only generate energy from heat if you have a heat differential (i.e. you have a cool area to dump the energy into) and there are specific efficiency limits depending on relative temperature (any inefficiency goes to heat up your cool area).