Well, if they were close enough for the gasses from the explosion to hit the ship, then they'd hear it. Especially if they did a cinematic fly through the explosion of the ship you just shot. 😄
did you know: way back wen.. when they first released (Oct. 82) SDF-1 Macross. the first few episodes were what space combat was suppose to be.. "no one liked it.!!" so.. when the movie (85) came out they showed the first fight, as it should have been,, (but added sound.),,. all the fights after that they added dogfights...
That's the funny thing about people, we hate silent battles.
I just tell myself everything we hear is from the perspective of the insides of the ships we're seeing, the firing noises are from inside the firing ship and the sounds of the hits are from the inside of the one being hit. the 'whooshing' sounds when they fly are the drive fields forming and collapsing and the engines changing power settings, etc.
Then I ignore all of that speculation and just enjoy the experience ;)
I go to movies to see space battles, giant robots and sword fights.
If I want to consider deep philosophical concepts, I read the book.
Of course when the two are combined, that makes the movie memorable, but I can still appreciate a good special effects show, even with no 'redeeming social values' attached.
I imagine the sound as being generated by my ship's speakers to report a detected successful hit, and not necessarily indicative of the exact damage caused to the other ship. Most other sounds are the same sort of thing. The people who designed this ship know that I use my ears as one of my senses, it makes sense that they would utilize them to help relay some of the information.
The sounds of my lasers, on the other hand, could very well be from the capacitors powering those lasers discharging, but I wonder why they don't have charging sounds.
Yeah, when I worked on the VegaStrike project, they decided the same thing. People expect to hear noises, and nearly all forms of sci-fi gives them those noises even in space, so the game makes noises including impacts and explosions. We even dreamed up some applied phlebotium to explain it: "your ship's computer made those noises to give you audio feedback that your weapons are hitting and/or having effects, since your eyes are busy enough in a dogfight." In contrast, go back and watch 2001 A Space Odyssey, which was relatively realistic as to what space travel would be like, with lots of silent and painfully slow action.
I turn off those pop-up messages when I play, if it isn't intuitive then that's not my fault ;)
That's half the fun of learning a game and I can screw it up perfectly well by myself, I don't need help.
To me, and I may be one of the few, I see where the controls are and how the interface works and then game on !!
Buggering things up just lets me play longer until I figure it out on my own and that turns an '80 hour to complete' game into months of enjoyment and frustration of the pleasant kind ;)
"You've switched off your targeting computer"
Not my fault you put the O-N-O-F-F switch where the shield button should be.
Besides, it was a Decepticon in disguise.
Please stop hijacking my mouse back button. If I want to go to the previous page I've visited, I don't want to be forced to the previous comic instead.
Ok, I'll explain in a little more detail. I've got a Logitech G903 mouse that has configurable buttons. I have one set to "Go Back" On 99.9% of web pages when I click this button it takes me to whatever the previous page I was on.
However here and (for a while one other site, which when testing now doesn't do it anymore) if I click on the "Go Back" button, it takes me to the previous comic page (1762) rather than the last web page I was on before coming to comic page 1763 (gmail).
I can even make a video of it if you need it of me clicking the "Go Back" button and having it stroll me through the previous comics in order with the mouse nowhere either the back button or the previous comic link.
Given that I've only ever experienced this here, and one other page, and the only control I have over the mouse button is what command to assign to it, where else should I look to resolve t his?
Wow, her ship looks completely different from that angle, but still nice
So that's where the Enterprise's 'phase cannons' went...
Guess she had limited funds for starting equipment ;)
When in doubt, fire everything !!!
Space is too cold for an overheat problem
I'd think running the 'cooling system' through a finned radiator array would do something ?
Something along the lines of "heat always flows to the colder from the hotter" ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw-brvKO-Z0
I suppose if radiating the excess heat into a near vacuum was a problem then you could keep a supply of metal blocks 'chilling' in racks on the outside of the ship and bring them in to 'absorb' the weapon's heat until it reached equilibrium and then return them to the rack to slowly 'chill' again, sort of like 'whisky stones' ?
Or cycling a gas filled block outside to turn it into a solid by expansion in said vacuum then following the same process ?
Or simply apply the literary exception to the Laws of Thermodynamics ;)
I'm not a physicist, and I've not worked in space. So maybe I'm just an idiot. But I wouldn't expect cooling fins to work much better than something like a vanta black exterior, with all of the physical armor of the ship doubling as a heat sink.
After all, cooling fins work by increasing the surface area exposed to air flow. But there's no air.
You don't need to move your heat sinks around necessarily. That could work, but you could also use heat pump technology to move the heat. I'm not sure which would work better, but I just don't feel comfortable with this process that is opening part of the ship to the outside periodically as part of its heat elimination plan.
Of course, that doesn't work for when you're too close to a star - for that, you need a perfectly white or reflective surface towards the stellar body and a super-massive heat sink. But that's not where they are right now.
If you plan on having enough cooling block mass to store the heat until you get someplace where you could dump it, or fly around long enough to let the heat dissipate naturally, it would work. Just keeping them outside would face the same problem as directly having a radiator outside. Whiskey stones work because there's air in the freezer to carry the heat away. There's nothing to carry the thermal energy away in space, except to radiate it away via infrared. It's not great for moving a lot of heat quickly. Using a heat pump apparatus would certainly help, because you could concentrate the thermal energy in the radiating element, causing a higher differential, and speeding up the dissipation process. That does come with the added necessary machinery, and associated additional energy cost.
All that 'cold' has to be useable somehow, even at low but still 'there' efficiency, otherwise there wouldn't be any need to insulate spacecraft against it.
Sure, it does eventually cool off over time, just not really fast. Your best bet is efficiency, so that there's not a bunch of waste energy to begin with. :D
i'd suspectg that in the 39th century they've had lots of experience in materials management, superconductivity, energy transferrence, et al, to make weapons system that has a very high efficiency and produces the minimum waste heat possible.
What heat is produced would likely be used to provide heating for systems that require it and possibly for thermocells to produce power to put back into the systems, you can't create or destroy energy but you can move it around.
Radiating any excess waste heat night be as simple as towing a radiator array or building them into the structure as the ISS does now. The nice part is that the hotter something is the faster it radiates heat and if the waste heat could be converted to photons then that might be even faster.
In a vacuum environment, convection is no longer available and the only mechanism of rejecting heat is radiation. Radiation follows the Stefan-Boltzmann Law
E = T4
where
E = the energy rejected , the Stefan-Boltzmann constant,
= 5.67 W m-2 K-4
T = the temperature at which the heat is radiated
That is, the total amount of heat radiated is proportional to the surface area of the radiator. And the lower the radiation temperature, the larger the radiator area (and thus the radiator mass, for a given design) must be.
The radiator can only reject heat when the temperature is higher than that of the environment. In space, the optimum radiation efficiency is gained by aiming the radiator at free space. Radiating toward an illuminated surface is less effective, and the radiator must be shielded from direct sunlight.
Yes that's essentially right. Now remember, were talking about a compact fighter where radiator square area is at a premium. Basically your waste energy can be roughly calculated by power input X efficiency, and you get a rough idea how much you have to get rid of. Yes, you can use some of it for heating, and other processes, but realize, you can't just keep dumping waste energy from high powered devices into the cabin environment because you'll end up having a steady cabin temperature rise well beyond normal. Remember, high energy weapons would be an intermittent, and high input to the normal thermal energy handling systems.
In the 39th century, my guess would be that efficiency, rather than dissipation, would be the focus for high energy transfers, since you don't have to generate, or dissipate energy you don't waste. ;)
It's cold enough to chill the liquid helium tanks for cooling use, and more than cold enough for a VR simulation, no point telling the customers they can't fire at will ;)
Overheating was never mentioned any of the sci-fi series or movies unless there was a specific plot need for it and this is a sci-fi series ;)
Of course there were ruptured coolant lines aplenty in most all of them so liquid/gas/slurry coolant might be enough if it were run through many tiny tubes on the hull surface to expose the greatest volume possible to the coldest temperature possible, you'd still have to use compressors/pumps to move the medium around but probably not as much as you'd need to 'compress the cold back in' the way a refrigeration unit does ;)
(Yes, I know that's not the way coolant really works but it's a perfectly good description of that part of the cycle)
Liquid helium, (or nitrogen, or any compressed/liquefied gas for that matter) is self-cooling. When gaseous helium is drawn off, the liquid boils, and absorbs heat. That principle works just as well here on the surface of the planet. It's the same principle used in refrigeration, and it doesn't require the vacuum or temperature of space to work. Space isn't chilling the liquid, evaporation is. If anything, the effect of space is to provide a vacuum insulator, similar to the effect that can be observed in your Thermos. It keeps liquid hot or cold by introducing a vacuum barrier between the inner and outer layers: nothing there to transmit the thermal energy; your coffee stays hot. If you're using compressors, etc., to force a liquid state, that constitutes the heat pump that Some Ed mentioned before. As I said it can increase the rate of dissipation, but it comes at an energy cost.
Yes, plenty of Sci-fi instances being all over the map on this, overheating/not overheating, but the fact still remains, that space itself is a shitty heatsink. LOL Sci-fi plot and storylines notwithstanding. I can't remember a Sci-fi instance where space itself was specifically used as a cooling means.
What I'm (apparently unclearly) trying to say is that you can radiate infra-to-visible red emission to send heat away, but the only thing space itself does is to provide an "empty container" to radiate it into. Space itself doesn't dissipate the heat, your radiator does. In the atmosphere of the planet, air acts as a carrier to carry thermal energy to or from something. Space has no such carrier. That's why space is cold in the first place: there's nothing to hold any thermal energy. :D
I understand that and was going to use the thermos bottle analogy but in a different way.
Space is not a perfect vacuum, depending on the density of 'space' in the area, radiative dispersion might be more or less effective, in a nebula or interstellar gas cloud for example, or in areas of high 'solar wind' where there are particles to be warmed by the heat emitted, or by transmitting it out in a 39th century manner, we do have IR spotlights today and have for some time, they do carry a fair bit of energy but if you had that much to emit you may as well use it as a weapon. of course there's the heat generated by generating the IR beam to consider but anytime there's a difference in temperatures, objects will attempt to reach equilibrium.
I seem to recall seeing radiator arrays in several books/series but I can't remember exactly which ones, I do however recall seeing a great many instances where people started to freeze after the power failed and the 'cold of space' quickly drew the heat out of their ship.
I'd suggest venting a plasma or gas or even superheated water vapour to carry waste heat away but in space no one can hear you steam....
"I'd suggest venting a plasma or gas or even superheated water vapour to carry waste heat away but in space no one can hear you steam...."
*sigh* *facepalm* XD
Honestly, that would work.
To put it simply and succinctly, the assertion was made that space was cold such that overheating of device(s) was nigh on impossible. It's not the absorption capability of space that determines this; it's the capacity of the device(s) to transfer the excess. If your system is designed to be able to disperse the excess from maximum power use of that system, then no worries, but it's not a quality of space that enables you to do so, it's the design of your system. Space being cold has little to do with it.
Space is a soup of radiation, a few particles and little else.
Space has little effect on the passage of radiation, be it gamma, photonic, IR, radio or any other form of EM, (unless the energy hits one of the particles or something else sharing the space).
'Empty' space allows us to receive signals from probes at great distances, some only carrying 5 watt transmitters.
Space IS pretty lousy at conduction and convection, which is why IR can be emitted by radiation but not so easily transferred by 'touch'.
Vacuum flasks get around that by having a mirrored surface on the inside to reflect the IR back to the contents.
The vacuum between the walls of a 'thermos' slows down the rate at which the contents achieve equilibrium with the ambient surroundings via conduction and convection, not their loss(or gain) of heat by radiation.
All in all, those 'radiators' may appear black because they have a coating which provides the largest surface area possible to radiate IR from(or convert it into other forms of EM and transmit those), much like 'activated' charcoal or an anechoic or 'stealth' material, which bounces light around and makes things appear dark. Maybe nanotubes set on end much like 'vantablack' (Verically Aligned NanoTube Arrays)? although black is a poor choice for conduction, much better suited for absorption.
Radiating IR into space is what every star or object 'warmer' than the apparant temperature of a few degrees Kelvin does. It's how we 'see' stars and other things and why IR 'telescopes' work at all.
If space didn't conduct IR, then our local star and most others would be retaining their 'heat' at an exponential rate and would have overloaded long ago.
The thing about IR radiation is that unless and until it touches something to transfer it's energy to, usually in the form we call 'heat', it has no appreciable effect on the vacuum it travels through although it will eventually (luckily for us) attenuate through diffusion but still be for the most part detectable, like the residual energy from the 'Big Bang', otherwise we'd have been cooked long ago by all the IR produced by all the stars and galaxies.
To sum up, space has little to no effect on radiation or it's passage, but it doesn't lend itself well to conduction or convection unless there's something 'in' it to provide that.
The 'radiators' or other systems in sci-fi likely use technology we're no more familiar with than vantablack was to Neandertals.
I maintain that space is cold and dark, except when it's warm and bright and the biggest problem TeeDee is facing is how not to freeze in her ship while making it too hot for her adversaries.
"If space didn't conduct IR, then our local star and most others would be retaining their 'heat' at an exponential rate and would have overloaded long ago."
But space does NOT conduct IR. That's not accurate. Conductance needs material mass. What space does, is it fails to impede the IR radiation. In other words it neither helps nor hinders. Gravity, and matter in space have various effects on IR, and all EM. If space itself did conduct, heat loss in space would increase by orders of magnitude, since it could rely on greater transfer than IR radiation alone would allow. The local Solar system would be a bunch of hot rocks, because they'd be heated by not only the radiation flowing directly towards them, but the built up latent heat conducted "by space", rather than having the majority of the Sun's radiation flowing harmlessly past. We'd have a Solar system-wide greenhouse effect. If space conducted EM radiation, we wouldn't see the stars and formations as points of light, because the EM radiation would be conducted in non-linear directions long before it ever got here. IR telescopes would be just as useless, since resolution would be greatly impacted. However, the upside would be that space would be a much better heatsink than it is. That's the difference. ;)
Perhaps a refrigeration laser? Standard heat radiation is slow, but a laser could throw heat far enough away from the source to effectively cool it. It's theoretical, but it should work.
Still waiting for the Space Cyber-Vampires to make an appearance. Maybe in song ...
A hyper-jump to the left
And then a scan to the right
Deploy all hands to their ships
And bring your screens in-tight
But it's the engine's thrust
Provides momentum gaaaaiiiin!
Going to warp speed again!
Going to warp speed again!
I just tell myself everything we hear is from the perspective of the insides of the ships we're seeing, the firing noises are from inside the firing ship and the sounds of the hits are from the inside of the one being hit. the 'whooshing' sounds when they fly are the drive fields forming and collapsing and the engines changing power settings, etc.
Then I ignore all of that speculation and just enjoy the experience ;)
I go to movies to see space battles, giant robots and sword fights.
If I want to consider deep philosophical concepts, I read the book.
Of course when the two are combined, that makes the movie memorable, but I can still appreciate a good special effects show, even with no 'redeeming social values' attached.
The sounds of my lasers, on the other hand, could very well be from the capacitors powering those lasers discharging, but I wonder why they don't have charging sounds.
Re: alt text, Don't get me started about whiney forum game critics!
That's half the fun of learning a game and I can screw it up perfectly well by myself, I don't need help.
To me, and I may be one of the few, I see where the controls are and how the interface works and then game on !!
Buggering things up just lets me play longer until I figure it out on my own and that turns an '80 hour to complete' game into months of enjoyment and frustration of the pleasant kind ;)
What do you think Im doing, ordering pizza?!
Lovely work as usual.
Not my fault you put the O-N-O-F-F switch where the shield button should be.
Besides, it was a Decepticon in disguise.
However here and (for a while one other site, which when testing now doesn't do it anymore) if I click on the "Go Back" button, it takes me to the previous comic page (1762) rather than the last web page I was on before coming to comic page 1763 (gmail).
I can even make a video of it if you need it of me clicking the "Go Back" button and having it stroll me through the previous comics in order with the mouse nowhere either the back button or the previous comic link.
Given that I've only ever experienced this here, and one other page, and the only control I have over the mouse button is what command to assign to it, where else should I look to resolve t his?
So that's where the Enterprise's 'phase cannons' went...
Guess she had limited funds for starting equipment ;)
When in doubt, fire everything !!!
Space is too cold for an overheat problem
Something along the lines of "heat always flows to the colder from the hotter" ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw-brvKO-Z0
I suppose if radiating the excess heat into a near vacuum was a problem then you could keep a supply of metal blocks 'chilling' in racks on the outside of the ship and bring them in to 'absorb' the weapon's heat until it reached equilibrium and then return them to the rack to slowly 'chill' again, sort of like 'whisky stones' ?
Or cycling a gas filled block outside to turn it into a solid by expansion in said vacuum then following the same process ?
Or simply apply the literary exception to the Laws of Thermodynamics ;)
After all, cooling fins work by increasing the surface area exposed to air flow. But there's no air.
You don't need to move your heat sinks around necessarily. That could work, but you could also use heat pump technology to move the heat. I'm not sure which would work better, but I just don't feel comfortable with this process that is opening part of the ship to the outside periodically as part of its heat elimination plan.
Of course, that doesn't work for when you're too close to a star - for that, you need a perfectly white or reflective surface towards the stellar body and a super-massive heat sink. But that's not where they are right now.
What heat is produced would likely be used to provide heating for systems that require it and possibly for thermocells to produce power to put back into the systems, you can't create or destroy energy but you can move it around.
Radiating any excess waste heat night be as simple as towing a radiator array or building them into the structure as the ISS does now. The nice part is that the hotter something is the faster it radiates heat and if the waste heat could be converted to photons then that might be even faster.
In a vacuum environment, convection is no longer available and the only mechanism of rejecting heat is radiation. Radiation follows the Stefan-Boltzmann Law
E = T4
where
E = the energy rejected , the Stefan-Boltzmann constant,
= 5.67 W m-2 K-4
T = the temperature at which the heat is radiated
That is, the total amount of heat radiated is proportional to the surface area of the radiator. And the lower the radiation temperature, the larger the radiator area (and thus the radiator mass, for a given design) must be.
The radiator can only reject heat when the temperature is higher than that of the environment. In space, the optimum radiation efficiency is gained by aiming the radiator at free space. Radiating toward an illuminated surface is less effective, and the radiator must be shielded from direct sunlight.
In the 39th century, my guess would be that efficiency, rather than dissipation, would be the focus for high energy transfers, since you don't have to generate, or dissipate energy you don't waste. ;)
Overheating was never mentioned any of the sci-fi series or movies unless there was a specific plot need for it and this is a sci-fi series ;)
Of course there were ruptured coolant lines aplenty in most all of them so liquid/gas/slurry coolant might be enough if it were run through many tiny tubes on the hull surface to expose the greatest volume possible to the coldest temperature possible, you'd still have to use compressors/pumps to move the medium around but probably not as much as you'd need to 'compress the cold back in' the way a refrigeration unit does ;)
(Yes, I know that's not the way coolant really works but it's a perfectly good description of that part of the cycle)
Yes, plenty of Sci-fi instances being all over the map on this, overheating/not overheating, but the fact still remains, that space itself is a shitty heatsink. LOL Sci-fi plot and storylines notwithstanding. I can't remember a Sci-fi instance where space itself was specifically used as a cooling means.
What I'm (apparently unclearly) trying to say is that you can radiate infra-to-visible red emission to send heat away, but the only thing space itself does is to provide an "empty container" to radiate it into. Space itself doesn't dissipate the heat, your radiator does. In the atmosphere of the planet, air acts as a carrier to carry thermal energy to or from something. Space has no such carrier. That's why space is cold in the first place: there's nothing to hold any thermal energy. :D
Space is not a perfect vacuum, depending on the density of 'space' in the area, radiative dispersion might be more or less effective, in a nebula or interstellar gas cloud for example, or in areas of high 'solar wind' where there are particles to be warmed by the heat emitted, or by transmitting it out in a 39th century manner, we do have IR spotlights today and have for some time, they do carry a fair bit of energy but if you had that much to emit you may as well use it as a weapon. of course there's the heat generated by generating the IR beam to consider but anytime there's a difference in temperatures, objects will attempt to reach equilibrium.
I seem to recall seeing radiator arrays in several books/series but I can't remember exactly which ones, I do however recall seeing a great many instances where people started to freeze after the power failed and the 'cold of space' quickly drew the heat out of their ship.
I'd suggest venting a plasma or gas or even superheated water vapour to carry waste heat away but in space no one can hear you steam....
*sigh*
*facepalm* XD
Honestly, that would work.
To put it simply and succinctly, the assertion was made that space was cold such that overheating of device(s) was nigh on impossible. It's not the absorption capability of space that determines this; it's the capacity of the device(s) to transfer the excess. If your system is designed to be able to disperse the excess from maximum power use of that system, then no worries, but it's not a quality of space that enables you to do so, it's the design of your system. Space being cold has little to do with it.
Space has little effect on the passage of radiation, be it gamma, photonic, IR, radio or any other form of EM, (unless the energy hits one of the particles or something else sharing the space).
'Empty' space allows us to receive signals from probes at great distances, some only carrying 5 watt transmitters.
Space IS pretty lousy at conduction and convection, which is why IR can be emitted by radiation but not so easily transferred by 'touch'.
Vacuum flasks get around that by having a mirrored surface on the inside to reflect the IR back to the contents.
The vacuum between the walls of a 'thermos' slows down the rate at which the contents achieve equilibrium with the ambient surroundings via conduction and convection, not their loss(or gain) of heat by radiation.
All in all, those 'radiators' may appear black because they have a coating which provides the largest surface area possible to radiate IR from(or convert it into other forms of EM and transmit those), much like 'activated' charcoal or an anechoic or 'stealth' material, which bounces light around and makes things appear dark. Maybe nanotubes set on end much like 'vantablack' (Verically Aligned NanoTube Arrays)? although black is a poor choice for conduction, much better suited for absorption.
Radiating IR into space is what every star or object 'warmer' than the apparant temperature of a few degrees Kelvin does. It's how we 'see' stars and other things and why IR 'telescopes' work at all.
If space didn't conduct IR, then our local star and most others would be retaining their 'heat' at an exponential rate and would have overloaded long ago.
The thing about IR radiation is that unless and until it touches something to transfer it's energy to, usually in the form we call 'heat', it has no appreciable effect on the vacuum it travels through although it will eventually (luckily for us) attenuate through diffusion but still be for the most part detectable, like the residual energy from the 'Big Bang', otherwise we'd have been cooked long ago by all the IR produced by all the stars and galaxies.
To sum up, space has little to no effect on radiation or it's passage, but it doesn't lend itself well to conduction or convection unless there's something 'in' it to provide that.
The 'radiators' or other systems in sci-fi likely use technology we're no more familiar with than vantablack was to Neandertals.
I maintain that space is cold and dark, except when it's warm and bright and the biggest problem TeeDee is facing is how not to freeze in her ship while making it too hot for her adversaries.
But space does NOT conduct IR. That's not accurate. Conductance needs material mass. What space does, is it fails to impede the IR radiation. In other words it neither helps nor hinders. Gravity, and matter in space have various effects on IR, and all EM. If space itself did conduct, heat loss in space would increase by orders of magnitude, since it could rely on greater transfer than IR radiation alone would allow. The local Solar system would be a bunch of hot rocks, because they'd be heated by not only the radiation flowing directly towards them, but the built up latent heat conducted "by space", rather than having the majority of the Sun's radiation flowing harmlessly past. We'd have a Solar system-wide greenhouse effect. If space conducted EM radiation, we wouldn't see the stars and formations as points of light, because the EM radiation would be conducted in non-linear directions long before it ever got here. IR telescopes would be just as useless, since resolution would be greatly impacted. However, the upside would be that space would be a much better heatsink than it is. That's the difference. ;)
A hyper-jump to the left
And then a scan to the right
Deploy all hands to their ships
And bring your screens in-tight
But it's the engine's thrust
Provides momentum gaaaaiiiin!
Going to warp speed again!
Going to warp speed again!