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Old 08-28-2015, 10:05 AM   #74
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: [Spaceships] Heat Signature, Cloaking Device, and Stealth Hull

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mailanka View Post
Any thoughts on how one would dump all that IR at once?
You have some sort of superscience technology that can pump out large amounts of heat without any sort of radiator, or at least not a large one. Saying it can actually manage several orders of magnitude more heat than it usually pumps out isn't going to break anything. Failing that, use the same technology to actually build some radiators, and you should be able to dump all that heat rather rapidly. It could have a cool visual effect - the ship momentarily unfurls some hidden radiators, there's a sudden IR spike, and the radiators retract again.

As Anthony notes, actually expelling coolant (or using some way to expel all the heat with a portion of the coolant, either through boiling or through using a heat pump to make what you're expelling super-extra-hot first) is another option. This will give you a limited number of uses of stealth.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Using 'heat sink' to refer to thermal masses that are used as reservoirs to dump heat into is pretty common. Do you have an alternate term for those?
They're apparently called "thermal stores."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth View Post
Actually, it does. Page 66. Time with radiators open clears accumulated overheat on a 1-for-1 basis. Whether or not you're still running the hot systems.
Ah, so it does.
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