Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
How do vampire bats work? They have some sort of insulation between their IR sensors and the rest of the body, or something like that.
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First of all, it's not entirely true that the heat sensor has to be cooler than the thing it's sensing -- it just has to be cool if you want to be
good at sensing. Realistically, you aren't going to get IR performance on the scale of the GURPS advantage without cryogenic cooling and 2" optics, so presumably anything TL 0-1 with the IR vision advantage has a supernatural power. Secondly, not all parts of the body are at the same temperature, they probably use some sort of membrane that tends to cool to near ambient (and is thus rather vulnerable to frostbite, though I don't think vampire bats live anywhere where that will be a problem).