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Old 11-14-2018, 12:04 PM   #11
Anthony
 
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Default Re: waste heat

My solution to waste heat: ignore it. We're already violating the first law of thermodynamics, violating the third law is small change.
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Old 11-14-2018, 02:57 PM   #12
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Originally Posted by Mike Wightman View Post
SDBs, riders and monitors don't have jump capacitors.
Good point. Though if we're going to add heat sinks to them anyway for non-jump reasons, they could be the same stuff that jump drives have to have (or at least used to have to have).

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My solution to waste heat: ignore it.
That's my actual solution in practice, yes.
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Old 11-15-2018, 11:26 PM   #13
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Perhaps a reasonable superscience solution would be a device that is specifically designed to dispose of waste heat, and is unnecessary in places where waste heat can be disposed of by other means (oceans, rivers, air, huge fixed space radiators, etc.). Since gravitic propulsion is an existing Traveller superscience, maybe the device could be called the "gravitic radiator", and it's optional on planet-bound power plants.
Violation of the laws of thermodynamics, especially the entropy rule, axiomatically is not "Reasonable Superscience"...

More than one Traveller fan has postulated that FusionPP's dump heat into a different brane in N-dimensional space...
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Old 11-15-2018, 11:48 PM   #14
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Violation of the laws of thermodynamics, especially the entropy rule, axiomatically is not "Reasonable Superscience"...
Traveller is not reasonable superscience. Also, canonical black globe generators already violate the second law of thermodynamics.
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Old 11-16-2018, 09:05 AM   #15
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Default Re: waste heat

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
My solution to waste heat: ignore it. We're already violating the first law of thermodynamics, violating the third law is small change.
That is reasonable enough. However the technical ramifications about a superscience device to deal with heat can be interesting if you put narrative purposes first and engineering possibilities second.
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Old 11-16-2018, 09:11 AM   #16
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Violation of the laws of thermodynamics, especially the entropy rule, axiomatically is not "Reasonable Superscience"....
It's not violation of the laws of thermodynamics when a material such as radium continues to emit energy that was never put into it, even though it was taken so at first. Rather, it's a generalization of those laws to include mass-energy conversion as an energy source. Of course, in nineteenth-century terms, this WAS superscience, as the law of conservation of mass was as firmly established as any scientific law ever known.

If you can come up with a clearly defined physical mechanism for dumping waste heat into some nonobvious heat sink, then you have reasonable superscience. If you just handwave it, it's less reasonable; if you ignore the problem, it's not reasonable. On the other hand, if the production of waste heat is small, ignoring it may be simply narrative convenience, like not showing where the bathrooms are on the Enterprise (alternatively, perhaps the Enterprise uses transporters to dump biological wastes into space?).
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Old 11-16-2018, 11:29 AM   #17
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If you can come up with a clearly defined physical mechanism for dumping waste heat into some nonobvious heat sink, then you have reasonable superscience.
To be honest, the primary energy using components on a Traveller starship aren't a closed state anyway (energy weapons are putting energy into space, drives are doing... something) so you can just set your power plants to arbitrarily high efficiencies (upper theoretical limit for fusion is something like 99.99%) and make do with minimal heat sinks.
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Old 11-18-2018, 01:40 PM   #18
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It's not violation of the laws of thermodynamics when a material such as radium continues to emit energy that was never put into it, even though it was taken so at first.
Stop right there - you're quite wrong there. Fusion is a net energy loss above iron; the radium's radiation is literally releasing the energy used to create it, and it's glow is a mixture of its radioactivity and stored light in the form of excited electrons.
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Old 11-18-2018, 02:18 PM   #19
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It's not violation of the laws of thermodynamics when a material such as radium continues to emit energy that was never put into it
The energy was put into it. Just a really long time ago.
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Old 11-20-2018, 07:06 PM   #20
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Stop right there - you're quite wrong there. Fusion is a net energy loss above iron; the radium's radiation is literally releasing the energy used to create it, and it's glow is a mixture of its radioactivity and stored light in the form of excited electrons.
That is not how it was understood in the 19th century, when "matter" and "energy" were understood as entirely separate phenomena, each of which was separately conserved. As the nineteenth century understood it, the energy the radium emitted was coming out of nowhere. I am well aware of the twentieth century post-Einstein understanding of the matter—that was why I wrote, "it's a generalization of those laws to include mass-energy conversion as an energy source." But I didn't see a way to make the point that rather than abandoning the Law of Conservation of Energy, the twentieth century adopted a more general version of it, without stating how the matter looked to physicists in 1900, when they observed phenomena that violated the laws of thermodynamics as they understood them.

And that's relevant here because, if you came up with a novel physical phenomenon that allowed heat to disappear without being conducted, convected, or radiated, it could equally well lead to a more generalized conservation law; the process might no more violate the laws of thermodynamics than the emissions of radium violated those laws.
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