11-14-2018, 02:57 PM | #12 |
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: waste heat
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).
That's my actual solution in practice, yes. |
11-15-2018, 11:26 PM | #13 | |
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Alsea, OR
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Re: waste heat
Quote:
More than one Traveller fan has postulated that FusionPP's dump heat into a different brane in N-dimensional space... |
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11-15-2018, 11:48 PM | #14 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: waste heat
Traveller is not reasonable superscience. Also, canonical black globe generators already violate the second law of thermodynamics.
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11-16-2018, 09:05 AM | #15 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: waste heat
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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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
11-16-2018, 09:11 AM | #16 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: waste heat
Quote:
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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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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11-16-2018, 11:29 AM | #17 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: waste heat
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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11-18-2018, 01:40 PM | #18 |
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Alsea, OR
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Re: waste heat
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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11-18-2018, 02:18 PM | #19 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: waste heat
The energy was put into it. Just a really long time ago.
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11-20-2018, 07:06 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: waste heat
Quote:
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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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. Last edited by whswhs; 11-20-2018 at 07:12 PM. |
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