Quote:
Originally Posted by DataPacRat
Has anyone got any suggestions on how to convert the local temperature of space into damage?
The earlier suggestion of converting space-dust into the equivalent of a neutral particle beam worked out well; are there any rules-of-thumb to say things like "If you're close enough to a star that things get heated up to a temperature of 8,000 Kelvins, that's dumping X gigajoules of energy into your shields per turn, which can be treated like a laser doing Y damage per turn"? (If surface area matters, the speedster is 216 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, implying an area of around 8,400 sf.)
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I think I've got a handle on damage from light/heat in terms of watts, if not Kelvins.
At 1 AU, the sun's output is 1,368 watts/m^2. At its surface, 0.00465 AU, that's about 63 MW/m^2. The speedster is around 780 m^2, so it's absorbing 49.3 GW of energy every second, or around 500 GW every 10-second turn. Spaceships beams of 300 or 1000 GW do an average of 5250 or 7000 non-decade damage, well within the shields' capacity.
One of the larger nearby stars, Vega, has a luminosity of 40.12 of the sun, or 55 kW/m^2 at 1 AU; at its surface (~2.5 solar radii, 0.0116 AU), 406 MW/m^2 every second; the speedster's surface absorbs 316 GJ per second, or 3 TJ per 10-second turn, a mere average damage of 10,500.
So far, so good; let's try some heavier stars, with the tables and formulae from GURPS Space.
A star of mass 10 suns has luminosity 11,000, temperature 20,000 K, radius 0.0406 AU, outputs 9.11 GW/m^2 at its surface, so the ship gets 71 TJ per turn, which if we round up to 100 TJ, implies an average damage per turn of on the order of 35,000.
A star of mass 100 suns has luminosity 110M, temperature 50,000 K, radius 0.65 AU, outputs 356 GW/m^2 at its surface, the ship getting 2.8 PJ per turn, enjoying around 105,000 damage per turn.
All in all, it looks like as long as the speedster stays outside of the star itself, it can handle the heat.
... So, anyone care to estimate the damage from going /into/ a star? :)