[Spaceships]If Hyperspace is a fluid medium

[Langy]

Originally Posted by gjc8

If it's at a different temperature than cosmic microwave background, I think you end up with a perpetual motion machine, albeit potentially a very slow and inefficient one. You can avoid that by having it be at the same temperature, but much more efficient for heat transfer for whatever reason.

Ah - that's cool to know. As for why it's more efficient for heat transfer - convection is pretty much always better for heat transfer than radiation.

One thing to consider: having a big, cold heatsink is useful for more than just spaceships. Even in on planets, etc, hyperspace may be a better heatsink, since CMB is very cold.

Yeah - I considered that. There might be some things that use it - say, nuclear power plants - but I doubt that it'd be that common in most things, since it'd also be rather expensive.

You must decide how heat-conductive hyperspace is. Too little, and it works like vacuum, but too much and it will cool a spaceship very, very fast, up to the heat-conductive limit of the outer hull.

How much of a problem would this be? I'm guessing it'd put an upper limit on how long you can remain in hyperspace before you freeze to death unless you've got a reactor capable of churning out excessive amounts of heat, but how long do you think that'd be? Minutes, seconds, hours, days, weeks? I'd prefer it if big ships can last a few weeks in hyperspace without having too many reactors dedicated to just keeping the ship not-freezing.