Probably a stupid question.
- Thread starter darshu
- Start date
On page 65 of the manual.
"Use SILENT RUNNING to rig the ship for silent running. When so rigged, your cooling vents are locked shut, preventing heat from being radiated out into space. Your shield, if fitted, is also turned off".
"Use SILENT RUNNING to rig the ship for silent running. When so rigged, your cooling vents are locked shut, preventing heat from being radiated out into space. Your shield, if fitted, is also turned off".
Your power plant kicks out heat. When you are in silent running mode you do not expel that heat, therefore it gets hotter. It doesn't matter how much heat your power plant kicks out, if its generating any heat, it would build up slowly.
Its difficult enough for ships to lose heat as it is even when not silent running, considering the lack of a proper medium to transmit heat through. This is why your ships run hot at all... if it was like you imagine, then ships would be permanently frozen.
Its basic physics. Remember, space is largely a vaccum, and heat doesn't transmit well through a vaccum. That's why thermos flasks work and keep your coffee hot for hours on end.
Its difficult enough for ships to lose heat as it is even when not silent running, considering the lack of a proper medium to transmit heat through. This is why your ships run hot at all... if it was like you imagine, then ships would be permanently frozen.
Its basic physics. Remember, space is largely a vaccum, and heat doesn't transmit well through a vaccum. That's why thermos flasks work and keep your coffee hot for hours on end.
Yup - it's actually a lot harder to keep a space station (or spacecraft) cool than it is to keep it warm, because two of the three methods of heat transfer (conduction and convection) don't do anything in the near total vacuum of space, and so you can only lose heat by radiation. In fact, the reason that direct exposure to space would freeze (parts of) a person would be that the sweat on your skin and the moisture in your lungs will evaporate in the extreme low pressure and it will cause evaporative cooling. If you could actually keep your metabolism functioning (not easy without oxygen), you would be able to replenish the body heat as fast as you'd radiate it into space.
Common misconception, that moon landing conspiracy theorists latched on to. I'm surprised to see it pop again so many years later.
Thermoses isolate to minimize diffusion
Thermoses are reflective to minimize IR radiation
Thermoses use a vacuum to minimize convection.
Take one away, and you won't be happy with your thermos.
The next blistering August afternoon than comes around, remember all that heat crossed 93,000,000 miles of vacuum to get to you.
Source? I'm old enough to remember the Apollo 13 mission, and the major engineering obstacles that were overcome all had to do with the internal temperatures of the module dropping below operating specs, not the module getting too hot. There was considerable concern over not only hypothermia, but cold batteries, and the effect of condensation and frost on electrical components.
Because it was powered down to an extreme level; the primary heat source was the 400 watts given off by the body heat of 4 astronauts. It won't lose a lot of heat to space, but it will lose more than that. Small spacecraft are easier to cool, as well, due to a higher surface-to-volume ratios.
The ISS, for example, has no active heating system - the heat is produced as a byproduct of the power usage of the space station. It has an active cooling system. You may remember once the cooling system partially failed; the astronauts had to power off a lot of the equipment in order to keep the heat buildup to tolerable levels while they repaired it.
Gotcha. I completely misconstrued your original comment, as saying that station wasn't heated. It is, it's just using operating heat like my truck. My bad.
Yeah, i'm aware that heat has various modes of transmission. I was just keeping it simple.
Go on a diet if you want a small Asp.....