A spot of failure: measuring local temperature by ship heat.

[Jackie Silver]

I hoped to measure outside temperature by reference to the inside temperature of my ship, for use in complicated multiple star systems where other methods of determining temperature are difficult.
By stopping at various points around a boring singleton K-type star I tried to calibrate the outside temperature against ship heat %.
I dropped out of supercruise, brought the ship to a halt and left it for a minute to cool down to equilibrium.
I worked out what the outside temperature would be in K (x-axis) and plotted ship temperature % (y-axis) against it on this graph:



Unfortunately the ship heat only varies significantly when the outside temperature is very hot, and more importantly there is an amount of variation from a smooth line anyway (the temperatures vary around about 27%, sometimes 26%, sometimes 28%) so it isn't very useful.

Of course, this is for a very cool running Cobra. I may try again with a ship that's more sensitive to temperature changes.

(the high point of the temperature there was a considerable way inside fuel-scooping distance, and was the only point at which the heat dump panels were opened)

 

[Murishani]

Hey Jackie, this is interesting stuff and it lends credence to how Ziljan and I were discussing ship heat mechanics when stuck in gravity wells.

You probably already know this (smart cookie), but the reason (I suspect) that you're seeing that hard left to right line is because that's the plateau for when you have less incoming heat than your ship is mitigating with its cooling systems. I.e. the exterior temperature is not known, it is just known to be less than your systems can mitigate. Your ship will run at the same temperature until it hits an exterior temp of ~2250K at which point the heat overcomes your mitigation systems and it starts to go above baseline.

If you wanted to test this more thoroughly, since heat mitigation is a function of the PP Id think youd want the WORST PP you could get so its mitigating the least possible amount of heat, I bet youd see a more steady curve like that.

just my 2 cents

 

[Jackie Silver]

While I was looking at it I wondered about the heat dissipation on the new ships - I don't remember having any particular problems scooping during the PP Beta but it would be interesting to compare them to the Asp, Adder and Cobra.

 

[Murishani]

While I was looking at it I wondered about the heat dissipation on the new ships - I don't remember having any particular problems scooping during the PP Beta but it would be interesting to compare them to the Asp, Adder and Cobra.

Does ship model have anything to do with heat dissipation or is it purely a function of the PP?

 

[Jackie Silver]

I think it does, because the FdL overheats if you look at it funny, but I haven't really experimented enough to know.

 

[InMemoriamSirocco]

Call me dumb, but isn't the outside temperature always -270°C because outside, there's the vacuum of space?

 

[Microblitz]

Radiated heat from sunlight will warm up the ship as will heat generated by the ship itself. It's the heat being absorbed by space which is detectable.

 

[Murishani]

Call me dumb, but isn't the outside temperature always -270°C because outside, there's the vacuum of space?

Like Microblitz said, solar radiation and worse, the ships ambient systems will heat you up above that.