Asteroid cores are not cold

[Soron Silin]

If true, why don't our ships collect water vapors and become physically blocks of ice?

Certainly, if water which is frozen in small particles touches a hull which is warmer than the surrounding space, even with heat transffered to the external radiators, it would melt and then refreeze as it drips off the sides onto the hull. We should become huge blocks of ice, not unlike comets.

EDIT: I guess we have to suspend real world physics when it comes to Elite ships, heat sinks, shields and heat radiators. None of them operate according to the laws of physics.

Drips off the side. Without gravity? Although it would when you accelerated.
If the surface of the ship is above 0 degrees C, then ice would not form, but it's at this level that FDev plays a little loose to give game value rather than a strict simulation. They don't need to define every little detail; they can just hand-wave it. "Don't worry about it; that's all taken care of."

 

[Schmack]

As someone well experienced in cryogenics and high vacuum, I can tell you that thermal transfer through losing the vacuum around a ship is very real, but it would need to dissipate rather quickly instead of being always cold. I think the game tries to represent the gaseous vapor as thermally conductive, without considering "conduct to what exactly?"

Even a heat sink doesn't make a lot of sense, since the entire load of heat would need to be in that sink at the same time to lose it by shedding it. That means the rest of the ship would need to become a super conductor of heat just because you activated a module. The molecular structure of the ship itself would have to change. The hull can only transfer heat so fast.. and besides, where does it go otherwise?

Edit: looks like I was late to the party..

 

[Ezren]

I'm fairly certain that the rather detailed posts above have covered this but one can imagine that the cloud of ice would create plenty of heat conduction.

Plus, our ships are just riddled with technology that doesn't exist, so who knows how, exactly, it would interact with the conditions. We can get pretty close to a star, one of the most powerful objects in existence, without just turning into little melty balls of regret, after all.

It's also kind of nice to just be pretty much fully invisible to radar while you're doing such valuable, delicate work.

 

[M0rty]

not the immersion. ANYTHING BUT MY IMMERSIUON!! SCIENCE MUST BE ACCURATE IN VIDEO GAMES EEEEEEE

Even a heat sink doesn't make a lot of sense, since the entire load of heat would need to be in that sink at the same time to lose it by shedding it. That means the rest of the ship would need to become a super conductor of heat just because you activated a module. The molecular structure of the ship itself would have to change. The hull can only transfer heat so fast.. and besides, where does it go otherwise?

Edit: looks like I was late to the party..

for what i gather: The heat generated by the ship isn't from the outer hull, but from the moving parts required to move a giant mass of metal and electronics through space. Space is inherently cold enough (-455F/-270C) i doubt the heat from the engines will conduct far enough away to be a real problem for the rest of the ship. Your ship is probably measuring general engine temperature vs the temperature of the entire ship from the outer hull to the climate controlled quarters behind the bulkhead.

Think about it this way: If you put your hand close to an exposed lightbulb, your hand will heat up, but the rest of your arm will stay fairly cool (talking about an average household incandescent lightbulb). But if you put your hand over an open fire, your hand, wrist, forearm and shoulder will probably start to heat up and burn you. Engines warming up vs sitting too close to a White Dwarf.

And water is wet btw....

 

[Soron Silin]

As someone well experienced in cryogenics and high vacuum, I can tell you that thermal transfer through losing the vacuum around a ship is very real, but it would need to dissipate rather quickly instead of being always cold. I think the game tries to represent the gaseous vapor as thermally conductive, without considering "conduct to what exactly?"

I think what you are missing here is the phase change of liquids and solids into gases and liquids.

Even a heat sink doesn't make a lot of sense, since the entire load of heat would need to be in that sink at the same time to lose it by shedding it. That means the rest of the ship would need to become a super conductor of heat just because you activated a module. The molecular structure of the ship itself would have to change. The hull can only transfer heat so fast.. and besides, where does it go otherwise?

Heat pumps, dear boy, heat pumps. That's how the ISS does it. Then add 1,300 years of development.

 

[Ezren]

Heat pumps, dear boy, heat pumps. That's how the ISS does it. Then add 1,300 years of development.

Plus whatever technology allows us to go faster than the speed of light and not liquefy our organs when we're doing the things we do as everyday things in these ships.

 

[Soron Silin]

not liquefy our organs when we're doing the things we do as everyday things in these ships.

I just worked that out and it's not strong enough to liquify our organs. 100m/s/s, or 0 to 500m/s in 5 seconds, is only 10g. With training and the right gear, you'd expect tunnel vision and using a joystick would be near impossible, but that's all. Collisions of course are a different matter.

 

[Lightspeed]

My mining experience is limited and I may be wrong but isn't it only ice roids that make you cold?

Rock Roids don't?

Also, nice thread.

That is correct. I've recently switched from ice rocks to 'regular' rocks, and these don't make you cold.

 

[Morbad]

If true, why don't our ships collect water vapors and become physically blocks of ice?

Certainly, if water which is frozen in small particles touches a hull which is warmer than the surrounding space, even with heat transffered to the external radiators, it would melt and then refreeze as it drips off the sides onto the hull. We should become huge blocks of ice, not unlike comets.

I'd expect the entire skin of the vessel to be tied into the coolant loop and used to cool or heat the skin as necessary, as well as for supplemental radiative cooling when appropriate.

THere would be no 'dripping'. Any ice that hit the radiators would be vaporized on contact (they are glowing hot, probably several thousand C) and remove all the heat required to transform them from solid gas in that short perdiod of time and be violently pushed away from the ship.

Anything that came into contact with the skin, which would be much cooler, would either sublimate, or melt and stick to it via surface tension until it was boiled off.

It would be neat to see ice collect on the ship if silent running were engaged (with the heatpumps reversing to cool the skin) during the wash of ice, but that's probably too much detail to expect.

As someone well experienced in cryogenics and high vacuum, I can tell you that thermal transfer through losing the vacuum around a ship is very real, but it would need to dissipate rather quickly instead of being always cold. I think the game tries to represent the gaseous vapor as thermally conductive, without considering "conduct to what exactly?"

Conduct to the ship's skin and radiators.

Even a heat sink doesn't make a lot of sense, since the entire load of heat would need to be in that sink at the same time to lose it by shedding it. That means the rest of the ship would need to become a super conductor of heat just because you activated a module. The molecular structure of the ship itself would have to change. The hull can only transfer heat so fast.. and besides, where does it go otherwise?

Most of a ship's heat is going to be contained within it's primary coolant loop (which would probably be water, for heat capacity reasons). This heat would normally be removed from the ship by circulating it through the skin (which would actually pick up heat and cool the skin in close proximity to a hot object), and via heatpumps that actively moved heat to the much hotter radiator loop (which might be some sort of molten salt, metal, or something more exotic) for the radiators to dissipate (they can work with such a small area because of how hot they are...radiative cooling gets radically more efficient as temperature increases).

All that would have to occur for a heatsink to work would be for the coolant loops and heatpumps to handle moving that amount of energy at that rate (I've seen setups that could freeze a dozen metric tons of water in about twenty second by moving heat to something that was already warmer than the water), and the material the heatsink is made out of to be heated sufficiently to absorb that energy before it was ejected. This would be a challenge with current materials, but isn't anywhere near as far fetched as other things taken for granted in Elite.

The actual rate of transfer through the whole system doesn't necissarily need to be quite so rapid as it appears either; there are plenty of ways it could be buffered along the way, and almost certainly reserve capacity built into the system to absorb rapid shifts that would be necessary.

 

[Bryan K]

Plus whatever technology allows us to go faster than the speed of light and not liquefy our organs when we're doing the things we do as everyday things in these ships.

Warp drive.

It works, mathematically. Look it up, since it’s on literally every documentary about deep space travel made within the last 10 years.

 

[Morbad]

It works, mathematically.

Only if you have exotic matter, particles that cannot yet be demonstrated to exist, and/or energy densities that are, as far as we can currently determine, impossible to achieve...which makes warp drive a practical impossibility.

At the very least, it's considerably more far-fetched than augmented humans being able to withstand higher gravity, or improvements in heatpump efficiency.

 

[VR SenseiMatty]

Everyone knows that if you crack a core asteroid and then pilot the ship into the debris, your ship temperature drops until the screen ices up. I've seen it mentioned in videos that it is because the core, or the result of the blast, makes that area of space very cold. That's wrong. That area of space is no colder than any of the rest of the environment.

Cold is, of course, the absence of heat. There are only three ways that heat moves: conduction, convection and radiation. In conduction a cold body and a hot body in contact with each other share their heat until they are the same temperature. In convection a hot body warms the air around it, which then rises and allows cooler air to take its place. A hot body radiates infra-red light and in doing so loses energy, which results in it cooling down.

In space there is nothing in contact with your ship, so you can't use contact to cool down, (except for heatsinks.) So you can't use conduction. There is also no air and no "up" for it to move, so you can't use convection. The only way for your ship to lose heat is to radiate it. Radiation is very inefficient for cool bodies and so this is a problem that real space ship designers battle with. See how they do it on the ISS.

The rocks in icy rings are cold. They contain liquid oxygen, which puts their temperature between −218.79 °C and −182.962 °C. Every rock is that temperature; there is nothing special about cores. That has no effect on your ship because vacuum is a perfect heat insulator; the temperature of the rocks around you makes no difference to your ship. It is built to work in deep space where there is even less heat coming from a sun and, anyway, with a spacecraft, the problem is always cooling down, not warming up.

Except, that is, in the dense debris field immediately following the cracking of a core. The blast vapourises stuff and throws out rocks of all sizes, large and small. You hear it impact your hull when the rock cracks. The smallest rock shown when you fly into the debris is maybe a tonne, but there must be a whole host of smaller stuff too, down to grains of sand or less, and there will be a whole lot of it. Of course it will dissipate in time, drifting away and being attracted to other nearby bodies. But not quickly; the big rocks are only drifting slowly and the smaller stuff will not be moving any faster. For a few minutes following the blast, that space is not empty. One might say that it is not a vacuum, although the vast majority of it will be solid and liquid rather than a gas.

All that solid, liquid and gaseous matter makes contact with the hull of your ship. The heat of your ship is conducted into the cold particles and your ship cools down. Rather than being a strange property of cores or the explosion that cracks them, the cooling effect is a beautifully observed simulation of common physical law.

I agree, this phenomenon could be explained with phase transitions but this is not the case. Even with phase transition anyway the energy is provided by the Seismic Charge, so there's no reason why the environment should be colder than before the explosion. The energy to crack the asteroid is given (again) by the Seismic Charge so it's not subtracted from the asteroid nor from the environment so the system is in energetic balance.
Moreover there's no energy to subtract from the environment nor from the asteroid (it's just a rock!).

 

[Bryan K]

Only if you have exotic matter, particles that cannot yet be demonstrated to exist, and/or energy densities that are, as far as we can currently determine, impossible to achieve...which makes warp drive a practical impossibility.

At the very least, it's considerably more far-fetched than augmented humans being able to withstand higher gravity, or improvements in heatpump efficiency.

I respectfully disagree.

People are generally more accepting of technological solutions to problems. Hell, most people around here are terrified of GMOs, so I can’t ever really see society as a whole accepting genetic modification.

 

[schizrade]

It doesn't work like that because of conduction. Our planet is warmer inside than outside because heat is generated inside by nuclear fission and the outside is cooled by radiating.

No.
Most of the heat is leftover from the formation of the earth but also maintained by frictional heating in the core and to an unknown extent radioactive decay. But Radioactive Decay is not Fission.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-earths-core-so/

Just a clarification.

 

[Bryan K]

No.
Most of the heat is leftover from the formation of the earth but also maintained by frictional heating in the core and to an unknown extent radioactive decay. But Radioactive Decay is not Fission.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-earths-core-so/

Just a clarification.

Damn, beat me to it. Duly repped.

 

[Vandaahl]

No.
Most of the heat is leftover from the formation of the earth but also maintained by frictional heating in the core and to an unknown extent radioactive decay. But Radioactive Decay is not Fission.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-the-earths-core-so/

Just a clarification.

Thats an article from 1997. First articles that describe the research of fission in the earths core are from 2001. Not saying fission has been proven, but time has passed...

 

[Morbad]

I respectfully disagree.

People are generally more accepting of technological solutions to problems. Hell, most people around here are terrified of GMOs, so I can’t ever really see society as a whole accepting genetic modification.

Alcubierre style warp drive isn't a solution to anything if there is no way to get it to work or if it turns out to be fundamentally impossible.

Radioactive Decay is not Fission.

Yes it is.

 

[Bryan K]

Alcubierre style warp drive isn't a solution to anything if there is no way to get it to work or if it turns out to be fundamentally impossible.



Yes it is.

Getting to the Moon seemed fundamentally impossible 200 years ago. Progress happens. What we know now is not all there is to know.

All it takes is a single breakthrough sometimes.

 

[Sysmon]

Yes it is.

Fission, yes, or we wouldn't have certain tools to describe heating histories of metamorphic rocks, tools called fission tracks. Fission just means split, which is exactly what nuclear decay does.

We don't have sustained chain reactions in the earth, though. Radioactive decay helps keeping earth warm from the inside (Lord Kelvin argued that earth cooled like a big cannon ball and wouldn't be more than 125,000 years old based on cooling rates. The Curies proved him wrong eventually).

There has been natural nuclear reactors around, though. I forgot where in Africa it is, but there are places where the underground shows signs that radiogenic minerals have accumulated in large enough concentrations to cause sustained chain reactions. Nasty place to mine...

S

 

[Vandaahl]

Yes it is.

I believe it depends on the type of decay. Alpha and Beta are, Gamma not necessarily.