Cockpit ice near stars... ?

This is a thousands years in the future. If the spacecraft is coated with something completely (or almost completely) reflective of infrared radiation, or has near 100% efficient insulation, then sure it could stay cold inside as long as there is some active cooling going on.

I was going to say the star may also be smaller / dimmer than Sol, but Asellus Primus (aka theta Bootis) is 1.3 solar masses in real life.

The space shuttle's reinforced carbon-carbon heat shield was designed to withstand temperatures of up to 4,700° to ensure that the spacecraft and its passengers can survive the friction heat generated when it re-enters the atmosphere from orbit.

Just to be pedantic, re-entry heating is caused by shock or compression heating of the air molecules, not friction. Common belief.
 
This is a thousands years in the future. If the spacecraft is coated with something completely (or almost completely) reflective of infrared radiation, or has near 100% efficient insulation, then sure it could stay cold inside as long as there is some active cooling going on.

I was going to say the star may also be smaller / dimmer than Sol, but Asellus Primus (aka theta Bootis) is 1.3 solar masses in real life.



Just to be pedantic, re-entry heating is caused by shock or compression heating of the air molecules, not friction. Common belief.

Taken from this NASA news release: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/orionheatshield.html

To illustrate how hot that is, rapidly rubbing your hands together generates warmth. In contrast, a speeding space vehicle creates not just warmth, but tremendous heat, minimally due to friction between the air and surface of the spaceship as it moves at mind-boggling speed. (Most of the generated heat is due to rapid air compression without time for the air to cool off.)

So it's actually both.
 
Yep... but one final note - for any of it to work, if it ever did, the ship must be totally reflective except for visible light. Which means that it must be actively heated within. So if you turn off the heaters, you get freezing condensation.

But would it cool as quickly as it does? If heat can't get in, then it can't get out either and the ship would maintain it's internal temperature for a long time unless the air was actively cooled once the heating system is turned off.

Again. It works because it does... Like the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon. It's never explained how it works, we just take it for granted that it does.

:)
 
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What do you think he's doing as soon as you log off?

"Phew - that Axis blokes finally taken a break, gangway and break out the extra soft triple-ply. There's a monster about to dock."

Sometimes on this forum you find a Diamond amongst all the coal...
 
I do not think they've implemented solar heat yet.
I imagine interior heat would rise quickly if close to a star and you turned off shields, unless heat shielding is integral and unable to be bypassed for safety reasons?
It's a good point for discussion though. I suspect one that is ongoing internally.
 
Unless you were in a parallel universe where the laws of thermodynamics make no sense, then you wouldn't get ice on any part of the ship if we were 2 million miles away from a hot object like a star. As I said in my above post, Mercury is 28.5 million miles away from the Sun and the only place where ice forms on Mercury is at the bottom of very deep craters where the suns light and radiation never penetrates. It doesn't form on any other part of the planet, not even on the dark side, as the surface temperature is to hot and it evaporates.

If ice can't form on a planet that's 28.5 million miles away from the sun, then it'll never form on an object that's less than 2 million miles away.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/ice/ice_mercury.html

For ice to form you need water to be present, but water ice on the surface of the ship would evaporate directly to vacuum, and will rapidly sublime and escape into space unless it is kept cold at all times. Even if the inside of the ship is kept cool, the outside would still be incredibly hot and ice would not form... Unless, and this is where Elite's science may work in it's favour, the ship was protected by something that keeps it cool... Like the shields.

or a heat dissipation system.. maybe if we hit silent running, and turned off the drives, we should cook at arrival distances?
 
I do not think they've implemented solar heat yet.
I imagine interior heat would rise quickly if close to a star and you turned off shields, unless heat shielding is integral and unable to be bypassed for safety reasons?
It's a good point for discussion though. I suspect one that is ongoing internally.

I don't know, with the heat lately and being in a hauler for too long again, I feel like I'm in my old Vaxhaul Cavalier when the suns shine on the dash in game.. makes me want to open the side cockpit windows, and turn the stereo up to annoy the soft-top Merc/BM/Audi drivers in traffic again...
 
First thread I have read this evening after getting in from work, and a refreshing change to some of the recent topics of late (even the 'logging off' comment made me chuckle)

+1 to all posters.
 

Hotblack Desiato

H
But would it cool as quickly as it does? If heat can't get in, then it can't get out either and the ship would maintain it's internal temperature for a long time unless the air was actively cooled once the heating system is turned off.

Again. It works because it does... Like the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon. It's never explained how it works, we just take it for granted that it does.

:)

Good point re heat getting in/out. Totally escaped me, but you're right, the emissivity of a perfect reflector is 0. That doesn't stop you jettisoning heatsinks, but that is the only way to cool. Except for conduction, but there is not much of that going on.

So yes, it works because it does. We better tell FD to get rid of the ice. ;)
 
It does. The planet Mercury is 28.5 million miles away from the Sun and the temperature on the planet reaches 800 degrees Fahrenheit (430 degrees Celsius). Because the planet has no atmosphere to retain that heat, night time temperatures on the surface can drop to -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-170 degrees Celsius). You do get some ice formation on Mercury but only at the bottom of very deep craters where the suns light never penetrates.

AFAIK the same is also true for the moon in orbit of Earth. Water is not present in any form other than ice, and that's only possible in shadowed areas. The lunar impactor that struck the moon recently was a demonstration of this.

Further, both the moon (which is tidally-locked with Earth) and Mercury (which is getting closer to tidal locking with the Sun) have long rotational periods. The Moon is roughly 28 days, while Mercury is closer to 59 days. Under those conditions, both surfaces are exposed to solar radiation long enough to ensure that the temperature of the surface never stays below the freezing point of liquid water for long enough to allow it to form from Hydrogen, Oxygen, or water molecules already present nearby.

The complexity of why water does not form and remain in the vicinity of Mercury and the moon is far beyond a simple case of how much thermal energy is being output by the sun.

At 2 million miles the temperature would be much, much hotter and there would be no formation of ice on the metal skin of a space ship as even the side of the ship that's in shadow would be heated. If not by direct sunlight, then certainly by conduction of heat from the hot side of the ship and also convection from the heat of the surrounding space.

But heat convection needs a medium to work through, and there isn't one in a vacuum. The shaded side of any object is going to get colder over time regardless of distance from a heat source if it doesn't have any opportunity to face the source itself. The amount of time this takes is not going to be in the order of a few minutes, hours, or even days, as it takes time to radiate heat off of an object (conversely it takes time for thermal radiation to heat up a surface when there's nothing to convect said thermal radiation from source to destination), but it's nevertheless a fairly-well understood process.

However, point taken about heat transfer through the ship itself, although again, this won't happen quickly, since radiation takes time to heat up a given object without convection, and the lit side of the ship would take time to heat up.

So no, no ice.

The other aspect to consider is that liquid water cannot exist at all in a vacuum. The Triple-point of water at zero-pressure is such that the boiling point of water is the same, or lower (I'm not looking it up at this moment in time, so it's off the top of my head) than the freezing point of water.

Even if the surrounding space was only 270 Kelvins (-1 Centigrade or 30-31 Fahrenheit for you US folks) any liquid water released into the vacuum of space would boil away in just a few seconds at most.

This is most easily seen in comets, for those who are farther out than the Earth's orbit can still be seen to vent gaseous water into space. This is not a fast process either, as the comets will have had to travel for some months through space, gradually receiving heat from the output of the sun over a long period of time.

The take-away from this is that, while technically correct that ice cannot form on sunlit-sides of planets and bodies in the vacuum of space, this does not apply to pressurised systems where liquid water can have a chance to form, and therefore water ice can form as a consequence inside e.g. a pressurised cockpit.
 
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If enough radiation is getting through to melt the ice, the pilot is cooked. If enough conduction is getting through to melt the ice, the windows are opaque due to being white hot. If we allow that the ship can somehow be this close to a star, we have to assume that the windows and hull (given no shields in SC) are perfect reflectors of all but visible wavelengths. If we can even look at a star, we have to assume that the screen has a lot of control over what is getting through even on visible wavelengths anyway.

So yes, ice is perfectly consistent.

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One might think that a cooked pilot is a non sequitur to ice formation, but if enough radiation gets through to melt ice at any distance, all we have to do to cook the pilot is go a fraction closer to the star. So we must assume that we have complete control over the interior environment of the ship. So if we turn off the heating, it will get cold. But ice should form everywhere, not just on the windows.

Would that be gas mark 4?:D
 
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