Why doesn't heat increase the faster you go in supercruise?

[WildElf]

I know nothing with mass can reach the speed of light, blah blah... don't get all PhD on me.

Modern physics are ridiculous with or without getting PhD on you (although a weird boundary to have, it's like asking how floppy dough becomes crusty bread ... but don't you dare explain any of that chef stuff to me!)

When I read that "moving the universe around you" description in ED material, I also scoffed. It's a bad way to explain it. But given the original theory required "negative energy" which doesn't exist, I guess it was fine.

A better way to explain is to imagine you want to move across your floor laying down. Traditional boosters are like using a squirt gun. You'll move, but not quickly. Forget about reaching another room. Warp drives work by you pulling yourself with your fingers. You now have a hope of answering the door in a single lifetime.

Now, I don't have a PhD. I just learn by banging my head against wikis and articles until things start to make sense. I feel ignorant and stupid, but eventually parts of it click. I'm still hopeless with the math. If you would like to challenge yourself, and stop being afraid of feeling ignorant, here's a decent explanation of the science behind FSD and warp drives:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VWLjhJBCp0


We live in a fabulous time where information is at our fingertips. Don't give up. You'll be better for it.

Edit: It WOULD be cool if we could do mini-jumps in system. There's no reason to disallow that except game design really. It might make things like combat too cheesy.

 

[WildElf]

Also, if in close proximity to a sun roasting you to hell and back, why does a heat sink cool your ship down? How can heat radiate in radiated heat...

Real world heat sinks use solid or liquid mediums. For far future space ships, we would have super conducting liquid instead of water and glycol common today. In normal operation, the liquid circulates and spreads the heat out, absorbing it from hot components, like the engine, lasers, or the hull facing the sun, and bringing it to cold parts where it cools down. Heat build up happens when the liquid can't cool down enough before returning to hot areas.

A heat sink might be a container of more liquid, likely super cold, that flushes the system when engaged. All the existing hot liquid goes into the sink as the super cold liquid enters the rest of the ship. Then dump the sink so the heat is removed from the system. This would explain why the ship drops to 0-1% with a heat sink. Within a few seconds, that super cold liquid normalizes, and you better have your situation sorted or another sink available.

 

[Exeider]

Doesn't space have a constant background temperature of some −270°C ? (other than the little fan heater in the cockpit to stop us all turning in to a snowman) just for the fact that our ships heat up in the first place is just poor ship design. Unless you're orbiting a sun, there's no logical way any ship could over heat with a −270°C backdrop. It'd be like trying to over-heat a V8 submerged in liquid nitrogen....

Except there is no medium for which to transfer that heat other than a radiative force which out of the three, Conduction, Convection and Radiation is the least efficient of the three. So yes, it is totally possible to overheat a ship in the vacuum of out space, this is why in real life space craft design you need to have heat vanes/heat sinks to maximize the surface area of radiative force to keep your ship cool. And if you notice on the outside of your ship when you in supercruise your reactor's heat sinks are glowing hot trying to offset the heat.

 

[GunnerBill]

Real world heat sinks use solid or liquid mediums. For far future space ships, we would have super conducting liquid instead of water and glycol common today. In normal operation, the liquid circulates and spreads the heat out, absorbing it from hot components, like the engine, lasers, or the hull facing the sun, and bringing it to cold parts where it cools down. Heat build up happens when the liquid can't cool down enough before returning to hot areas.

A heat sink might be a container of more liquid, likely super cold, that flushes the system when engaged. All the existing hot liquid goes into the sink as the super cold liquid enters the rest of the ship. Then dump the sink so the heat is removed from the system. This would explain why the ship drops to 0-1% with a heat sink. Within a few seconds, that super cold liquid normalizes, and you better have your situation sorted or another sink available.

Had no one ever considered what such radical heat cycling must be doing to our ships?

 

[aRJay]

Had no one ever considered what such radical heat cycling must be doing to our ships?

It is probably part of why integrity degrades.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Had no one ever considered what such radical heat cycling must be doing to our ships?

Cooling.

 

[DidNothing]

Just put an ice pack on it and it will be fine.

 

[ManlyVIK]

Modern physics are ridiculous with or without getting PhD on you (although a weird boundary to have, it's like asking how floppy dough becomes crusty bread ... but don't you dare explain any of that chef stuff to me!)

When I read that "moving the universe around you" description in ED material, I also scoffed. It's a bad way to explain it.

By don't get all PhD on me, I just meant don't patronize me with an attempted explanation. I've looked into this stuff just as much as the next online scientist, and I'm pretty confident we don't have any real physicists playing elite dangerous.

And as for the "moving the universe around you" that's basically what happens. If you aren't moving the ship itself, then you're moving everything outside of it, unless space is a liquid and just a bubble of it moves through itself - which makes even less sense.

 

[Caydran]

It's cold in space. Really cold.

The baseline temperature of outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvin (−270.45 °C; −454.81 °F).

 

[tolm]

I read a novel recently where ships travelling within an FTL “bubble” could no longer radiate heat at all, since they were no longer in “regular” space. This meant that all ships travelling in FTL would slowly build up heat just from the standard systems running and body heat from the crew. As a result, for sustained FTL travel, the crew would be cryogenically frozen and then as much heat dumped from the ship as possible before FTL was engaged and, even then, for long journeys the ship would have to drop out of FTL periodically to extend its radiators in “real space” and cool down before continuing.

Was kind of a cool concept - I think based on (some) current theoretical physics - but, man, that would suck for gameplay ......

 

[Maolagin]

I'm pretty confident we don't have any real physicists playing elite dangerous

False

 

[VerticalBlank]

I'm pretty confident we don't have any real physicists playing elite dangerous.

Raises hand.

 

[fu9ar]

By don't get all PhD on me, I just meant don't patronize me with an attempted explanation. I've looked into this stuff just as much as the next online scientist, and I'm pretty confident we don't have any real physicists playing elite dangerous.

And as for the "moving the universe around you" that's basically what happens. If you aren't moving the ship itself, then you're moving everything outside of it, unless space is a liquid and just a bubble of it moves through itself - which makes even less sense.

Space is not a state of matter like a liquid. It is a separate kind of thing that the people in the Elite universe have learned how to manipulate directly to some degree. I'm just a dilettante in the subject, but basically physics is about applying carefully measured empirical models to predict future phenomena. Humanity has done a lot of careful work for centuries and have been able to find a wide range of repeatable phenomena that engineers leverage into our technology. High energy physics is in baby stage compared to the scientific body of knowledge we have about normal matter.

 

[Lysette]

Space is not a state of matter like a liquid. It is a separate kind of thing that the people in the Elite universe have learned how to manipulate directly to some degree. I'm just a dilettante in the subject, but basically physics is about applying carefully measured empirical models to predict future phenomena. Humanity has done a lot of careful work for centuries and have been able to find a wide range of repeatable phenomena that engineers leverage into our technology. High energy physics is in baby stage compared to the scientific body of knowledge we have about normal matter.

To that adds that all is just by observation - what is perception and an interpretation of what might be out there - it might not be like we think it is, in it's properties most likely, but it might just not be what we think it is at all. My personal opinion about the matter is, that it is all just in the realm of mathematics with no reality to it whatsoever - and that perceived reality is just a mathematical phenomena - but it seems that just Max Tegmark and I share this opinion about "reality".

 

[fu9ar]

Hooey. Mathematics is a language that we use to define quantities and relationships between quantities. Nothing more.

 

[Lysette]

Hooey. Mathematics is a language that we use to define quantities and relationships between quantities. Nothing more.

nah I see this as a fundamental truth underlying everything - we just formalized part of it - that is what I mean with mathematics.

 

[Frankymole]

nah I see this as a fundamental truth underlying everything - we just formalized part of it - that is what I mean with mathematics.

The universe works on mathematical principles, yes. At least the part of it that we can see.

 

[Lysette]

The universe works on mathematical principles, yes. At least the part of it that we can see.

i go a little further, in my mind it has just mathematical properties and is basically that what we so poorly describe with our mathematics. I think though, that mathematics isn't invented but discovered - what is invented are the symbols used to describe it, but not mathematics itself.

You know, we (my partner and I) made experiments with emergence - to unravel how body plans are "stored". A more or less "simple" idea behind the experiment - have a "growth process" description, which starts out with a big block and is subsequently subdividing it following the rule of the growth process. Each subdivision becomes it's own active cell until it is subdivided itself. A cell can be visible or invisible, active or passive. The rules of the growth process consider the states of surrounding cells to get to the next state of an active cell. Passive cells do nothing - they reached their final state.

This starts with a voxel block - 1 cell of size 1024x1024x1024 voxels - 128MB - and we "compress" that into a growth process description of 256 bits (32 bytes). This description is derived from a complex adaptive process using a similarity function as fitness function (in the easiest case simple XOR&count) to compare it with a voxel body this growth process is supposed to generate. All active cells operate in parallel (immense task, we had to create an own system to make this somewhat happen - on 2496 cores and 32768 CUDA cores, but still just pseudo-parallel, because the number of active tasks is in the tens of millions). Takes quite a while to run (as in weeks).

But what we got out of it is a somewhat reliable method, to regenerate the voxel body just using the growth process and those 256 bits with an error of 1.3% for a single run (error measured with XOR&count). So basically the body plan of the voxel body is stored in the virtual part of the network - which is basically "nowhere", it has no physical location where it would be stored. That information comes to be emergently during the running growth process. We believe, that nature has a very similar principle to "store" body plans without to require a physical object to store it - it's basically stored to "nowhere".

This is the kind of mathematics I'm thinking of when I say it's all mathematical.

When we analyzed those 256 bits of the growth process description, we found that about half of the bits control a "healing" process - when we disturb the running model locally and create errors, they are fixing themselves somewhat due to the activity of the surrounding cells - very very interesting how this all works.

Another result is that this process requires a good amount of true parallelism to work - the result has to be chaos-stable and chaos is an important element in the process. Each growth run creates a slightly different voxel body, they are not the same, pretty much like twins are in nature - very similar, but not the same.

That this works at all shows the power of complex adaptive processes - the visible part of the universe has just 1000 times more particles than there are variations of the growth process description. One should expect that it will never get to a result - but it just takes weeks to accomplish.

 

[Quantis Trap]

It WOULD be cool if we could do mini-jumps in system.

What do you think supercruise is? It's a series of mini-jumps.

In my mind, it's done by the same FSD, constantly warping/folding space in littler folds than a full jump.
That's why there little or no inertia, friction and heat, because the ships are not really moving that much, but instead just hopping from point to point.
It also explains why passengers are not instantly killed by acceleration or deceleration. There is very little or no acceleration or deceleration (frame shift or cruise).

 

[WildElf]

What do you think supercruise is? It's a series of mini-jumps.

I definitely don't think it's that because it's demonstrably not.

Here's what I think supercruise is.

Supercruise appears to operate in accordance of "warping" space theories, such as compacting space in front of it, or maybe even creating a spacetime slope in front to just "fall" forward along. It doesn't jump at all, we are always in normal space. It is dramatically impacted by other warping of spacetime (namely massive gravity wells of planets and stars). Get too close and SC fails, sometimes taking damage. It smoothly moves through normal space, and can be blocked by passing near objects.

FSDI's also fit into this logic, they might generate a stronger well, or warp, that causes both ships to fall towards the same spot and exit SC. Yet, FSDIs can do nothing against hyperdrive mode. If they were both jumps, then it shouldn't matter. "Hyperdiction" is (currently) completely beyond human technology.

In stark contrast, the hyperdrive (clearly designated as a different mode) is not affected by gravity wells outside of mass lock. Supercruise requires precise escape vectors to get away from a powerful gravity well, but hyperdrive works in nearly any direction. Close to a planet's surface where SC is not possible, we can point at a system above the horizon and jump straight there. To engage SC we must be pointing perpendicular to the surface. Hyperdrive can move through the edges of planets and stars, trajectories where supercruise would fail. In contrast to the more gentle and smooth warping of SC, HD is a drastic fold that punches through point A to D, skipping any points B or C. The lore even specifies the difference, calling it entering hyperspace or witch-space, unlike SC which stays in normal space.

And pertinent to the thread topic, the HD generates the same amount of heat while charging, even if SC is already engaged. If they were the same, there shouldn't be any heat difference, since the different speeds of SC show no heat difference.

The time for HD trips is roughly the same 15 seconds, whether you are moving 4 LY or 40 or 300. SC can't even reach 1/4 LY in less than 90 minutes. Clearly different modes of operation. For a true "mini-jump" we would enter hyperspace and cover even fractional LY in roughly the same 15 seconds.

There is nothing that indicates SC is a short distance form of HD. They each are using the same FSD in completely different ways.