That's a pretty scummy sponser. Hope they at least paid you handsomely. Why do they feel the need to obfuscate they're pricing? I shouldn't need to bust out a calculator to get a rough estimation of the price. Not to mention 31 separate shipping packages for one toy? That sounds great for the environment.
Came here to say the same. Subscription based model kits are wildly overpriced, and rarely if ever offer the option to purchase the entire set as a single package. I've been hooked on your channel for a long time, and while I understand you need sponsors to keep the lights on, I'd have expected better from a channel I respect this much than to see you shill a product like this. That aside, Fantastic video as always, thanks for the great content.
To be clear (pushes glasses up nose), I don't know if this is a good price or not. It seems like a gorgeous model and it IS die cast with lights and greeblies and everything. I just don't like the way they're hiding the pricing and not having an "all at once" price/option.
My single biggest pet peeve in so so many IP's, franchises, shows, movies, whatever, is people instafreezing when exposed to space. You're totally right that it's down to pure ignorance and failure to conduct a 5 second google as research.
For movies, I have to concede that it's easier to communicate the "somebody's dying in space" with visible freezing than suffocating (which should be horrifying to watch-and therefore potentially leading to the box-office poison 'R' rating).
@@mglenadelAn R rating isn't poison for the box office, just look at how successful horror films are to see the proof of that. The issue is, studios think it is, despite the fact that R rated movies did stupidly well in the 70s and 80s
I really liked that comment about deploying radiators as an indicator of surrender. It’s like a futuristic reversal of age of sail ships striking colors
It also opens the door for a bunch of interesting storytelling. For example you could have ships pre chill themselves before going into combat and thesefore be able to have tension slowly rise during a battle. The crew could go from a cold ship as their breath mists and they wait for weapons to come into range to a warm ship where most of the fighting is done to tense moments as both crews take carefull shots and use their engines as sparingly as possible whilst their crews start suffering from heatstroke as both franticly try and outlast the other. You could also make shooting a ship with its radiators out against conventions of space combat as it is analogous to surrender.
I just got a idea, which is how you could make systems that work similar to flags and colors from the ages of sail where that stuff was super important, like extended radiators as a white flag but other systems can be used to communicate other concepts such as goals or threats. Now I want to make a space setting that functions like sailing ships with everything being scaled up to space.
It is a cool idea, but unfortunately would be difficult to implement realistically, because presumably all of that kind of information would just be exchanged automatically by radio, because space combat between ships would virtually never happen in visual distance of each another.
It depends on the context. You'd probably want to retract radiators in a close-ish range merge when beam weapons can be deployed accurately at tight focus. At longer (several light seconds or more) distances when burning to set up an attack vector for standoff missile launches or a beam run you'd want your drive radiators out to sustain high thrust power - at such ranges jitter would make precisely targeting radiators very hard and tight focusing a beam would be challenging as well. A better sign of surrender would probably be extruding low temperature life support radiators, which aren't needed in combat but would need to be out to keep the ship habitable long term.
i've always thought a cool potential explanation for why many sci fis starships appear to always be under thrust is that they actually forcefully radiate their waste heat out what look to us like rocket cones, but aren't
Glad you included elite dangerous in here as heat management is a somewhat significant part of the gameplay, and the radiators on ships are incorporated really well into the designs.
Radiators are definitely an underrated design feature; I definitely have them on pretty much every ship in my stories in the form of panels and strips along with internal emission sinks for stealth and protecting the obviously vulnerable radiators during transit or combat!
I always loved the look of the capital ship designs from FASA's old Renegade Legion setting, massive, long ships build around enormous spinal mount mass drivers, they had these big ventral fins. I don't remember if that was their purpose in the game, but I swiped them as a place to both serve as a secondary heat sink and to retract and protect radiators during combat.
I thought that there can't be no stealth in space? The crew's life support alone emits enough heat to stick out like a sore thumb against the 3 Kelvin cosmic microwave background, and I don't think it's a good idea to turn it off until the cabin's temperature reaches 3 K..... Trying to insulate the crew hab will make the insulator heats up too.
@@lazyremnant380 there can be stealth, in the same way we have stealth on earth now. And hiding thermal signatures can be done by dumping heat prior to entering detection range and just not cycling heat to the outer insulated hull. Or having a coating shell around your ship with the vacuum between the two. Now your thermal print will be tiny for a reasonable amount of time, likely long enough to get within reasonable firing range... then your missiles and your flares and a fresh heat dump can cover you while you burn away thus giving you even more stealth opportunities.
@@littlekong7685 I think stealth on Earth works because we're inside an atmosphere full of stuffs that readily distorts electromagnetic radiations, and air convections cooling off cockpits and hot exhausts, we don't have that in the vacuum of space. There's no horizon to hide stuffs in space, thus the effective detection range can be very very long. We can still see Mars' tiny moons with ordinary telescope from here, 225 million kms away. Infrared space-based telescopes like JWST can see clearer and further. If my enemy has a base on Mars, I'm sure that any anomalous heat signature will be visible from Earth orbit in 20 minutes or less, and I will take steps to investigate. I think hiding waste heat inside a vacuum flask only delays the inevitable. You'd still have to radiate the ever-increasing heat away at some point and the crew presumably wants to survive beyond that point (because your cover is already blown up and your enemy is firing at you). Getting within firing range will require turning on the engine, which will be detectable. Coasting all the way might be doable, but if the enemy can detect your initial thrust, with the knowledge of orbital mechanics, they can very accurately predict your trajectory.
@@littlekong7685 There ain't no PRACTICAL stealth in space. You can in theory make something invisble in space for a short amount of time, but it will take so much effort, that it is not practical. There is no horizon in space. And while the intensity of radiation decreases with the square of the distance, you can always increase exposure times. You'd have to cool your hull down to almost 3 kelvin and then store that heat somewhere. And that's going to be realy energy intensive - and generating that energy generates a lot more heat for which you'll need even more energy to store it somewhere. The dog's chasing its own tail there... The colder something is, the harder it is to cool it down further. Also, while you are stealthing it up out there, you can't manuvre at all as long as you use any kind of reaction based propulsion system. You will have to generate your trajectory extremely far out if you want the plume from whatever drive you use not to be spoted. The farther out you start, the more powerfull your propulsion system must be to get you anywhere in anything even aproaching a usefull time frame. And the more powerful your propulsion system is, the further out you have to shut it down to avoid detection. Again, dogs and tails... I'm not a physicist, but my uneducated layman's guess goes to possibly light years for a fusion drive...
Absolutely correct! Heat management should be more than an afterthought. Especially for stealth ships, as infrared light gives away the ship in the dark background.
Even if its not a ship designed specifically for stealth, remember that the first rule of survivability is not being detected at all, so you might allow for normal warships to have ways of limiting thermal radiation so they can attempt to have the element of surprise on their side or even to run away if needed.
@@TitterpigRancher yes there is. I assume you are confusing "stealth" with "undetectability" Stealth = trying to make yourself as hard as possible to detect (typicly limited to the settings main forms of sensors) Undetectability = having a way to be impossible to be detected. Classical examples for space stealth would be: Hiding behind stuff (Planets, moons, other ships); Thermal controll to fool thermal sensors; Optical camouflage to stop visual identification; false ID/IFF beacons and/or changing the ships siluette/performance to pass as another type of ship; Anti radar coating/hullshapes, etc. All of these and many more can be used to hide/make it harder to be detected.
@@vyran7044 All of those things exist, yes, but none of those will make your thermal signature equal to background, and unless you can figure out a way to outrun your own EM signature, the IR wavelength your craft emits will be visible from one side of the galaxy to the other (as the Webb telescope has so unequivocally proved, even though we knew that already). Your ship needs those radiators to survive, and the comparatively enormous signature of those radiators (to say nothing of your drive itself) will always tell whoever is at your destination that you're coming, parsecs and years before you can hope to arrive there. Most of deep space is incredibly vast and incredibly empty. You're traversing a terrain where the defender has the ultimate high ground. There's nothing to be stealthy IN. Hence, no matter how many measures you take in order to lower your detectability, you can never lower your detectability to zero, and unless you lower it to zero, you're always going to be seen. There is no stealth in space.
In space engineers, i make wings out of heat vent blocks to try to emulate radiators, i find it neat that when i shoot a railgun it lights up pretty colors
It can also play a role in ship detection If thermal detection is a big thing a ship might try to radiate heat into pellets it can drop all at once to remain stealthy for a while It has the disadvantage of giving stealth ships a fixed limited time in stealth, but that adds tension It can also be a distraction or work as a flare to fool thermal sighted weapons, for example A stealth ship has run out of heat pellets and has to engage its cruising radiators and is spotted, it gets locked on by thermal torpedoes and drops its pellets last second, the torpedoes barely miss and the stealth ship manages to run away
And this concept would be history repeating itself Before nuclear energy in submarines, they relied on charging batteries with combustion engines when they had access to surface air and then could only stay underwater until the batteries were low. And this was all done for stealth, as no technology existed yet to detect underwater craft. This effectively meant that submarines were stealth ships that needed to drop stealth regularly to avoid certain doom and were constantly trying to balance their stealth with limited power supply. Replace charging batteries with cooling heatsinks and you've got stealth spaceships
Got to love radiators, they're both so underrated and underappreciated that I now include them on all spaceships I build in games, not only do they make the ships feel more realistic, they also look magnificent with their orange glow breaking the shadows!
They're often very subtle, but many Gundam warships, particularly in the Universal Century, have radiators on the underside of their ships. The Federation Magellan and Salamis class have radiators that are flush with the hull, and ships on both sides in the Char's Counterattack movie have highly visible radiator panels sticking out from the ventral hull, typically near the engine blocks.
@Nichodo It's not shown in the UC, but early in Gundam Seed, one of the antagonist machines returns to its ship and is immediately shot with something that makes the armor cool to touch. If you mean out in battle, the average sortie time of a mobile suit isn't long enough for overheating to be a problem unless they are using some specific system or weapon that generates a lot of waste heat. Powerful systems have been known to overheat machines before however. Most notable is probably the Big Zam during the One Year War.
It's funny how some older anime shows, especially really futuristic ones, pay attention to realism whilst modern movies don't, except for Avatar. One anime in particular that i remember was "Kakumeiki Valvrave". In the anime they had overheating problems after a not to long battle so they came up with disposable heatsinks, which I didn't fully understand back when I saw it.
Having heat management factored in a space battle would definitely make it interesting. You can’t just have your spaceguns to continuously shoot. It’ll generate heat faster than the rate of what the radiator able to remove. And talking about warframe, this is why we have that heat bar in railjack weapon. Having radiators could also be one of the justification why you have a wing-like structure in your spaceship. The other is to have maneuver thrusters on the wingtips.
If you only needed the protrusions or attitude control, there would likely be a better shape than a wing like one. Radiators are definitely the stronger justification for such a thing, though they could do double duty.
Check out the game "Attack Vector: Tactical". Ships fighting each other have internal sumps to store heat, spike radiators that get rid of a little bit of heat at a time, batteries to power weapons, and engine thrust. If you run low on power you can turn on your main reactor, but the only way to get rid of heat from the main reactor steadily is to extend your radiators. If those radiators are extended while you are in range of the enemy, they can get shot off easily and you are essentially SOL so need to surrender. Extending radiators while in combat is the universal signal for "I surrender", as if you keep fighting after extending the radiators then your opponent will simply shoot them off and your crew gets baked alive due to the main reactor's waste heat
There is a game called Naev that does this, in what is otherwise a pretty simple space game. Unfortunately, that aspect isn't necessarily a positive for the fun of the gameplay. A related (both are inspired by the same old game series) game called Endless Sky also has heat, but in that case it is is only ship-wide (Naev has a system where fired guns generate heat, reducing their effectiveness, which is then transferred to the ship and only from there radiated) and it is possible to remove heat faster than generated even at full blast depending on your outfits - you'll typically only need to consider in the three scenarios of having seriously neglected cooling equipment, relying heavily on Korath equipment (which typically runs especially hot) and when fighting certain foes that use weapons designed to heat up the target.
Since we're mentioning games, I love StarSector's use of flux. It's meant to resemble heat building up from receiving hits to shields and/or firing weapons. It's simple to understand for new players and it has a really interesting story (you kind of have to piece it together yourself though, which I enjoy but others may not)
The radiators in the game Terra Invicta are also fairly interesting as someof the better drives lack efficiency (less then 95% is bad by endgame) as the energy created by such reactors and drives is so huge that even the best radiator, the tin dropplet radiator becomes truly huge, which is disappointingly not shown by the radiator size in game but is incredibly expensive in resource cost. Extending and retracting radiators is also needed in the space combat, with heat sinks allowing the player's ships to continue fighting for a time without being vulnerable due to extended radiators.
In the video game called The Outer Worlds, there is a quest called "Happiness Is A Warm Spaceship", where the player is tasked with retrieving radiator parts for an old colony ship turned space port called the Groundbreaker. After you find the parts, you then have to go into the Engineering shaft to cycle the droplet pumps to cool the radiator system that is filling the ship interior with super-heated air. ;)
One of my favorite games. I love the sly humor, excellent graphics and the steam punk design themes. There is supposed to be a sequel in the works but I think a lot of design studios are struggling with the massive funding needed for these more sophisticated games so it has been quite a while since the last announcement.
@@Palaemon44That's why they break them up into a base game and DLCs, although even the large companies that shift ten times the units will now break games up into multiple DLCs for maximum profit. Customers are even brainwashed into the idea that day-one DLC, or already planned DLC, instead of having them all as base content, is somehow a good thing.
The UNSC has a really cool solution to heat management: The ENTIRE hull is both a heatsink and a radiator. They pump heat directly into the meters-thick Titanium-A armor plating. As it's a *LOT* of mass, as well as the entire exterior surface area of the ship, it works amazingly well.
So the weird thing is, you kind of want a tiny, very hot radiator to get rid of heat efficiently, not a very large cool one. Whatever your radiator is, you ideally want it running at a temperature that is pretty close to it's material melting point. This is why plasma or droplet radiators are nice - you can run them far BEYOND any material melting point, in principle. The question is what mechanism are you using to transfer the ship's heat into these droplets, and why isn't that mechanism itself melting? Usually some hand-waving about magnetism is included here, which is perfectly fine for sci-fi.
@@Vastin You want that if you want to minimize the surface area. If you are turning your entire outer hull into a radiator then you are not worrying about minimizing surface area.
Is this why the Pillar of Autumn was so god damn big and why that Covenant ship was leaking stuff from the hull? I've only finished CE and am in the middle of Halo 2.
Excellent. As a battletech/mechwarrior player Heat Sinks are drilled into my thinking and that extends to ships. It’s an easy reality win in my eyes to add
When I originally played MechWarrior 4, the opening levels, on the moon, we easy as you didn't have to worry about heat buildup - and I thought that was neat, as well as a good way to introduce players to the game mechanics. Its only much later that I realised that fighting in a vacuum would be problematic for mechs, as their heat sink wouldn't work as well, if at all, in space, seeing as how they seem to use conduction for heat transfer. Although that does beg to ask how ASFs in the void dispose of heat...
@@draco84oz I think ASF and War/JumpShips have those weird fins like in TRO2750's ships and such which are Actually Radiators, similar to ASF wings, which explains their weird amount of wings
I kind of want to see a sort of siege warfare space battle now, where several small ships with weapons too weak to penetrate the defenses of a larger ship, but strong enough to damage the vulnerable radiators, force the larger warship to retract her radiators. Then they just...force the larger ship to keep the radiators retracted for fear of having them destroyed until the larger ship surrenders despite having no threat to its superstructure at all.
@@BlackDouglas1000also trucking in short burn nukes. Have the fighter carried ship killer nukes have an absurdly powerful, short burn drive to sprint them into range, while the gunship sized fighter has normal fusion torch drives. The missle has something like a antimatter powered drive that uses powdered uranium as reaction mass, giving sprint speed, but no endurance. The warheads could be anything from laser heads to "Brimstone" nuke powered fragmentation warheads. The fighters are like modern fighter bombers, built like medium bombers, with probably only two crewmembers to keep numbers down, and are missle trucks with enough guns to shread drones, other fighters, or aerospace fighters.
The concept of using your coolant and dumping it overboard is something we use IRL. The rocket fuel or oxidizer(not sure which) flows round tubes in the nozzles and cool them before passing into the combustion chamber.
@@lucky-segfault Dual expander engine cycle uses both fuel and oxidizer. And, IIRC, first ever expander engine used liquid oxygen as both oxidizer and working fluid
Thanks for bringing more public light to this! Pretty much only project rho nerds who used to dwell on obscure IRC's really lament the lack of radiators, to the point where 2001 was redesigned to exclude radiators because not one laymen would expect it to have "fins"
@@scottfw7169 Yeah, they could even have made a silly scene out of chaging radiator fluid and a car analogue or something, it would have saved so much realism and time on redesigning.
Currently taking Engineering Thermodynamics 1, and I have to say, you can prove with basic arithmetic that this is one of the hottest Spacedock videos of all time.
Nice. I loved thermo. Our Sr project (Aerospace Engineering) was a space design using the space shuttle fuel tank for the main structure. :) I did the thermal and propulsion.
The venture stars descending is my favourite scene in avatar. Such a lovely vessel In my setting, radiators will play a key role in showing the struggle of spaceflight, the limitations of heatsinks, and radiators themselves, with each ships using different types. Heat management can add so much to hard scifi, so i will utilize it
It's a shame they ditched the sails they originally used in the first film. I don't think they were shown but I guess they changed to engines to get that incredible scorched earth scene
@@helplmchoking They had the engines in the first film too. They use the sail when leaving and returning to Earth, but when they arrive on and leave Pandora they use the antimatter engines
One nice thing is that you can pre heat your reaction mass to get rid of heat. Real life rockets does this to cool the rocket engines. And at high trust you can cool better as you use more reaction mass. Also open cool your heavy laser cannons for the muzzle flash effect.
Open-cycle cooling (such as the "nuclear lightbulb" realistic(-ish) theoretical design) is my headcanon for why The Expanse doesn't bother with radiators on their ships. Especially since they don't JUST use the fusion plasma for their thrust, they run it through a bunch of water to increase the momentum imparted. That water is a perfect place to dump the heat from the interior of the ship as well. (Especially if you use handwavey physics-inspired designs rather than 100%-hard sci-fi numbers.)
@@erikschaal4124 nah, the heat itself is the source of thrust, ie: high heat => high kinetic energy of gas => faster exit velocity => high thrust. So epstein drive ran cool mean it has no energy, and uses less fuel means it produce no gas, = zero thrust.
@@kaitlyn__Lpretty sure in a few episodes they do actually overheat some of the pdcs or come close. They are actively cooled and they also use many barrels not just one so they don't get as hot.
@@putty-e2872 usable heat (directed into thrust) and waste heat (such as from the magnets directing the thrust) can both occur, so the supposition is whatever Epstein did which made the “flame” blue and fuel efficiency go up had to have massively reduced the waste heat to move the energy into useful heat.
I've always thought that adding accurate radiators would make for MORE exciting sci fi space battles instead of less. Like, make it a plot point that your ships all have these giant weak spots that can be retracted behind armored doors in combat, but that limits the time you can fight drastically, so you have tense moments where the crew is weighing keeping their radiators closed but overheating all their systems or opening their radiators early and exposing them to enemy fire. Plus different types of ships would have different sizes of heat sink, so you would end up with interesting lopsided battles where some ships just try to outlast their opponents because they know they have the sink capacity to keep fighting longer than their opponents. Its a shame that so few ips actually have interesting radiators or heat systems in general.
sounds like space age torpedoes, open cycle radiator transfers heat from the ship to a ferrous medium that is violently expelled via rail or coil toward the enemy of choice.
Sacrificial heat sinks can be very useful for a combat ship since they can also act as a decoy given that they should temporarily have a significantly higher thermal signature than your ship as long as you don't have the engines pointed at whatever you want to confuse
A book I read a long time ago ( I don't remember its name) where it was about a mission to venus (near future). In it, they actually addressed this with a clever open cycle heatsink that doubled as a balast system on a smaller parasite craft. It used solid lead to absorb the heat and then it dumped the molten lead. This also served a plot point as it limited the time the craft could spend on the surface and continually changed how it maneuvered. Just a cool concept in my opinion.
Saturn Run by John Sanford Ctein had a lead radiator system on a loop. Melting then reforming lead outside on a conveyor belt to return cooled down to once again melt and go back outside for a conveyor belt ride to dump heat on long loop.
In a game like Elite Dangerous where heat is an actual game mechanic, I love how their ship design deals with it. Most ships when dealing with a lot of heat will expose their radiators more. Also just charging all the heat into a heat sink and chucking it overboard is just hilarious to me.
I imagine it'd be more like spraying superheated coolant out than physically chucking a heat sink out the airlock, but that is a hilarious image. Maybe that could appear as a jury-rigged heat management adjunct on a craft with other adjustments- like a souped-up civilian-grade hero ship.
Same with Terra Invicta. Some of the late game drive turn your ship into flying radiator because of its awful efficiency. (like the protium converter and firefly torch) You can even retract your radiator in combat to minimize damage but you will need heat sink otherwise you will melt your ship.
The ships for my setting have HUUUGE radiator sails that fold out pretty much whenever the ships aren't in combat or in FTL. I purposely made them connect to the main hull using "masts" to create a sailing ship vibe. In combat though, I just use elite-dangerous esque ejectable heat-sinks. It does put a limit on time in combat though, at least if you don't want mass drivers poking holes in your "Sails"
I like a combination of water vapor soft CNT inflatable bags and the ability to selectively pop those bags to offload heat. It doubles as good protection against energy weapons because you can release a bunch of cold vapor as an ice cloud to diffuse particles of, say a maser. Also you're carrying a bunch of water, it's good for drinking im told.
One of the coolest ideas I've seen is using Radiators as, essentially, either chaff, or a sensor decoy, by ejecting them during/before combat to make precise reading of the battlefield more difficult: they could even be used offensively, by making it more difficult to tell when missiles are being launched by basically showering an entire area with radiators made hot enough to melt. As long as the ship can either cool down using more conventional methods (like landing somewhere,) or at least transfer the crew out of the ship so the slower cooling isn't lethal, there isn't even much risk.
One of the best radiator ideas is having an open cycle loop for your BFG, huge laser shot followed by jetting a cloud of glowing plasma/gas around the ship, like a cannon with muzzle suppressor vanes and recoil kicking up dust.
In 2001 the USS Discovery was originally going to have some nice big radiators to go with it's nuclear drive, but they were removed in the end because they thought people would think they were wings
@@MrGoesBoom They could have taken a moment to include some quick something which would inform the public, but, no, they took the lazy escape and ignored the thing.
I'm reminded of a quote I saw on the Atomic Rockets page: "Amateurs discuss rockets, professionals discuss heat management." Thank you for raising this topic; it's so important for spacecraft design but so often missing in fiction.
for my universe I didn't wanted radiators but I did wanted to take heat management into account, so the way it works is that heat is transformed back into energy and stored in the ship battery, and if the battery is full (notably during battle, since shields also pump energy into the battery when shot at) there are exhaust systems that are basically just very energy-vore lights on the hull to quickly dumps energy out of the battery. most ships can have a few tiny exhausts simply hided in random spots, but ships that need extremely reliable emergency systems (experimental weapons for instance) or that have tiny battery capacity have larger deployable exhausts, and if they start working you know something probably went wrong.
I remember reading years ago, in one of Clarke's supplemental books, that the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey was supposed to have radiators attached to the drive assembly at the rear. But the producers thought they may be confused for wings by the viewers, so Discovery had its wings clipped.
Love seeing Torchship representation on this channel. Actually, there's a lot of cool obscure or semi-obscure stuff this episode highlights, which is cool!
There are a number of sci fi stories that incorporate this concept. Some even deal with issues where a ship can't vent heat out to space or the thermal sensors on a pursuing ship will find them. And what goes on inside the ship while this is happening.
One additional possibility is to use the heat to improve the energy of propellant from thrusters. By exciting the particles of the propellant, making them leave the exhaust port faster.
Modern rocket engines sometimes use regenerative cooling, but keep in mind that the second law of thermodynamics means that much of your heat will inevitably be wasted away.
Never thought I'd be so into heat radiation. Really like the direction this channel has taken lately. Love the real world science being applied to hard sci-fi.
FINALLY! The most important part of all the equipment on any starship or space station! Edit: Also, phase shifting energy batteries(phase shifting heatsinks) for convenient plot lengths of time to justify space combat duration!
Any major energy weapon turret should probably be seated in or on some kind of highly reflective or otherwise insulated surface to prevent the heat radiating off of the weapon itself from heating the main ship, if feasible.
@@mryellow6918 You obviously need a physical join to the ship for power, ammunition, and whatever articulation machining you're using for your turret - however, if it uses gun barrels or rails these will likely be radiating a lot of heat and will be projecting out over the hull - this is the part you might want to consider adding additional reflective insulation to.
I was thinking about the stealth system on ME's Normandy - what if you do the opposite. Instead of hiding the heat, output as much as possible, and use it to hide something behind you. Make your little ship (maybe not that little) a big hot angry spot on the enemy heat sensors. Just like radiators, heat itself can be used in interesting ways.
The idea is to not draw attention. This tactic might be able to hide the heat signature, but all that heat will not go unnoticed. The moment the enemy ship points its ladar at you, your cover's blow.
Not very good for pure stealth (where the objective is to be completely undetected). Very cool idea for evasion though (people know your there but can't narrow it down enough to target). I guess it's similar to electronic warfare systems that put out a huge amount of noise.
The heat mechanics in Elite is top notch. Not only need you worry about your ship getting too hot and how heat affects observability and damages systems, but in very specific situations overheating the ship is a solution to certain problems. Plus the radiators are designed beautifully on many ships, adding to their character.
I like how space in sci-fi slowly shifts from a "here be dragons" superficial fairytale to an actual vision of a place where people might one day live and work. This channel is a perfect example of that.
I love radiators (and heat management systems in general) but I also like not adding them when I want to show the technological gulf between two spacecraft in the same setting, by showing the ones that do have them meeting the ones to whom the laws of physics are seemingly more optional, and then having characters react accordingly
I already decided to have heat regulation be a vital part of space flight in my RPG from the last video where you mentioned it. Been thinking about it and created mechanics for dumping secondary coolant for short term emergencies. So glad to see more content on this topic.
I had an idea for a mass driver weapon for space battleships where the ammunition would be used as a heatsink, thus allowing you to fire long bursts which would be good for point defence weaponry. I wasn't sure exactly how you'd achieve this possibly by having the ammunition feed through the coolant outflow.
That was one thing I remembered from Mass Effect, the Normandy’s stealth mode would sink heat into the hull instead of trying to radiate it out, with the caveat of course that there’s a crew-cooking time limit on how long you can do this. The scifi Tantalus drive allowed for non-radiative thrust somehow as well.
It's nice to see Children of a Dead Earth get a cameo. I love that game, warts and all, and would love to see you guys feature it in a review or Let's Play.
Someday, when the stars align, I'd love to see CoaDE get a proper update again (or just a straight up sequel). It has so much unrealized potential. On topic, in CoaDE, I've settled on a common design for battleships where an armored ring extends out amidships, significantly beyond the diameter of the hull itself. Most of the weapons on the ship are mounted around the circumference of this ring, which helps to draw enemy fire away from the bow of the ship, which has an internal armored belt to protect the crew and systems. Tucked behind the weapons ring are the radiators, which are built to be mostly or entirely concealed behind the ring when viewed front on. The ships engage the enemy head-on and rely on the armored ring to protect the radiators. Of course, if they have to engage in the first place then the missiles and drones have failed to do their job. 🙂 The game sometimes struggles modeling the armor on the weapons ring properly, but I feel that the concept itself is sound. Some of my larger ships also have "emergency" radiators to be deployed in place of main radiators during point defense scenarios, with a lower outlet temperature and only enough cooling to run a backup generator for powering CIWS and life support. The idea is to significantly reduce the heat signature and surface area of the radiators, which are what enemy missiles actually home in on. It also allows you to use much smaller flares, since they don't have to outshine your main radiators.
Dont forget phase change radiators. Depending on the medium, you can dump fantastic amounts of energy into relatively small spaces. You just have to develop the correct gradient to make it work right Also, a nice singularity would be ideal to just pump energy into it over and over and over. Over. However, I'm sure you pump enough energy into a singularity. It's going to eventually grow and create a gravitational field that is uncontrollable.
the droplet system is pretty cool idea, which reminded me of when i was reading about spray pond cooling systems used for some early soviet nuclear reactor facilities. so i can easily see how the concept would work for space
This is actually what I've been thinking all along. Wings on an X-wing or "solar panels" on TIE fighters are actually heatsinks. That can also explain why laser cannons are usually mounted on the tip of the wing. Actually the design of TIE fighters are actually quite genius. The panels can radiate heat and protect the cockpit at the same time. And since heatsinks can be easily made redundant, one or two stray shots will not make the whole ship inoperable.
The TIE fighter is great from a thermal perspective but terrible from a structural and ADCS one, because the large wings means your center of mass will be completely off if it gets hit. The x wing is better because of the smaller target profile, but ideally, if you wanted maximum manueverability, you'd actually want engines on wingtips too. However, the issue there is the vulnerability of the engines, like you see on the y wing. Of course this is all according to our design principles, not accounting for star wars advances in technology.
Heat is waste. One of the most important things you can do is figure out a way to get the heat into your exhaust. I'm not saying radiators aren't important. But a good way to illustrate the difference between an efficient design and an inefficient design is adding lots of radiators.
@@deathsinger1192 There are lots of ways to measure efficiency, and it's relative to many variables. Maybe it's like the rocket equation, and you need much bigger radiators to get a tiny more amount of speed. Or maybe it's a square-cube law thing, where the Avatar ships are the smallest they can be made, and improve with scale. I don't know enough about them to say.
Ahhhhh! Thank you so much. I love when high tech sci fi uses functional concepts in ship design. The amount of giant craft with giant rear engines and no reverse thrust drives me crazy.
So it would be difficult to build an effective space warship just because of the heat problem, because all the cool stuff you can hit people with generates a lot of heat, especially beam weapons, I guess^^
Bingo. Missiles generate much much less heat which helps with them but designing anything for war is never ever going to be easy. Spacecraft especially included
There's currently reaserch suggesting you might not need a radiator. You can just generate a huge magnetic fields to act as a giant radiator for your ship
I love how this video handles the topic. Putting forth a great concept that should be implemented more without presenting it as mandatory, simply a better solution that can be used in many cool and unique ways.
I feel like it would also be interesting to bring up cooling systems that use the fuel to cool the engines. Plenty (most?) of modern rockets do this to keep the engines from melting from the massive thermal load, using the cryogenic fuel/oxidizer to cool and then getting rid of the heat by firing the fuel out the back.
That's called open-cycle cooling, the video already mentioned it for a bit. That's also one of the factors that makes chemical rockets' Isp looks really bad compared to nuclear or electric engines, because those types of cooling rely heavily on the huge mass flow that chemical rockets have, and huge mass flow means low Isp, which makes chemical rockets a real gas-guzzler.
@@lazyremnant380 Well, yeah, it's a form of open cycle cooling. He was going over the general concept, but I thought this specific case was worth mentioning, since it's already in use today. There are plenty of other forms of open cycle cooling too. Also, it's true that you need a lot of flow to cool the engine cone, but for a lower, less concentrated heat load like life support this could still be useful.
@@lazyremnant380 Is that one reason that ion engines are so slow, because they have to radiate heat and not simply expell it? So they can't scale up or they might melt?
@@henryward5457 Ion engines are slow because ions have much smaller mass than the hot gases produced by chemical reactions, in accordance with Newton's second law of motion. They're also not a heat engine, so they don't emit much heat by themselves. Current ion engines are limited by the amount of electrical power from solar panels that is used to accelerate them. We can replace those panels with a nuclear reactor that can supply much more power to the engine, greatly increasing their thrust, but only up to a point, no thanks to the ions having the same charge repelling each other, choking the flow. Now, when you have a nuclear electric engine like this, the reactor, being a heat engine, will emit waste heat that needs to be radiated away.
There’s something about the minor but still very important designs of a vehicle in media, fiction and games are my favourite. Vehicle suspension is kinda like my turn on, I love studying, watching, absorbing every detail of a vehicle’s suspension
I was happy to see ED's heatsink ejection referenced. Such a fun game that I really need to get back into (haven't played in years). I remember loving the heat mechanics tho, I tried making a stealth ship using an eagle with no shields and just tougher hull so I could stay in silent running for longer. It kinda worked in some ways, but mostly was just a fun new way to play lol. I had more than 1 heatsink launcher on that one. It was always cool how the windshield would stay icy for a long time on that ship!
I don't know if it's just me, but I LOVE the way radiators look on realistic spacecraft. I know this video was purely about the practical uses, but I think radiators also give you a good excuse to add wide wing-like shapes to your design without running into the "Planes in space" accusation.
Designing the radiator flaps on spacecraft is always a good part of the process, I find. Great for if you have a large unused area where nothing else makes sense. Then again, I love all the things I can do maths around, so maybe that's just me.
Ever since I first watched this video, I've been adding radiators to all my ship designs for my own setting. I have to say, playing with with they can actually look like has been really fun, and it's satisfying to know that not only am I making a lot of my ships look better, I'm also making them more realistic.
In Star Trek, they have something called intercoolers, which sound like a more advance Sunpower Free-Piston Stirling Cryocoolers, along with plasma vents.
I think it’d be cool to see a system where they “eject” heat via coolant pods/canisters/shells. They’d be filled with a coolant of some type and after it’s coolant has gotten to hot, it just ejects it, in a similar manner to any kind of magazine fed weapon ejecting a shell casing. Could look cool and be another thing to be easily “reloaded” in a sort of magazine type thing
In case anyone is wondering, the reason why humans freeze when ejected into space is because of the latent heat of vaporization of water. Liquid water takes 4.2 joules of energy to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius, or 1 Kelvin. To raise it from 0 degrees liquid water to 100 degrees liquid water takes 418 joules. To vaporize (turn from liquid to gas,) 1 gram of water takes 2257 joules of energy. 5 times as much as raising it from "ice cold" liquid water to "boiling hot" liquid water. Water is notable both because of how much the energies of vaporization are, AND because water is unusually high thermal mass. For comparison, the specific heat of fats are around 0.45 joules per gram per degree Celsius. A tiny bit more than 1/10th that of water. Your body is more water than everything else combined, and you are not air tight much less water tight. When exposed to the vacuum of space, the water starts vaporizing, and takes with it the energy requires to overcome the water's hydrogen bonds; it literally boils away as water vapor flies off into space until there's so little energy in what remains that it freezes (no longer has the energy to overcome the solid matter state of the strong hydrogen bonds.) If all of the water inside you freezes ..... you're frozen. It IS convection in the standard models, since it's vapor taking away the heat. Once you're frozen, any solar energy hitting your frozen corpse will sublimate away (go directly from frozen water into water vapor,) until you are a desiccated anhydrous husk of a human.
As a huge Sci-Fi fan, I love this channel and its attention to detail. I have watched so many videos to make sure the Sci-Fi game we are creating adheres to as many principles (while staying fun and engaging!). Thanks again for making this great content.
A while back I had an idea about metal cloth radiators, with thicker tubes containing the coolant woven into it. Suspended from masts for a very sail-like, yet still plausible spaceships.
Remember that you will have to conduct or convect the heat TO those locations. It's doable, but you will need something to transfer the heat from one part of the spacecraft to another at a high efficiency. And moving the parts changes your CG too, as well as obscuring your sensors.
The "Chuck it Overboard" style of Heat Management can be used in Combat... Make the Ammunition for a Railgun or Dust Gun the collector for your ships Waste Heat, then when it's almost hot enough to vaporize, fire the now super-hot material at your enemy, adding Thermal Damage to the Kinetic Damage the Rail/Dust gun already does...
As someone looking to write my own fictional sci-fi universe, I love these videos that look into the potential designs of futuristic space craft. Obviously, with Sci-fi almost anything can be explained away as some future science-y stuff, but there are still basic components and issues we know that need to be solved!
The idea of using open-cycle radiators for dumping large amounts of heat quickly is particularly interesting, from a story and world-building perspective. Since this uses up coolant and thus requires frequent refueling, it would only be intended for infrequent use. But guess what else is infrequent? Short, intense space battles! So a spaceship could use its closed-cycle radiators for normal operations, and then when in a battle, it could turn them off to avoid thermal detection, instead storing the heat in a disposable liquid. If detected, the ship could dump the superheated liquid overboard as a form of extra propulsion and perhaps defense (to confuse heat-seeking torpedoes). My point is that including radiators insteod of ignoring them can actually enhance the storytelling possibilities. Radiators can lead to interesting decisions and dilemmas, as mentioned in this video (larger radiators present more of a target to enemy weapons, but are necessary for more powerful weapon systems).
Really wanted to add cooling systems to my own ships. It can add more to a story. Didn't find a lot of ways we can do it rapidly with the ISS being the example I think I went with for at least sublight engines and stuff. Things get more complex when you add weapons, shields (at least plasma based), and a functioning warp drive. Glad to know of other methods in the works. Haven't thought about using pellets for example to spray heat away from the ships.
You could put a radiator station at strategic points like shipping hubs or FTL lane intersections. Think a large ring or tube-like space station that sprays coolant at your ship.
Alternate pitch (especially if we're talking sci-fi) Collect the heat and turn it into more power. It doesn't need to make more than it uses to do this, but it should in total use less than just radiating it away.
Laws of thermodynamics says hi since making or using energy also creates waste heat. End result is instead of getting rid of heat, you end up with more. Better off copying Star Wars neutrino radiators where they are dumped as neutrinos.
The Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey was supposed to have radiators and had them in Clarke's novel, but Stanley Kubrick nixed them because he was worried the audience would think they were fins. About open cycle cooling, I believe the canceled X-20 Dynasor spaceplane was designed to carry water which would be vented through the metal heat shield scales during the hottest part of reentry to shed the heat load.
I was expecting you to mention how radiators work in the expanse. I can't remember anything mentioning that in the series, also, I liked how Ammar and Galente (I think I typed correctly) used laser and plasma weapons, I liked the fact that the setups usually had heatsinks to improve weapon efficiency.
The need to radiate heat was a thing a few times in the old Star Wars EU novels. There was one system that mined a planet that orbited quite close to its sun, so getting rid of excess heat was a challenge. For visiting ships, there were special shield ships to chaperone them in from out-system to the inner planets.
I kinda like the idea of physically jettisoning heat. In a certain kind of setting, it's another consumable type of thing. You need to dock not just to refuel and re-stock, but cool down, cycle coolant, or re-fill your coolant tanks.
ok the idea of a combat situation based around dodgeing and deflecting most shots coming to an end when one side deploies their radiators becauae they cant be armored sounds like great visual design!
One thing I learned from DP9 is how much of a vulnerability large/hot radiators (or insufficiently insulated heat sinks) can be. Space warfare depends very heavily on being able to precisely pinpoint your enemy's location and vector while making your own as hard to pin down as possible. This makes your thermal profile something an enemy can use against you. Properly regulating heat during battle would be an intricate dance, and knowing an enemy ship's sensor array would help you know when you can vent a little hotter and when you really do need to rein it in.
Great Video! This topic is almost never talked about. If anyone wanted to sci-fi with a industrial or retro feel, you could have the ships pump coolant into space from structures that look like a 20th century ocean ship's smoke stacks.
Also makes stealth ships more interesting because to effectively go stealthed you need to stop radiating heat. Which means that you immediately have a downside to otherwise possibly overpowered stealth ships. You can only remain stealthed as long as your crew is not getting cooked to death.
Kind of surreal to see youtubers advertising those same monthly part model kits I saw advertised on TV as kid. I have a collection like that centered around Star Wars vehicle models accompanied by a small magazinr with lore and behind the scenes stuff.
This video made me think of a concept weapon that I'm calling the slag missile It is an open cycle cooling but you put all your superheated coolant into a warhead on a guided missile and once the missile is like 100 m away from your target it detonates spreading superheated coolant all across their ship melting systems like their radiators crippling the ship's ability to cool down or downright disabling their ship entirely
In my setting magic and technology are used in tandem. Thus, most radiators on ships use cryomancy to effectively pump heat from cold objects to hot ones, making them radiate away huge amounts of energy. Cryomancy doesn't just cool something down, it makes the heat move away from the target of the spell. Ship generates heat -> cryomancy moves this heat to the radiators and doesn't let it come back to the hull -> heat is radiated away. This exact method can be used to make heatsinks with HUGE capacity. Like straight up a tungsten block which can be pumped with heat until it glows white. Moreover, there are ways to reuse the heat - cryomancy has a lot of uses in this field.
"Scifi ships already have glowy parts, why not make them functional?" The old addage of if you don't know what part of the alien ship to aim for, fire at the glowing bits, still holds true.
Played a lot of Elite Dangerous back before they killed the game for consoles. Thermal management was a key part of building, tuning, and operating the ships in that game. And watching the radiators open up and glow brighter and brighter during heavy power usage was really neat-looking.
One of the highest performance cooling solutions is "boil off" it is an open loop water based system most famously used in ultra high performance piston aircraft racing such as the Reno Air Race. The idea is super simple instead of cooling the water directly with a radiator, you remove the radiator and let it cycle between a coolant tank and the engine once the water is forced to undergo a phase change to steam you let it escape. By allowing the phase change to happen, the water rejects 5 to 7 times the heat.
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Good video, bad sponsor. It would take 2 years and 8 months to be able to finish that model at a cost of $1658.82 USD.
@@mordaxrehn Not checking your math, but I came up with 1960 and change from the US site including shipping.
That's a pretty scummy sponser. Hope they at least paid you handsomely. Why do they feel the need to obfuscate they're pricing? I shouldn't need to bust out a calculator to get a rough estimation of the price. Not to mention 31 separate shipping packages for one toy? That sounds great for the environment.
Came here to say the same. Subscription based model kits are wildly overpriced, and rarely if ever offer the option to purchase the entire set as a single package. I've been hooked on your channel for a long time, and while I understand you need sponsors to keep the lights on, I'd have expected better from a channel I respect this much than to see you shill a product like this.
That aside, Fantastic video as always, thanks for the great content.
To be clear (pushes glasses up nose), I don't know if this is a good price or not. It seems like a gorgeous model and it IS die cast with lights and greeblies and everything. I just don't like the way they're hiding the pricing and not having an "all at once" price/option.
My single biggest pet peeve in so so many IP's, franchises, shows, movies, whatever, is people instafreezing when exposed to space. You're totally right that it's down to pure ignorance and failure to conduct a 5 second google as research.
For movies, I have to concede that it's easier to communicate the "somebody's dying in space" with visible freezing than suffocating (which should be horrifying to watch-and therefore potentially leading to the box-office poison 'R' rating).
@@mglenadelthen maybe dont include that in your movie, you dont really have to show someone after they get spaced to convey they're gone forever
@@mglenadelAn R rating isn't poison for the box office, just look at how successful horror films are to see the proof of that.
The issue is, studios think it is, despite the fact that R rated movies did stupidly well in the 70s and 80s
People still freeze a lot faster than most objects we throw into space, the whole sublimation of our blood thing.
@@mglenadel homie u have no idea what you're talking about.... box-office poision R? lmao
I really liked that comment about deploying radiators as an indicator of surrender. It’s like a futuristic reversal of age of sail ships striking colors
It also opens the door for a bunch of interesting storytelling. For example you could have ships pre chill themselves before going into combat and thesefore be able to have tension slowly rise during a battle. The crew could go from a cold ship as their breath mists and they wait for weapons to come into range to a warm ship where most of the fighting is done to tense moments as both crews take carefull shots and use their engines as sparingly as possible whilst their crews start suffering from heatstroke as both franticly try and outlast the other.
You could also make shooting a ship with its radiators out against conventions of space combat as it is analogous to surrender.
I just got a idea, which is how you could make systems that work similar to flags and colors from the ages of sail where that stuff was super important, like extended radiators as a white flag but other systems can be used to communicate other concepts such as goals or threats. Now I want to make a space setting that functions like sailing ships with everything being scaled up to space.
It is a cool idea, but unfortunately would be difficult to implement realistically, because presumably all of that kind of information would just be exchanged automatically by radio, because space combat between ships would virtually never happen in visual distance of each another.
It depends on the context. You'd probably want to retract radiators in a close-ish range merge when beam weapons can be deployed accurately at tight focus. At longer (several light seconds or more) distances when burning to set up an attack vector for standoff missile launches or a beam run you'd want your drive radiators out to sustain high thrust power - at such ranges jitter would make precisely targeting radiators very hard and tight focusing a beam would be challenging as well.
A better sign of surrender would probably be extruding low temperature life support radiators, which aren't needed in combat but would need to be out to keep the ship habitable long term.
@@Alicorn_ You can still fake a surrender over radio. Besides you can see this over IR.
i've always thought a cool potential explanation for why many sci fis starships appear to always be under thrust is that they actually forcefully radiate their waste heat out what look to us like rocket cones, but aren't
Glad you included elite dangerous in here as heat management is a somewhat significant part of the gameplay, and the radiators on ships are incorporated really well into the designs.
"silent running"
"frameshift drive charging"
"temperature critical"
"warning taking heat damage"
"EJECT EJECT"
Love this game
Love that "silent running" amounts to shutting down all the radiators, and that you can briefly break a target lock by dumping a heat sink overboard.
@@thestabbybrit4798It's so cool, I love it. Haven't played in a long while though.
Yeah, I was just wondering if he was gonna mention Elite in the video for how much heatsinks are part of the gameplay.
Shame the game itself sucks though
Radiators are definitely an underrated design feature; I definitely have them on pretty much every ship in my stories in the form of panels and strips along with internal emission sinks for stealth and protecting the obviously vulnerable radiators during transit or combat!
I always loved the look of the capital ship designs from FASA's old Renegade Legion setting, massive, long ships build around enormous spinal mount mass drivers, they had these big ventral fins. I don't remember if that was their purpose in the game, but I swiped them as a place to both serve as a secondary heat sink and to retract and protect radiators during combat.
I thought that there can't be no stealth in space? The crew's life support alone emits enough heat to stick out like a sore thumb against the 3 Kelvin cosmic microwave background, and I don't think it's a good idea to turn it off until the cabin's temperature reaches 3 K..... Trying to insulate the crew hab will make the insulator heats up too.
@@lazyremnant380 there can be stealth, in the same way we have stealth on earth now. And hiding thermal signatures can be done by dumping heat prior to entering detection range and just not cycling heat to the outer insulated hull. Or having a coating shell around your ship with the vacuum between the two. Now your thermal print will be tiny for a reasonable amount of time, likely long enough to get within reasonable firing range... then your missiles and your flares and a fresh heat dump can cover you while you burn away thus giving you even more stealth opportunities.
@@littlekong7685 I think stealth on Earth works because we're inside an atmosphere full of stuffs that readily distorts electromagnetic radiations, and air convections cooling off cockpits and hot exhausts, we don't have that in the vacuum of space.
There's no horizon to hide stuffs in space, thus the effective detection range can be very very long. We can still see Mars' tiny moons with ordinary telescope from here, 225 million kms away. Infrared space-based telescopes like JWST can see clearer and further. If my enemy has a base on Mars, I'm sure that any anomalous heat signature will be visible from Earth orbit in 20 minutes or less, and I will take steps to investigate.
I think hiding waste heat inside a vacuum flask only delays the inevitable. You'd still have to radiate the ever-increasing heat away at some point and the crew presumably wants to survive beyond that point (because your cover is already blown up and your enemy is firing at you). Getting within firing range will require turning on the engine, which will be detectable. Coasting all the way might be doable, but if the enemy can detect your initial thrust, with the knowledge of orbital mechanics, they can very accurately predict your trajectory.
@@littlekong7685 There ain't no PRACTICAL stealth in space.
You can in theory make something invisble in space for a short amount of time, but it will take so much effort, that it is not practical.
There is no horizon in space. And while the intensity of radiation decreases with the square of the distance, you can always increase exposure times.
You'd have to cool your hull down to almost 3 kelvin and then store that heat somewhere. And that's going to be realy energy intensive - and generating that energy generates a lot more heat for which you'll need even more energy to store it somewhere. The dog's chasing its own tail there...
The colder something is, the harder it is to cool it down further.
Also, while you are stealthing it up out there, you can't manuvre at all as long as you use any kind of reaction based propulsion system.
You will have to generate your trajectory extremely far out if you want the plume from whatever drive you use not to be spoted.
The farther out you start, the more powerfull your propulsion system must be to get you anywhere in anything even aproaching a usefull time frame. And the more powerful your propulsion system is, the further out you have to shut it down to avoid detection. Again, dogs and tails...
I'm not a physicist, but my uneducated layman's guess goes to possibly light years for a fusion drive...
Absolutely correct! Heat management should be more than an afterthought.
Especially for stealth ships, as infrared light gives away the ship in the dark background.
Even if its not a ship designed specifically for stealth, remember that the first rule of survivability is not being detected at all, so you might allow for normal warships to have ways of limiting thermal radiation so they can attempt to have the element of surprise on their side or even to run away if needed.
Just put all of your radiators on one side of your ship and hopefully the enemy doesn't have extra eyes anywhere else.
There is no stealth in space.
@@TitterpigRancher yes there is.
I assume you are confusing "stealth" with "undetectability"
Stealth = trying to make yourself as hard as possible to detect (typicly limited to the settings main forms of sensors)
Undetectability = having a way to be impossible to be detected.
Classical examples for space stealth would be:
Hiding behind stuff (Planets, moons, other ships); Thermal controll to fool thermal sensors; Optical camouflage to stop visual identification; false ID/IFF beacons and/or changing the ships siluette/performance to pass as another type of ship; Anti radar coating/hullshapes, etc.
All of these and many more can be used to hide/make it harder to be detected.
@@vyran7044 All of those things exist, yes, but none of those will make your thermal signature equal to background, and unless you can figure out a way to outrun your own EM signature, the IR wavelength your craft emits will be visible from one side of the galaxy to the other (as the Webb telescope has so unequivocally proved, even though we knew that already). Your ship needs those radiators to survive, and the comparatively enormous signature of those radiators (to say nothing of your drive itself) will always tell whoever is at your destination that you're coming, parsecs and years before you can hope to arrive there. Most of deep space is incredibly vast and incredibly empty. You're traversing a terrain where the defender has the ultimate high ground. There's nothing to be stealthy IN.
Hence, no matter how many measures you take in order to lower your detectability, you can never lower your detectability to zero, and unless you lower it to zero, you're always going to be seen. There is no stealth in space.
In space engineers, i make wings out of heat vent blocks to try to emulate radiators, i find it neat that when i shoot a railgun it lights up pretty colors
Really? I need to try that
Aw damn, it's a DLC deco
I thought SE had added heat mechanics since I was gone
It can also play a role in ship detection
If thermal detection is a big thing a ship might try to radiate heat into pellets it can drop all at once to remain stealthy for a while
It has the disadvantage of giving stealth ships a fixed limited time in stealth, but that adds tension
It can also be a distraction or work as a flare to fool thermal sighted weapons, for example
A stealth ship has run out of heat pellets and has to engage its cruising radiators and is spotted, it gets locked on by thermal torpedoes and drops its pellets last second, the torpedoes barely miss and the stealth ship manages to run away
With Elite: Dangerous, the Heat Sink Launchers are exactly that. I have pulled that exact manuver many times. Never gets old.
And this concept would be history repeating itself
Before nuclear energy in submarines, they relied on charging batteries with combustion engines when they had access to surface air and then could only stay underwater until the batteries were low. And this was all done for stealth, as no technology existed yet to detect underwater craft.
This effectively meant that submarines were stealth ships that needed to drop stealth regularly to avoid certain doom and were constantly trying to balance their stealth with limited power supply.
Replace charging batteries with cooling heatsinks and you've got stealth spaceships
That is clever - stealth ships using a disposable heat sink in stealth mode.
Got to love radiators, they're both so underrated and underappreciated that I now include them on all spaceships I build in games, not only do they make the ships feel more realistic, they also look magnificent with their orange glow breaking the shadows!
They're often very subtle, but many Gundam warships, particularly in the Universal Century, have radiators on the underside of their ships. The Federation Magellan and Salamis class have radiators that are flush with the hull, and ships on both sides in the Char's Counterattack movie have highly visible radiator panels sticking out from the ventral hull, typically near the engine blocks.
But what about the Mobile Suits?
@Nichodo
It's not shown in the UC, but early in Gundam Seed, one of the antagonist machines returns to its ship and is immediately shot with something that makes the armor cool to touch.
If you mean out in battle, the average sortie time of a mobile suit isn't long enough for overheating to be a problem unless they are using some specific system or weapon that generates a lot of waste heat.
Powerful systems have been known to overheat machines before however. Most notable is probably the Big Zam during the One Year War.
It's funny how some older anime shows, especially really futuristic ones, pay attention to realism whilst modern movies don't, except for Avatar.
One anime in particular that i remember was "Kakumeiki Valvrave". In the anime they had overheating problems after a not to long battle so they came up with disposable heatsinks, which I didn't fully understand back when I saw it.
@@Nichodowhy do you think the gundam has those horns?
(I’m joking of course)
@@Nichodo Gundam Freedom from Seed has significant radiators both closed and open loop but it's more the exception than the norm.
Having heat management factored in a space battle would definitely make it interesting. You can’t just have your spaceguns to continuously shoot. It’ll generate heat faster than the rate of what the radiator able to remove.
And talking about warframe, this is why we have that heat bar in railjack weapon.
Having radiators could also be one of the justification why you have a wing-like structure in your spaceship. The other is to have maneuver thrusters on the wingtips.
If you only needed the protrusions or attitude control, there would likely be a better shape than a wing like one. Radiators are definitely the stronger justification for such a thing, though they could do double duty.
Check out the game "Attack Vector: Tactical". Ships fighting each other have internal sumps to store heat, spike radiators that get rid of a little bit of heat at a time, batteries to power weapons, and engine thrust. If you run low on power you can turn on your main reactor, but the only way to get rid of heat from the main reactor steadily is to extend your radiators. If those radiators are extended while you are in range of the enemy, they can get shot off easily and you are essentially SOL so need to surrender.
Extending radiators while in combat is the universal signal for "I surrender", as if you keep fighting after extending the radiators then your opponent will simply shoot them off and your crew gets baked alive due to the main reactor's waste heat
There is a game called Naev that does this, in what is otherwise a pretty simple space game. Unfortunately, that aspect isn't necessarily a positive for the fun of the gameplay. A related (both are inspired by the same old game series) game called Endless Sky also has heat, but in that case it is is only ship-wide (Naev has a system where fired guns generate heat, reducing their effectiveness, which is then transferred to the ship and only from there radiated) and it is possible to remove heat faster than generated even at full blast depending on your outfits - you'll typically only need to consider in the three scenarios of having seriously neglected cooling equipment, relying heavily on Korath equipment (which typically runs especially hot) and when fighting certain foes that use weapons designed to heat up the target.
Since we're mentioning games, I love StarSector's use of flux. It's meant to resemble heat building up from receiving hits to shields and/or firing weapons. It's simple to understand for new players and it has a really interesting story (you kind of have to piece it together yourself though, which I enjoy but others may not)
The radiators in the game Terra Invicta are also fairly interesting as someof the better drives lack efficiency (less then 95% is bad by endgame) as the energy created by such reactors and drives is so huge that even the best radiator, the tin dropplet radiator becomes truly huge, which is disappointingly not shown by the radiator size in game but is incredibly expensive in resource cost.
Extending and retracting radiators is also needed in the space combat, with heat sinks allowing the player's ships to continue fighting for a time without being vulnerable due to extended radiators.
In the video game called The Outer Worlds, there is a quest called "Happiness Is A Warm Spaceship", where the player is tasked with retrieving radiator parts for an old colony ship turned space port called the Groundbreaker. After you find the parts, you then have to go into the Engineering shaft to cycle the droplet pumps to cool the radiator system that is filling the ship interior with super-heated air. ;)
One of my favorite games. I love the sly humor, excellent graphics and the steam punk design themes. There is supposed to be a sequel in the works but I think a lot of design studios are struggling with the massive funding needed for these more sophisticated games so it has been quite a while since the last announcement.
Love that game, the plot was gold and the setting was stellar.
@@Palaemon44That's why they break them up into a base game and DLCs, although even the large companies that shift ten times the units will now break games up into multiple DLCs for maximum profit.
Customers are even brainwashed into the idea that day-one DLC, or already planned DLC, instead of having them all as base content, is somehow a good thing.
The UNSC has a really cool solution to heat management:
The ENTIRE hull is both a heatsink and a radiator. They pump heat directly into the meters-thick Titanium-A armor plating.
As it's a *LOT* of mass, as well as the entire exterior surface area of the ship, it works amazingly well.
To be fair this is technically true of every spacecraft; after all everything radiates heat to some extent.
So the weird thing is, you kind of want a tiny, very hot radiator to get rid of heat efficiently, not a very large cool one. Whatever your radiator is, you ideally want it running at a temperature that is pretty close to it's material melting point.
This is why plasma or droplet radiators are nice - you can run them far BEYOND any material melting point, in principle. The question is what mechanism are you using to transfer the ship's heat into these droplets, and why isn't that mechanism itself melting? Usually some hand-waving about magnetism is included here, which is perfectly fine for sci-fi.
@@Vastin You want that if you want to minimize the surface area. If you are turning your entire outer hull into a radiator then you are not worrying about minimizing surface area.
If its thick it's bad you don't want a radiator to be thick. You want it to be thin you want the surface area not the mass
Is this why the Pillar of Autumn was so god damn big and why that Covenant ship was leaking stuff from the hull? I've only finished CE and am in the middle of Halo 2.
I love it how Spacedock more and more becomes a channel dedicated to explain how to write proper hard scifi.
Excellent. As a battletech/mechwarrior player Heat Sinks are drilled into my thinking and that extends to ships. It’s an easy reality win in my eyes to add
And what's wild is that 90% of the time it looks good too
When I originally played MechWarrior 4, the opening levels, on the moon, we easy as you didn't have to worry about heat buildup - and I thought that was neat, as well as a good way to introduce players to the game mechanics. Its only much later that I realised that fighting in a vacuum would be problematic for mechs, as their heat sink wouldn't work as well, if at all, in space, seeing as how they seem to use conduction for heat transfer.
Although that does beg to ask how ASFs in the void dispose of heat...
@@draco84oz at least its corrected in the Battletech PC game where fighting on the moon turns your mech into a pressure cooker
@@draco84oz I think ASF and War/JumpShips have those weird fins like in TRO2750's ships and such which are Actually Radiators, similar to ASF wings, which explains their weird amount of wings
some of my favorite wins in battletech are forcing a heat overload. its just funny to me
I kind of want to see a sort of siege warfare space battle now, where several small ships with weapons too weak to penetrate the defenses of a larger ship, but strong enough to damage the vulnerable radiators, force the larger warship to retract her radiators. Then they just...force the larger ship to keep the radiators retracted for fear of having them destroyed until the larger ship surrenders despite having no threat to its superstructure at all.
You just made space fighters make sense!
@@BlackDouglas1000also trucking in short burn nukes. Have the fighter carried ship killer nukes have an absurdly powerful, short burn drive to sprint them into range, while the gunship sized fighter has normal fusion torch drives. The missle has something like a antimatter powered drive that uses powdered uranium as reaction mass, giving sprint speed, but no endurance. The warheads could be anything from laser heads to "Brimstone" nuke powered fragmentation warheads.
The fighters are like modern fighter bombers, built like medium bombers, with probably only two crewmembers to keep numbers down, and are missle trucks with enough guns to shread drones, other fighters, or aerospace fighters.
This sounds like a very likely scenario so I guess they will figure out how to prevent it in that grimdark future of mankind.
@@AntonMochalin Fury Class Interceptor says hi.
In Elite thats the way you make to get away/flee megaships. You can't destroy them but hit the heat radiators to make them flee.
The long awaited Radiator Video!
About time
Not longer than trying to shed the heat of a fusion engine with no radiators
The concept of using your coolant and dumping it overboard is something we use IRL. The rocket fuel or oxidizer(not sure which) flows round tubes in the nozzles and cool them before passing into the combustion chamber.
It's usually the fuel. Oxidizer + heat = rust
@@lucky-segfault Dual expander engine cycle uses both fuel and oxidizer.
And, IIRC, first ever expander engine used liquid oxygen as both oxidizer and working fluid
Thanks for bringing more public light to this! Pretty much only project rho nerds who used to dwell on obscure IRC's really lament the lack of radiators, to the point where 2001 was redesigned to exclude radiators because not one laymen would expect it to have "fins"
My brain doesn't get why they did that avoidance instead of taking 30 seconds in-film to do something which would inform the public.
@@scottfw7169 Yeah, they could even have made a silly scene out of chaging radiator fluid and a car analogue or something, it would have saved so much realism and time on redesigning.
Currently taking Engineering Thermodynamics 1, and I have to say, you can prove with basic arithmetic that this is one of the hottest Spacedock videos of all time.
Nice. I loved thermo. Our Sr project (Aerospace Engineering) was a space design using the space shuttle fuel tank for the main structure. :) I did the thermal and propulsion.
The venture stars descending is my favourite scene in avatar. Such a lovely vessel
In my setting, radiators will play a key role in showing the struggle of spaceflight, the limitations of heatsinks, and radiators themselves, with each ships using different types.
Heat management can add so much to hard scifi, so i will utilize it
It's a shame they ditched the sails they originally used in the first film. I don't think they were shown but I guess they changed to engines to get that incredible scorched earth scene
@@helplmchoking They had the engines in the first film too. They use the sail when leaving and returning to Earth, but when they arrive on and leave Pandora they use the antimatter engines
One nice thing is that you can pre heat your reaction mass to get rid of heat. Real life rockets does this to cool the rocket engines.
And at high trust you can cool better as you use more reaction mass.
Also open cool your heavy laser cannons for the muzzle flash effect.
if your weapons discharge anything physical, you can use waste heat to preheat the discharge, and gain some open system cooling from your gunfire.
Open-cycle cooling (such as the "nuclear lightbulb" realistic(-ish) theoretical design) is my headcanon for why The Expanse doesn't bother with radiators on their ships.
Especially since they don't JUST use the fusion plasma for their thrust, they run it through a bunch of water to increase the momentum imparted. That water is a perfect place to dump the heat from the interior of the ship as well. (Especially if you use handwavey physics-inspired designs rather than 100%-hard sci-fi numbers.)
Given that the epstine drive was cinematically fuel efficient, I would assume it generates far less waste heat than any real world rocket engine.
@@erikschaal4124 indeed, though I’m thinking about all the other sources of heat (inhabitants, computers, comm lasers, PDCs, later railgun)
@@erikschaal4124 nah, the heat itself is the source of thrust, ie: high heat => high kinetic energy of gas => faster exit velocity => high thrust. So epstein drive ran cool mean it has no energy, and uses less fuel means it produce no gas, = zero thrust.
@@kaitlyn__Lpretty sure in a few episodes they do actually overheat some of the pdcs or come close. They are actively cooled and they also use many barrels not just one so they don't get as hot.
@@putty-e2872 usable heat (directed into thrust) and waste heat (such as from the magnets directing the thrust) can both occur, so the supposition is whatever Epstein did which made the “flame” blue and fuel efficiency go up had to have massively reduced the waste heat to move the energy into useful heat.
I've always thought that adding accurate radiators would make for MORE exciting sci fi space battles instead of less. Like, make it a plot point that your ships all have these giant weak spots that can be retracted behind armored doors in combat, but that limits the time you can fight drastically, so you have tense moments where the crew is weighing keeping their radiators closed but overheating all their systems or opening their radiators early and exposing them to enemy fire. Plus different types of ships would have different sizes of heat sink, so you would end up with interesting lopsided battles where some ships just try to outlast their opponents because they know they have the sink capacity to keep fighting longer than their opponents. Its a shame that so few ips actually have interesting radiators or heat systems in general.
I still like the idea of using open cycle heating to super heat a projectile and then make it the enemies problem via ballistic transfer.
sounds like space age torpedoes, open cycle radiator transfers heat from the ship to a ferrous medium that is violently expelled via rail or coil toward the enemy of choice.
“Ballistic transfer” is my new favorite way to say “shoot at something”
Our heat sink is quite simple, as it is also our weapons system.
Sacrificial heat sinks can be very useful for a combat ship since they can also act as a decoy given that they should temporarily have a significantly higher thermal signature than your ship as long as you don't have the engines pointed at whatever you want to confuse
A book I read a long time ago ( I don't remember its name) where it was about a mission to venus (near future). In it, they actually addressed this with a clever open cycle heatsink that doubled as a balast system on a smaller parasite craft. It used solid lead to absorb the heat and then it dumped the molten lead. This also served a plot point as it limited the time the craft could spend on the surface and continually changed how it maneuvered. Just a cool concept in my opinion.
That is interesting.
Saturn Run by John Sanford Ctein had a lead radiator system on a loop. Melting then reforming lead outside on a conveyor belt to return cooled down to once again melt and go back outside for a conveyor belt ride to dump heat on long loop.
In a game like Elite Dangerous where heat is an actual game mechanic, I love how their ship design deals with it. Most ships when dealing with a lot of heat will expose their radiators more. Also just charging all the heat into a heat sink and chucking it overboard is just hilarious to me.
I imagine it'd be more like spraying superheated coolant out than physically chucking a heat sink out the airlock, but that is a hilarious image.
Maybe that could appear as a jury-rigged heat management adjunct on a craft with other adjustments- like a souped-up civilian-grade hero ship.
Just use your reaction mass for your drive as a heat sink.
@@JainZar1 The SR72 Blackbird used to do that, transfer heat from friction heating to the cold fuel before it was burned
Same with Terra Invicta. Some of the late game drive turn your ship into flying radiator because of its awful efficiency. (like the protium converter and firefly torch) You can even retract your radiator in combat to minimize damage but you will need heat sink otherwise you will melt your ship.
The ships for my setting have HUUUGE radiator sails that fold out pretty much whenever the ships aren't in combat or in FTL. I purposely made them connect to the main hull using "masts" to create a sailing ship vibe. In combat though, I just use elite-dangerous esque ejectable heat-sinks. It does put a limit on time in combat though, at least if you don't want mass drivers poking holes in your "Sails"
I like a combination of water vapor soft CNT inflatable bags and the ability to selectively pop those bags to offload heat. It doubles as good protection against energy weapons because you can release a bunch of cold vapor as an ice cloud to diffuse particles of, say a maser. Also you're carrying a bunch of water, it's good for drinking im told.
Also really quite good as radiation shielding if stored properly.
One of the coolest ideas I've seen is using Radiators as, essentially, either chaff, or a sensor decoy, by ejecting them during/before combat to make precise reading of the battlefield more difficult: they could even be used offensively, by making it more difficult to tell when missiles are being launched by basically showering an entire area with radiators made hot enough to melt.
As long as the ship can either cool down using more conventional methods (like landing somewhere,) or at least transfer the crew out of the ship so the slower cooling isn't lethal, there isn't even much risk.
One of the best radiator ideas is having an open cycle loop for your BFG, huge laser shot followed by jetting a cloud of glowing plasma/gas around the ship, like a cannon with muzzle suppressor vanes and recoil kicking up dust.
I remember when Renegade Legion Leviathon came out and some people stated that the capital ships looked wrong because of the huge radiators.
In 2001 the USS Discovery was originally going to have some nice big radiators to go with it's nuclear drive, but they were removed in the end because they thought people would think they were wings
@@MrGoesBoom They could have taken a moment to include some quick something which would inform the public, but, no, they took the lazy escape and ignored the thing.
I'm reminded of a quote I saw on the Atomic Rockets page: "Amateurs discuss rockets, professionals discuss heat management." Thank you for raising this topic; it's so important for spacecraft design but so often missing in fiction.
for my universe I didn't wanted radiators but I did wanted to take heat management into account, so the way it works is that heat is transformed back into energy and stored in the ship battery, and if the battery is full (notably during battle, since shields also pump energy into the battery when shot at) there are exhaust systems that are basically just very energy-vore lights on the hull to quickly dumps energy out of the battery.
most ships can have a few tiny exhausts simply hided in random spots, but ships that need extremely reliable emergency systems (experimental weapons for instance) or that have tiny battery capacity have larger deployable exhausts, and if they start working you know something probably went wrong.
I remember reading years ago, in one of Clarke's supplemental books, that the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey was supposed to have radiators attached to the drive assembly at the rear. But the producers thought they may be confused for wings by the viewers, so Discovery had its wings clipped.
Love seeing Torchship representation on this channel. Actually, there's a lot of cool obscure or semi-obscure stuff this episode highlights, which is cool!
There are a number of sci fi stories that incorporate this concept. Some even deal with issues where a ship can't vent heat out to space or the thermal sensors on a pursuing ship will find them. And what goes on inside the ship while this is happening.
One additional possibility is to use the heat to improve the energy of propellant from thrusters. By exciting the particles of the propellant, making them leave the exhaust port faster.
Modern rocket engines sometimes use regenerative cooling, but keep in mind that the second law of thermodynamics means that much of your heat will inevitably be wasted away.
Never thought I'd be so into heat radiation. Really like the direction this channel has taken lately. Love the real world science being applied to hard sci-fi.
FINALLY! The most important part of all the equipment on any starship or space station!
Edit: Also, phase shifting energy batteries(phase shifting heatsinks) for convenient plot lengths of time to justify space combat duration!
I looove the look of the plasma wings. Such an aggressive, yet elegant looking radiator design.
Warframe AND Torchship rep? I expected the latter, but not the former; I’ve been looking forward to this video.
Knowing how much he loves them, I bet hoojiwana had fun saying "radiators radiating into other radiators"
We also use thermal blankets to manage heat. Satellites will have either reflective or absorbing blankets depending on how heat needs to be managed.
Any major energy weapon turret should probably be seated in or on some kind of highly reflective or otherwise insulated surface to prevent the heat radiating off of the weapon itself from heating the main ship, if feasible.
@@Vastinhow are you planning to connect the turret to the shit?
*ship
@@mryellow6918 You obviously need a physical join to the ship for power, ammunition, and whatever articulation machining you're using for your turret - however, if it uses gun barrels or rails these will likely be radiating a lot of heat and will be projecting out over the hull - this is the part you might want to consider adding additional reflective insulation to.
I was thinking about the stealth system on ME's Normandy - what if you do the opposite. Instead of hiding the heat, output as much as possible, and use it to hide something behind you. Make your little ship (maybe not that little) a big hot angry spot on the enemy heat sensors.
Just like radiators, heat itself can be used in interesting ways.
sooo, become a flare?
The idea is to not draw attention. This tactic might be able to hide the heat signature, but all that heat will not go unnoticed. The moment the enemy ship points its ladar at you, your cover's blow.
You're compromising the strength of your hull, too. And probably ruining your antennae, lenses, and other sensory gear mounted outside.
Not very good for pure stealth (where the objective is to be completely undetected). Very cool idea for evasion though (people know your there but can't narrow it down enough to target). I guess it's similar to electronic warfare systems that put out a huge amount of noise.
@@stevenscott2136 Depends - if your ship has a way to vent the heat from an exhaust or something, it should be safe. It's setting dependent.
Glad you mentioned Wlite Dangerous! I love their heat sinks and radiators.
The heat mechanics in Elite is top notch. Not only need you worry about your ship getting too hot and how heat affects observability and damages systems, but in very specific situations overheating the ship is a solution to certain problems. Plus the radiators are designed beautifully on many ships, adding to their character.
I like how space in sci-fi slowly shifts from a "here be dragons" superficial fairytale to an actual vision of a place where people might one day live and work.
This channel is a perfect example of that.
I love radiators (and heat management systems in general) but I also like not adding them when I want to show the technological gulf between two spacecraft in the same setting, by showing the ones that do have them meeting the ones to whom the laws of physics are seemingly more optional, and then having characters react accordingly
I already decided to have heat regulation be a vital part of space flight in my RPG from the last video where you mentioned it. Been thinking about it and created mechanics for dumping secondary coolant for short term emergencies. So glad to see more content on this topic.
I had an idea for a mass driver weapon for space battleships where the ammunition would be used as a heatsink, thus allowing you to fire long bursts which would be good for point defence weaponry. I wasn't sure exactly how you'd achieve this possibly by having the ammunition feed through the coolant outflow.
That was one thing I remembered from Mass Effect, the Normandy’s stealth mode would sink heat into the hull instead of trying to radiate it out, with the caveat of course that there’s a crew-cooking time limit on how long you can do this. The scifi Tantalus drive allowed for non-radiative thrust somehow as well.
It's nice to see Children of a Dead Earth get a cameo. I love that game, warts and all, and would love to see you guys feature it in a review or Let's Play.
Someday, when the stars align, I'd love to see CoaDE get a proper update again (or just a straight up sequel). It has so much unrealized potential.
On topic, in CoaDE, I've settled on a common design for battleships where an armored ring extends out amidships, significantly beyond the diameter of the hull itself. Most of the weapons on the ship are mounted around the circumference of this ring, which helps to draw enemy fire away from the bow of the ship, which has an internal armored belt to protect the crew and systems. Tucked behind the weapons ring are the radiators, which are built to be mostly or entirely concealed behind the ring when viewed front on. The ships engage the enemy head-on and rely on the armored ring to protect the radiators. Of course, if they have to engage in the first place then the missiles and drones have failed to do their job. 🙂
The game sometimes struggles modeling the armor on the weapons ring properly, but I feel that the concept itself is sound. Some of my larger ships also have "emergency" radiators to be deployed in place of main radiators during point defense scenarios, with a lower outlet temperature and only enough cooling to run a backup generator for powering CIWS and life support. The idea is to significantly reduce the heat signature and surface area of the radiators, which are what enemy missiles actually home in on. It also allows you to use much smaller flares, since they don't have to outshine your main radiators.
Nice 'High Frontier' board game nod.
Need to get that back to the table again soon.
Dont forget phase change radiators. Depending on the medium, you can dump fantastic amounts of energy into relatively small spaces. You just have to develop the correct gradient to make it work right
Also, a nice singularity would be ideal to just pump energy into it over and over and over. Over. However, I'm sure you pump enough energy into a singularity. It's going to eventually grow and create a gravitational field that is uncontrollable.
the droplet system is pretty cool idea, which reminded me of when i was reading about spray pond cooling systems used for some early soviet nuclear reactor facilities. so i can easily see how the concept would work for space
This is actually what I've been thinking all along. Wings on an X-wing or "solar panels" on TIE fighters are actually heatsinks. That can also explain why laser cannons are usually mounted on the tip of the wing.
Actually the design of TIE fighters are actually quite genius. The panels can radiate heat and protect the cockpit at the same time. And since heatsinks can be easily made redundant, one or two stray shots will not make the whole ship inoperable.
The TIE fighter is great from a thermal perspective but terrible from a structural and ADCS one, because the large wings means your center of mass will be completely off if it gets hit. The x wing is better because of the smaller target profile, but ideally, if you wanted maximum manueverability, you'd actually want engines on wingtips too. However, the issue there is the vulnerability of the engines, like you see on the y wing. Of course this is all according to our design principles, not accounting for star wars advances in technology.
These kinds of videos are why I love this channel. Y'all do the hardest of hard sci-fi analysis
Heat is waste.
One of the most important things you can do is figure out a way to get the heat into your exhaust.
I'm not saying radiators aren't important.
But a good way to illustrate the difference between an efficient design and an inefficient design is adding lots of radiators.
the Engines of an ISV in Avatar are about 99,9999999999...% Efficient
@@deathsinger1192 There are lots of ways to measure efficiency, and it's relative to many variables.
Maybe it's like the rocket equation, and you need much bigger radiators to get a tiny more amount of speed.
Or maybe it's a square-cube law thing, where the Avatar ships are the smallest they can be made, and improve with scale.
I don't know enough about them to say.
Ahhhhh! Thank you so much. I love when high tech sci fi uses functional concepts in ship design. The amount of giant craft with giant rear engines and no reverse thrust drives me crazy.
So it would be difficult to build an effective space warship just because of the heat problem, because all the cool stuff you can hit people with generates a lot of heat, especially beam weapons, I guess^^
Battletech (whilst about mechs) makes this issue a huge part of game balance and design for players to deal with
Bingo. Missiles generate much much less heat which helps with them but designing anything for war is never ever going to be easy. Spacecraft especially included
I'd go with the open system approach and just throw the molten coolant at the enemy.
There's currently reaserch suggesting you might not need a radiator. You can just generate a huge magnetic fields to act as a giant radiator for your ship
@@mryellow6918 That still is in effect a radiator and afaik is the working principle behind Dusty Plasmas
I love how this video handles the topic. Putting forth a great concept that should be implemented more without presenting it as mandatory, simply a better solution that can be used in many cool and unique ways.
I feel like it would also be interesting to bring up cooling systems that use the fuel to cool the engines. Plenty (most?) of modern rockets do this to keep the engines from melting from the massive thermal load, using the cryogenic fuel/oxidizer to cool and then getting rid of the heat by firing the fuel out the back.
That's called open-cycle cooling, the video already mentioned it for a bit.
That's also one of the factors that makes chemical rockets' Isp looks really bad compared to nuclear or electric engines, because those types of cooling rely heavily on the huge mass flow that chemical rockets have, and huge mass flow means low Isp, which makes chemical rockets a real gas-guzzler.
@@lazyremnant380 Well, yeah, it's a form of open cycle cooling. He was going over the general concept, but I thought this specific case was worth mentioning, since it's already in use today. There are plenty of other forms of open cycle cooling too. Also, it's true that you need a lot of flow to cool the engine cone, but for a lower, less concentrated heat load like life support this could still be useful.
@@lazyremnant380 Is that one reason that ion engines are so slow, because they have to radiate heat and not simply expell it? So they can't scale up or they might melt?
@@henryward5457 Ion engines are slow because ions have much smaller mass than the hot gases produced by chemical reactions, in accordance with Newton's second law of motion. They're also not a heat engine, so they don't emit much heat by themselves.
Current ion engines are limited by the amount of electrical power from solar panels that is used to accelerate them. We can replace those panels with a nuclear reactor that can supply much more power to the engine, greatly increasing their thrust, but only up to a point, no thanks to the ions having the same charge repelling each other, choking the flow.
Now, when you have a nuclear electric engine like this, the reactor, being a heat engine, will emit waste heat that needs to be radiated away.
@@lazyremnant380 So heat dumping is currently not a problem, but might be if we switch to nuclear-powered rockets.
There’s something about the minor but still very important designs of a vehicle in media, fiction and games are my favourite. Vehicle suspension is kinda like my turn on, I love studying, watching, absorbing every detail of a vehicle’s suspension
Wait so I could put glowing wings of plasma on my ships and it's still hard sci-fi? Fuck yeah.
I was happy to see ED's heatsink ejection referenced. Such a fun game that I really need to get back into (haven't played in years). I remember loving the heat mechanics tho, I tried making a stealth ship using an eagle with no shields and just tougher hull so I could stay in silent running for longer. It kinda worked in some ways, but mostly was just a fun new way to play lol. I had more than 1 heatsink launcher on that one. It was always cool how the windshield would stay icy for a long time on that ship!
I don't know if it's just me, but I LOVE the way radiators look on realistic spacecraft.
I know this video was purely about the practical uses, but I think radiators also give you a good excuse to add wide wing-like shapes to your design without running into the "Planes in space" accusation.
Designing the radiator flaps on spacecraft is always a good part of the process, I find. Great for if you have a large unused area where nothing else makes sense. Then again, I love all the things I can do maths around, so maybe that's just me.
Hey, @Spacedock, you have any idea how or if mirrors can be used in space battles, as camouflage or some anti-laser defense armor ?
Ever since I first watched this video, I've been adding radiators to all my ship designs for my own setting. I have to say, playing with with they can actually look like has been really fun, and it's satisfying to know that not only am I making a lot of my ships look better, I'm also making them more realistic.
In Star Trek, they have something called intercoolers, which sound like a more advance Sunpower Free-Piston Stirling Cryocoolers, along with plasma vents.
They must also get very hot as they are blue
There is also a whimsical concept of forcefields that double as a radiators.
I think it’d be cool to see a system where they “eject” heat via coolant pods/canisters/shells. They’d be filled with a coolant of some type and after it’s coolant has gotten to hot, it just ejects it, in a similar manner to any kind of magazine fed weapon ejecting a shell casing. Could look cool and be another thing to be easily “reloaded” in a sort of magazine type thing
In case anyone is wondering, the reason why humans freeze when ejected into space is because of the latent heat of vaporization of water. Liquid water takes 4.2 joules of energy to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius, or 1 Kelvin. To raise it from 0 degrees liquid water to 100 degrees liquid water takes 418 joules. To vaporize (turn from liquid to gas,) 1 gram of water takes 2257 joules of energy. 5 times as much as raising it from "ice cold" liquid water to "boiling hot" liquid water.
Water is notable both because of how much the energies of vaporization are, AND because water is unusually high thermal mass. For comparison, the specific heat of fats are around 0.45 joules per gram per degree Celsius. A tiny bit more than 1/10th that of water.
Your body is more water than everything else combined, and you are not air tight much less water tight. When exposed to the vacuum of space, the water starts vaporizing, and takes with it the energy requires to overcome the water's hydrogen bonds; it literally boils away as water vapor flies off into space until there's so little energy in what remains that it freezes (no longer has the energy to overcome the solid matter state of the strong hydrogen bonds.) If all of the water inside you freezes ..... you're frozen.
It IS convection in the standard models, since it's vapor taking away the heat. Once you're frozen, any solar energy hitting your frozen corpse will sublimate away (go directly from frozen water into water vapor,) until you are a desiccated anhydrous husk of a human.
As a huge Sci-Fi fan, I love this channel and its attention to detail. I have watched so many videos to make sure the Sci-Fi game we are creating adheres to as many principles (while staying fun and engaging!).
Thanks again for making this great content.
A while back I had an idea about metal cloth radiators, with thicker tubes containing the coolant woven into it. Suspended from masts for a very sail-like, yet still plausible spaceships.
That would create an intriguing visual. I like it.
Never thought of that. But I do like to put rigging on spacecraft to secure extended elements like the radiators.
Remember that you will have to conduct or convect the heat TO those locations. It's doable, but you will need something to transfer the heat from one part of the spacecraft to another at a high efficiency. And moving the parts changes your CG too, as well as obscuring your sensors.
The "Chuck it Overboard" style of Heat Management can be used in Combat...
Make the Ammunition for a Railgun or Dust Gun the collector for your ships Waste Heat, then when it's almost hot enough to vaporize, fire the now super-hot material at your enemy, adding Thermal Damage to the Kinetic Damage the Rail/Dust gun already does...
As someone looking to write my own fictional sci-fi universe, I love these videos that look into the potential designs of futuristic space craft. Obviously, with Sci-fi almost anything can be explained away as some future science-y stuff, but there are still basic components and issues we know that need to be solved!
The relationship between radiators and heatsinks feels like it could create a good submarine-esque mood in a story
The idea of using open-cycle radiators for dumping large amounts of heat quickly is particularly interesting, from a story and world-building perspective. Since this uses up coolant and thus requires frequent refueling, it would only be intended for infrequent use. But guess what else is infrequent? Short, intense space battles! So a spaceship could use its closed-cycle radiators for normal operations, and then when in a battle, it could turn them off to avoid thermal detection, instead storing the heat in a disposable liquid. If detected, the ship could dump the superheated liquid overboard as a form of extra propulsion and perhaps defense (to confuse heat-seeking torpedoes).
My point is that including radiators insteod of ignoring them can actually enhance the storytelling possibilities. Radiators can lead to interesting decisions and dilemmas, as mentioned in this video (larger radiators present more of a target to enemy weapons, but are necessary for more powerful weapon systems).
Really wanted to add cooling systems to my own ships. It can add more to a story. Didn't find a lot of ways we can do it rapidly with the ISS being the example I think I went with for at least sublight engines and stuff. Things get more complex when you add weapons, shields (at least plasma based), and a functioning warp drive. Glad to know of other methods in the works. Haven't thought about using pellets for example to spray heat away from the ships.
Love it. Been hearing you go on about radiators for ages, glad to finally see a video dedicated to them.
You could put a radiator station at strategic points like shipping hubs or FTL lane intersections. Think a large ring or tube-like space station that sprays coolant at your ship.
Alternate pitch (especially if we're talking sci-fi)
Collect the heat and turn it into more power. It doesn't need to make more than it uses to do this, but it should in total use less than just radiating it away.
Laws of thermodynamics says hi since making or using energy also creates waste heat. End result is instead of getting rid of heat, you end up with more. Better off copying Star Wars neutrino radiators where they are dumped as neutrinos.
The Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey was supposed to have radiators and had them in Clarke's novel, but Stanley Kubrick nixed them because he was worried the audience would think they were fins.
About open cycle cooling, I believe the canceled X-20 Dynasor spaceplane was designed to carry water which would be vented through the metal heat shield scales during the hottest part of reentry to shed the heat load.
I was expecting you to mention how radiators work in the expanse. I can't remember anything mentioning that in the series, also, I liked how Ammar and Galente (I think I typed correctly) used laser and plasma weapons, I liked the fact that the setups usually had heatsinks to improve weapon efficiency.
Love this type of content! Some realism in our science fiction is great. Really good job on the video explaining the concept!
The need to radiate heat was a thing a few times in the old Star Wars EU novels. There was one system that mined a planet that orbited quite close to its sun, so getting rid of excess heat was a challenge. For visiting ships, there were special shield ships to chaperone them in from out-system to the inner planets.
I kinda like the idea of physically jettisoning heat. In a certain kind of setting, it's another consumable type of thing. You need to dock not just to refuel and re-stock, but cool down, cycle coolant, or re-fill your coolant tanks.
ok the idea of a combat situation based around dodgeing and deflecting most shots coming to an end when one side deploies their radiators becauae they cant be armored sounds like great visual design!
One thing I learned from DP9 is how much of a vulnerability large/hot radiators (or insufficiently insulated heat sinks) can be. Space warfare depends very heavily on being able to precisely pinpoint your enemy's location and vector while making your own as hard to pin down as possible. This makes your thermal profile something an enemy can use against you. Properly regulating heat during battle would be an intricate dance, and knowing an enemy ship's sensor array would help you know when you can vent a little hotter and when you really do need to rein it in.
Great Video! This topic is almost never talked about. If anyone wanted to sci-fi with a industrial or retro feel, you could have the ships pump coolant into space from structures that look like a 20th century ocean ship's smoke stacks.
Also makes stealth ships more interesting because to effectively go stealthed you need to stop radiating heat.
Which means that you immediately have a downside to otherwise possibly overpowered stealth ships.
You can only remain stealthed as long as your crew is not getting cooked to death.
Kind of surreal to see youtubers advertising those same monthly part model kits I saw advertised on TV as kid. I have a collection like that centered around Star Wars vehicle models accompanied by a small magazinr with lore and behind the scenes stuff.
This video made me think of a concept weapon that I'm calling the slag missile
It is an open cycle cooling but you put all your superheated coolant into a warhead on a guided missile and once the missile is like 100 m away from your target it detonates spreading superheated coolant all across their ship melting systems like their radiators crippling the ship's ability to cool down or downright disabling their ship entirely
In my setting magic and technology are used in tandem. Thus, most radiators on ships use cryomancy to effectively pump heat from cold objects to hot ones, making them radiate away huge amounts of energy. Cryomancy doesn't just cool something down, it makes the heat move away from the target of the spell.
Ship generates heat -> cryomancy moves this heat to the radiators and doesn't let it come back to the hull -> heat is radiated away.
This exact method can be used to make heatsinks with HUGE capacity. Like straight up a tungsten block which can be pumped with heat until it glows white.
Moreover, there are ways to reuse the heat - cryomancy has a lot of uses in this field.
"Scifi ships already have glowy parts, why not make them functional?"
The old addage of if you don't know what part of the alien ship to aim for, fire at the glowing bits, still holds true.
Played a lot of Elite Dangerous back before they killed the game for consoles. Thermal management was a key part of building, tuning, and operating the ships in that game. And watching the radiators open up and glow brighter and brighter during heavy power usage was really neat-looking.
One of the highest performance cooling solutions is "boil off" it is an open loop water based system most famously used in ultra high performance piston aircraft racing such as the Reno Air Race. The idea is super simple instead of cooling the water directly with a radiator, you remove the radiator and let it cycle between a coolant tank and the engine once the water is forced to undergo a phase change to steam you let it escape. By allowing the phase change to happen, the water rejects 5 to 7 times the heat.