Game called early due to rain. Recorded live before a global audience on February 04, 2021. Made possible by the Members.
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The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 274
Game called early due to rain. Recorded live before a global audience on February 04, 2021.
11 replies on “The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 274”
Bill said he posted the Ramona show. Where is it at?
Why can’t I access The Stratosphere Lounge here before it’s on Youtube? I thought membership had it’s priveliges…..
Hi Russell. Welcome. Bill records it live Thursdays at 9 ET. Go to the shows tab, then to Steatosphere Lounge. Bill puts music on starting about 5 minutes beforehand. There’s also a live chat going on. It took me a week or so to figure out how to get the live show as well. See you there!
A heat shield between a ship and an observer would soon come to temperature equilibrium with the heat radiated from the ship. It would then radiate black body radiation at that temperature.
This would weaken the signal, though, because radiation would be emitted in all directions, after blocking radiation entering it from one direction. This is the principle, by the way, by which an air gap reduces x-ray scatter in x-ray images, something I studied in graduate school.
A working heat block might actually need to be two or three layers of shielding, spaced out to allow reradiated infrared to escape. So when you deploy the heat screen, the ship would eject a disc which would separate into two or three, held together by cables. It could be an impressive effect.
In space, the only way to dump heat is by radiation. If you want to increase heat loss, you have to warm up the surface that radiates, because the radiated power goes as the fourth power of temperature.
If you want to try for stealth, put your radiating surfaces on the side you’re keeping turned away from the enemy. A plate that is 10% of the surface area at 1000K radiates as much energy as 123% of the entire surface of the ship at 300K.
How good are your heat pumps?
Nifty idea. You could actually have multiple surfaces, one per major side, let’s say, and radiate out in the direction away from the enemy. It would work great when you are pretty certain you have the detection advantage, or even when shots have already been fired, and you can help stealth by keeping hull heat close to background, and radiate in the opposite direction of enemy sensors.
Also, I think Bill may be incorrect about lasers generating heat, as such. I’m pretty sure they don’t particularly, except when the beam hits particles, exciting them, which is part of why a laser is not visible, off axis, in a vacuum. The heat is mostly from whatever you are using to generate the power, which would be the same with a railgun, I believe. Man, I wish I knew more physics; I’m so going down the rabbit hole about lasers tomorrow…
A strange idea for the railgun; You could try combining the railgun ammunition with your eject-able heatsinks. Just send all the heat into the shell, and sent it at the enemy. The enemy could detect the shell, in transit, but if you are already detected, that may not matter, though would likely require repositioning after firing to avoid return fire.
You can send your heat out with your decoys, as well, thus killing two birds with one stone.
Alright, enough geeking out for one post.
I recall reading that the output power of a laser is something like 1% of the input power. The rest would have to go somewhere.
Indeed, lots of processes generate waste heat. The rail guns would generate heat in the magnetic coils used to accelerate projectiles. And I’m sure the fusion engines generate a fair amount of waste heat. Second Law of Thermo always rears its ugly head.
In John Ringo’s ‘Live Free or Die’ they inflate an asteroid to use as a fortress to protect Earth.
The weaponry is essentially a bunch of mirrors the size of a tractor trailer that are spread out and move enough that they can’t be pot-shotted. The fortress is a shield for the collimator that brings reflected sunlight together in a coherent light beam that can generally ram through anything in one-shot.
Could some sort of distributed system be an answer to how you get a beam powerful enough without having a mass of heat in one place to dump.
Doc Smith, in his Lensman series, had a weapon called the Sunbeam. It focused the energy of the Sun into a beam directed at the enemy. He was a little short on details of how this was accomplished.
I wonder if a large fleet of solar sail ships could reflect sunlight toward a single target, thereby incinerating it. There would be far too many of these to shoot down, and because they’re solar sail ships they’d be in constant motion.
Isn’t that what happens in James Bond: Diamonds Are Forever, as well?
That was a single satellite. I don’t recall whether it was capturing solar energy, or had another power source.
The notion of a fleet of reflectors is that each one would direct the sun’s radiation toward a target, and not necessarily one on Earth.