63 replies to this topic

[MechWarrior5152251]

Didn't this thread start out as "Shouldnt heat dissipation be increased"? I need better reading comprehension.

[ScarecrowES]

Hit the Deck, on 03 April 2016 - 02:22 PM, said:

Yes, the idea is to use energy to remove/reduce heat. Laser cooling works kind of that way.

Not exactly. Your goal would be to convert waste heat from the reactor to another form of energy which could then be broadcast away from the mech.

How would we do that?

It's far from impossible to design a system that captures heat and uses it to power a device which then emits EM waves of some sort... but the mechanical complexity and size of such a system to dissipate the amount of waste heat produced by a mech would be larger and more complex than the mech itself. Beyond that, the resulting high energy waves would literally destroy the mech... or at least everything around it... for most types of energy in this band. At the very least it would make mech on mech combat more or less impossible.

So... space magic.

[Y E O N N E]

Hit the Deck, on 03 April 2016 - 01:53 PM, said:

Right, but it doesn't need to have the same (in)efficiency as the various laser weapon, meaning that it shouldn't need to generate as much waste heat for a certain output. Speaking of the output, I'm not sure how much it needs to function.

Law of conservation of energy, dude. You can't just magic the energy out of the system. To reduce the energy in one direction requires as much energy in the opposite directions plus the energy required to overcome the inefficiencies in your cooling system. Therefore, if you've got 5000 J of thermal energy that needs to be handled, you're going to have to spend 5000 J to cool it with the lasers...plus overhead. That means you are actually just generating more total heat in the system.

The only way to actually cool your system is to eject the heat. You can do this by dumping it into an external medium, dumping it into an internal medium and then ejecting that medium, or dumping it into an internal medium and allowing it sufficient time to radiate away. On Earth, things are cooled by dumping the heat into the ground or the atmosphere, letting the planet radiate it away into space. In space, you have to go straight to the radiative process because there is no external medium to transfer to.

[Hit the Deck]

Yeonne Greene, on 03 April 2016 - 04:31 PM, said:

Law of conservation of energy, dude. You can't just magic the energy out of the system. To reduce the energy in one direction requires as much energy in the opposite directions plus the energy required to overcome the inefficiencies in your cooling system. Therefore, if you've got 5000 J of thermal energy that needs to be handled, you're going to have to spend 5000 J to cool it with the lasers...plus overhead. That means you are actually just generating more total heat in the system.
...

Hmm in this matter you are certainly correct. I actually had thought about the fact that the laser cooling system itself generates heat (the overhead you mentioned) but just brushed it aside.....