Random Thoughts

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After many people asked me to do this, I added a donate button. It has been there for two days now. Grand total donations so far? Exactly $1. That’s rather amusing. I think I will keep it for another week or so and then take it down. I don’t really like asking for donations anyhow.

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Space.com wrote an article on the BTE site ideas this week.

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It would be cool to build a functional prototype of the Enterprise that is a miniature ship, say 3 feet in length. You could pay to launch it into space and then use it for testing. It would be like having the world’s first RC spacecraft. And a remote camera could take some awesome pictures of the Enterprise in orbit around earth.

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Where are the billionaires when you need them?

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Speaking of RC vehicles, watch this guy in Austria fly his RC plane up a mountain and then race it back down. He surely must have crashed many times when learning how to do this. I can imagine some long hikes up the mountainside by him in search of his crashed RC plane.

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One of the biggest challenges in the conceptual design of the Enterprise is that it wants big radiators. I have said for some time on this site, like on the forum, that getting rid of waste heat is one of the biggest technical hurdles. Some people interviewed in the Space.com article talked about this too.

My original plan, at last in my head, is that the entire outer aluminum hull serves as one giant radiator. Heat transfer pipes can carry liquid to distribute the heat load over the the entire ship. There is a lot of hull area, so this seemed like it would work. However, there is a lot of waste heat too – greater than 5 gigawatts of it!

When I calculate the surface temperature of the ship, when the ship acts as one big radiator,  I come up with over 400degC. That’s too hot. It’s like the entire ship is a giant stove top. While the aluminum won’t melt, this is above the service temperature for aluminum components.

Also, at 400degC the electric generator (a heat engine of some type) gets pretty inefficient. Ideally the radiator operates at

More on this in a future post …

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