Shields and starship engines, heat in general, etc

[Roondar]

I was reading some stuff over at spacebattles and I suddenly realized something which struck me as a 'rather big problem' for Starships in general, including ST/SW ships.

There is a very strange thing that happens all the time in both SW and ST which requires some hefty handwaving or specialised technology to fix. It's all very simple in the end:

1) How do ST/SW starships that shield themselves deal with their own heat production? We know that the ships generate massive quantities of heat (their tech is not 100% efficient for one and they use, regardless of how you wish to view the respective universes, insane amounts of energy in rather small volumes). So how do they get rid of it?

2) How do ST/SW starships with shields actually move without hurting their shields. In fact, how can a ship that stops energy/particle weapons with a technobabble field ever manage to move on thrust or even with fields at all?

I have a few ideas here but I'd love some input on it as well. For instance, I am not entirely sure if there is already an in-universe answer to these problems. Or if any such solution actually makes sense.

On getting rid of heat produced during shields-up time

This is actually a major problem. A shielded vessel (we're assuming shields are not one-way protectin here) stops energy from getting out just as much as it stops energy from getting in. Any action that the vessel takes (including projecting it's shield and getting rid of energy that hit the shield) will produce heat (by virtue of not being 100% efficient).

Most fiction 'solves' this issue by using heat sinks and heat radiation.

Radiating heat while shielded is however, not a real option unless your shields let energy through as well. If they don't (and I see no reason for a shield to be one-way only) any form of heat radiation will merely increase the work the shields have to do (you collect energy, producing heat in the process. you then radiate that energy back out, which will hit the shields, causing you to have to start all over, etc).

Heat sinks might work to a point, but they would be limited in capacity and considering you'd need some place to store them as well this can't be too great a capacity. After all, what kind of matter would you use to make the sink? Every type you could think of (asuming real-world stuff) would be very limited in it's capacity compared to the weapon yields.

The only somewhat viable solution in my eyes would be a shielding system that doesn't actually do all 'the work' required to stop the impact/explosion/etc but even then you're still in deep trouble from your own heat production.

So how could it really work? Heat sinks would have to be 'magic' to work. Radiating heat would also have to be 'magic' to work. Or is that just the way it is?

On motion during shield-up time

If we accept that shields protect a vessel fully (and not leave gaping holes where the engines are) the conventional thrust model would have a massive issue while shields are up: the reactant would interact with the shield, which if it works properly, won't let it through. This 'has to be so' for shields to be of any value. If a shield has a hole where the engine is then enemies would merely focus their attacks on that hole.

Given this requirement, SF ship combat should either happen without any course corrections (and certainly not blazing engines or that silly 'hard to port' stuff) at all or involve (yet again) magic.

Flickering shields on and off rapidly would only partly solve the issue and would severely hamper combat effectiveness and likewise shield effectiveness. If your shield is only up 50% of the time, no matter how fast it flickers, it can only stop damage 50% of the time.

(This is incidently also why ST shields 'frequency' cannot mean what certain Pro-Wars debaters have argued for. Any sustained hit on the shields (like say a phaser blast) would always partially leak through in such a system. But wait, it would not just leak through - 50% of it would leak through. That is clearly not consistent with onscreen evidence. Shields are quite often capable of withstanding hits without any damage, including sustained phaser blasts and other beam weapons hitting)

So.. What do you feel about this - am I missing some obvious solution or are shields really just 'magic' in every sense of the word?

[GStone]

I don't think they have to be. If the shield allows one to see the vessel inside it, EM radiation is getting through. So, the vessel's heat dissipation system could be designed to let it pass back out. It could be stored somehow and released in limited quantities, but wouldn't require someone 'at the heat dissipating helm'.

There might be some part of the life support system of the SF universe that saps enough of the power from the heat build up that it can be emitted in some form from the vessel. Like some cooling material.

[Roondar]

I don't think they have to be. If the shield allows one to see the vessel inside it, EM radiation is getting through. So, the vessel's heat dissipation system could be designed to let it pass back out. It could be stored somehow and released in limited quantities, but wouldn't require someone 'at the heat dissipating helm'.

There might be some part of the life support system of the SF universe that saps enough of the power from the heat build up that it can be emitted in some form from the vessel. Like some cooling material.

A shield that lets EM radiation through would be rather useless against stuff like photon torpedoes, lasers, stellar radiation and err, other sources of EM radiation though ;)

See, if it blocks EM radiation at usefull levels you can't simply get rid of the heat. That is in essence the whole problem. Allowing low intensity EM radiation through would still keep the problem: where do you store the vast quantities of heat you generate that you can't radiate away quickly enough?

For example, low end figures for the Enterprise put the peak reactor power (sustainable for no less than 12 hours) at a couple of billion GW. Even if we take extreme effeciency ratings (say, 99%) we'd still have to create a mechanism to get rid of a good million+ GJ each second or we'll all be burned to a crisp.

Same thing with weapons fire, even a 99% effecient shield would still leave us with quite insane amounts of energy to get rid of.

Besides, it's quite clear from onscreen stuff that the E-D is not radiating away heat in any meaningfull manner. Nor is any ST/SW ship.

[GStone]

As much as some might not like to hear it, it could be a medthod of using subspace. As much as people go on about subspace being the answer to everything, if we were to assume that is a broad term used for a variety of phase variances of matter/energy, much like light existing in 2 places for the double slit test, that would be how the energy could be transitioned out of space-time and not effect the ship. I took up most of a thread at SCN on the idea, running it through several of the techs and it fits nicely.

http://www.subspace-comms.net/index.php?topic=1910.0

Much like a warp coil changes the electroplasma by altering the phase variance, as the end product of the energy interacting with the coils, there might be heat dissipation coils of some kind that phase the heat out of existence by altering the wave properties of the heat and whatever is carrying that heat (EM energy or some other type of particle/molecule). Or a phaser-like operation the involves 'vaporizing' the excess heat to phase it out of the space-time continuum.

Other SF franchises, I don't know. We should see smoke stack effects. :-P

[Jedi Master Spock]

It's fine for me when the waste energy for the operation of the warp drive itself is emitted through subspace. The waste heat from antimatter and fusion reactors themselves simply producing usable power, though, that's more problematic.

I am of the opinion that it's worth assuming very high efficiencies in nearly all science fiction power plants for this very reason.

[2046]

I always thought Trek shields were pretty much one-way . . . i.e. little comes in, but everything can go out. Phasers out, yes . . . phasers in, no. Torpedoes out, yes . . . torpedoes in, no. I'm fairly sure there are probably examples of objects (i.e. shuttlecraft, mines/probes, possibly dropped-off torpedoes) exiting from the shields without explicit reference, as well.

Star Wars shielding may not have this, at least in some cases . . . e.g. Hoth.

[SailorSaturn13]

low-frequence EM waves (Wavelength < 1000 km), but with huge intensities. Other sips cannot use this as weapon because of diffraction

[l33telboi]

Ooh, this is why I love the Mass Effect verse. They go into quite a lot of detail on how exactly heat is dissipated, and it's a significant factor in space combat and even routine operation.

[Ted C]

1) How do ST/SW starships that shield themselves deal with their own heat production? We know that the ships generate massive quantities of heat (their tech is not 100% efficient for one and they use, regardless of how you wish to view the respective universes, insane amounts of energy in rather small volumes). So how do they get rid of it?

2) How do ST/SW starships with shields actually move without hurting their shields. In fact, how can a ship that stops energy/particle weapons with a technobabble field ever manage to move on thrust or even with fields at all?

*snip*

On getting rid of heat produced during shields-up time

This is actually a major problem. A shielded vessel (we're assuming shields are not one-way protectin here) stops energy from getting out just as much as it stops energy from getting in.

This is obviously not entirely true, since we know that both SW and ST ships can fire weapons with their shields up. There are obviously ways to get energy out through the shield.

From a Star Trek perspective, shield frequency might come into play. We know that weapon bursts tuned to certain frequencies can get in through the shield, so the "frequency hole" may exist partly to give them a way to bleed waste energy out by radiating it at a controlled frequency.

*snip*

On motion during shield-up time

If we accept that shields protect a vessel fully (and not leave gaping holes where the engines are) the conventional thrust model would have a massive issue while shields are up: the reactant would interact with the shield, which if it works properly, won't let it through. This 'has to be so' for shields to be of any value. If a shield has a hole where the engine is then enemies would merely focus their attacks on that hole.

This wouldn't seem to be a severe problem for ship using warp drive; if the ship is warping space itself for propulsion, it doesn't care so much where the exhaust gases go.

Based on the incidents in which nebula gases have had negative effects on shields or ships (The Wrath of Khan and Chain of Command being examples), it seems that shields are somewhat permeable to gases. A shielded ship maneuvering on impulse/ion drive while shielded, for instance, needs to release exhaust in a controlled manner. All shields presumably do this by design, and I don't see any reason why the shield shouldn't favor one direction (outbound particles over inbound particles), since it's obviously controlling the direction the particles go when they leave the shield, anyway.