Nonamer wrote:Why would that be? Isn't temperature a linear scale?
Temperature is linear in one sense - average kinetic energy of particles. And conductive heat transfer is proportional linearly to the temperature difference. Newton figured that out.
However, not everything related to temperature is linear, and not all heat transfer is conductive. Some is radiative, and it's this that's going to cook the hull when you have shields. Black body radiation (heat radiation) is proportional to the fourth power of temperature, so a 50,000K body radiates sixty four times as much as a 12,500K body.
To illustrate why going inside the body increases your radiation by (typically) a factor of four, I'll define what the "typical" shape is: Spherical. So if you're sitting outside, you get a circle's radiation - pi*r^2 - and inside, you get your surface area - 4*pi*r^2.
If you half-submerge, you get an average of twice the radiation of sitting outside and half of sitting inside. It's dependent some on geometry, but that's the factor of 16 difference between those two cases.
Mike DiCenso wrote:Leia makes a comment that she can see Athega's "solar corona" when the star is eclipsed.
What is it eclipsed by? See... the fraction of the sky taken up by the star determines how much of its radiation is going to be present. That's the geometric reasoning underlying the inverse square law, and if you can see the corona in an eclipse and know the size and distance of an object, you know
exactly how much of the sky it takes up. From that and the temperature, you can determine exactly how much radiative flux you're eating.
The star having a corona doesn't prevent it from being a white dwarf, incidentally, although a white dwarf is vanishingly unlikely to have a companion close enough to see it as a disk in the sky.