StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Over the last decade we've seen great strides in our understanding of the qualitative and quantitative factors influencing the design of SW warships. Saxton's numbers were nice, and Ender has done some great work on reactor power. However, I think we've under-analyzed the relations between the components of the ships.

As near as I can tell, it's been taken as gospel that the factor that most constrains a SW ship's combat effectiveness (defined however you choose) is reactor output. This makes a great deal of sense in terms of offensive worth, as well as maneuverability. Both require huge energies to be tossed idly about. On the other hand, we've latched onto the magic neutrino radiator explanation for shielding, almost so we don't need to think about such a scientifically-implausible phenomenon any further.

Anyway, I was inspired by the following from Norm Friedman's Modern Warships:

Friedman wrote:Electronic components and missile systems are anything but dense. Electronic systems are light, and they require space around them for access. Missiles are far lighter, per unit volume, than were the guns and shells they have replaced and modern warships generally lack the single densest component of the ships of the past, armor. A ship can be thought of as the sum of its components: hull, machinery, armament, command-and-control (including sensors), and lesser items. Most modern surface combatants are volume- rather than weight-critical: there is not enough space in the hull to accommodate everything its displacement can (and must) carry, and so a great deal is packed into a bulky superstructure, which may sometimes appear as a forecastle almost the length of the hull itself. Volume criticality shows in the bulky superstructures of modern warships, and, indirectly, in the way in which essential weapon control systems such as computers have to be packed into these vulnerable spaces. Hull dimensions are often fixed by the need to support weights in the ship, and the excess volume requirement flows over into the superstructure. However, in some cases the ship is also length-critical: everything must be packed in along the centerline.

We know that magic neutrino radiators are behind SW shielding. But we also know intuitively that a larger radiator is necessary to dissipate more energy. I would also posit that it's not unreasonable to think that one radiator cannot sit "behind" another; neutrinos are highly uninteractive, but they definitely interact at least one-way with the radiators (by definition, really). Therefore, radiators would need to lie one-deep on a ship.

I believe this line of thinking is worthwhile, and that it could explain a number of things about SW ships that have never been well-explained. For instance, it makes little sense that the DS2 would need to be 180 times as voluminous as the DS1, especially since the reactor (based on blueprints) did not appear to grow by anything like the same proportion, more like 5x based on volume. Well, what if it's not the 180x volume increase, but the 32x surface area increase? This would fit well with a station that has to dissipate more energy (from a faster-firing weapon) and may have more powerful shields to protect the Emperor's precious hind end.

Likewise, why is the Executor so flat and skinny? We accept that it is not massively more offensively powerful than an ISD. Perhaps, though, as a command ship (compared to, again, a destroyer) the Executor has massively more staying power on the battlefield due to her greatly increased surface area. This would give shielding proportionate to the area increase - something like 60 km^2 (!) compared to 1.5 km^2 for an ISD. Ships that are more defensively-oriented could be expected to be thinner and flatter, and the converse would be true. We might then expect smaller, less expensive ships to be more volume-efficient shapes; this seems to fit in with our knowledge of smaller ships like the Carracks and Dreadnaughts. It also would explain long thin segments of heavily-shielded fighters like the B-wing, X-wing and even TIE Defender (which only appears to have 1.5x the engines of a standard TIE fighter but many more times the radiator area).


I do not mean to declare that this IS the way it must be, only that it seems to me to explain some things that were previously unexplained.

Neutrinos don't interact with normal matter (okay, damn rarely) so you could simply stack layers of radiators on top of each other without them interfering with each other.

Magic neutrino radiators are manifestly not normal matter as we understand it. Neutrinos are in the tens-of-eV range on average and so must be magically produced at rates that are foreign to science as we know it.

Samuel wrote:Neutrinos don't interact with normal matter (okay, damn rarely) so you could simply stack layers of radiators on top of each other without them interfering with each other.

There's limited utility in stacking them one on top of the other unless we know the mechanicism to channel neutrinos. As far as I know, I have yet to hear of an actual method to channel neutrinos the same way we channel heat.

Yet, I would point out that if it is truly a surface area issue, we'd be seeing a lot more radiators. Yet, we see that most ships place emphasis on armour plating, rather than plastering whole sections with radiators.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Samuel wrote:Neutrinos don't interact with normal matter (okay, damn rarely) so you could simply stack layers of radiators on top of each other without them interfering with each other.

There's limited utility in stacking them one on top of the other unless we know the mechanicism to channel neutrinos. As far as I know, I have yet to hear of an actual method to channel neutrinos the same way we channel heat.

Yet, I would point out that if it is truly a surface area issue, we'd be seeing a lot more radiators. Yet, we see that most ships place emphasis on armour plating, rather than plastering whole sections with radiators.

And you're assuming the radiators cannot be subsurface...why? On what grounds do you assume much of the hull surfaces cannot be radiators? Are the radiators aboard starfighters mutually exclusive to armor? And of course, Erik is not suggesting only surface area matters, just that its effective on design trade-offs and relative performance has been historically ignored in favor of volume-power relationships.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Samuel wrote:Neutrinos don't interact with normal matter (okay, damn rarely) so you could simply stack layers of radiators on top of each other without them interfering with each other.

There's limited utility in stacking them one on top of the other unless we know the mechanicism to channel neutrinos. As far as I know, I have yet to hear of an actual method to channel neutrinos the same way we channel heat.

Yet, I would point out that if it is truly a surface area issue, we'd be seeing a lot more radiators. Yet, we see that most ships place emphasis on armour plating, rather than plastering whole sections with radiators.

I think shields make normal radiators a moot point- If they didn't stop heat, you'd be dead when the heat from the turbolasers bleeds into the ship and causes the air to become a plasma.

Well on one hand we do know that part of the reason for the DS size change was heat dissipation - the old EGVV tells us it was covered in lots of pinhole sized exhaust ports rather than one moderate sized hole. So you might be able to make a case there. But beyond that I don't think this tracks - you assume that neutrinos interact with the radiator because the radiator produces them. This need not be the case at all - neutrino emission could be the response of tibanna gas when it is subjected to high energy, much like how noble gases emit light when energized (all things do but neon bulbs are the easiest to relate conceptually).

As to them being "magic" and never seen by science, you do realize that supernovas release about half their energy in the form of neutrinos, right?

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:There's limited utility in stacking them one on top of the other unless we know the mechanicism to channel neutrinos. As far as I know, I have yet to hear of an actual method to channel neutrinos the same way we channel heat.

Who says they are channeling neutrinos? They could just be channeling the heat to tibanna gas, which has both a high specific heat capacity and emits neutrinos as a primary way of changing energy state rather than photons like normal materials.

Yet, I would point out that if it is truly a surface area issue, we'd be seeing a lot more radiators. Yet, we see that most ships place emphasis on armour plating, rather than plastering whole sections with radiators.

If surface area were an issue one would still expect that, as you would use the armor as a heat sink. However, we don't see the armor radiating out into space in the presence of such heat loads like we would expect.

Illuminatus Primus wrote:And you're assuming the radiators cannot be subsurface...why? On what grounds do you assume much of the hull surfaces cannot be radiators? Are the radiators aboard starfighters mutually exclusive to armor? And of course, Erik is not suggesting only surface area matters, just that its effective on design trade-offs and relative performance has been historically ignored in favor of volume-power relationships.

There will be a day when quantum noise will become an issue for photonics and electronics or whatever equivalent we have for electronics. Neutrinos may one day be an issue that if quantum noise needs to be low enough for high precision work.

Also, why would you want hull armour to be efficient radiators? It also implies your energy flow can also reach the insides of the ship. Do you want that?

Ender wrote:Who says they are channeling neutrinos? They could just be channeling the heat to tibanna gas, which has both a high specific heat capacity and emits neutrinos as a primary way of changing energy state rather than photons like normal materials.

Well, erik called them neutrino radiators so... I was under the impression from Saxton's sources that they were heat.

Samuel wrote:

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Samuel wrote:Neutrinos don't interact with normal matter (okay, damn rarely) so you could simply stack layers of radiators on top of each other without them interfering with each other.

There's limited utility in stacking them one on top of the other unless we know the mechanicism to channel neutrinos. As far as I know, I have yet to hear of an actual method to channel neutrinos the same way we channel heat.

Yet, I would point out that if it is truly a surface area issue, we'd be seeing a lot more radiators. Yet, we see that most ships place emphasis on armour plating, rather than plastering whole sections with radiators.

I think shields make normal radiators a moot point- If they didn't stop heat, you'd be dead when the heat from the turbolasers bleeds into the ship and causes the air to become a plasma.

You're an idiot. "Stop heat"? What the fuck does that mean? Clearly the energy is not perfectly deflected or lost to space, the shielding system (however well insulated) must absorb and control it, it must then lose that energy back into the environment in order to lower its temperature. Or I guess you just know thermodynamics better than Dr. Curtis Saxton, Ph.D. Astrophysics, since he thought active neutrino radiators were a necessary contrivance to make their performance make thermodynamic sense.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Illuminatus Primus wrote:And you're assuming the radiators cannot be subsurface...why? On what grounds do you assume much of the hull surfaces cannot be radiators? Are the radiators aboard starfighters mutually exclusive to armor? And of course, Erik is not suggesting only surface area matters, just that its effective on design trade-offs and relative performance has been historically ignored in favor of volume-power relationships.

There will be a day when quantum noise will become an issue for photonics and electronics or whatever equivalent we have for electronics. Neutrinos may one day be an issue that if quantum noise needs to be low enough for high precision work.

I'm interested in the line of thought here. Do you have examples of such problems neutrinos could represent, or any examples of limitations they would pose?

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Also, why would you want hull armour to be efficient radiators? It also implies your energy flow can also reach the insides of the ship. Do you want that?

No, it assumes neutrinos can reach the insides of your ship. Which regardless of energy content, is extremely un-interactive (in other words, it will not release that energy into normal matter making up the ship).

Illuminatus Primus wrote:

I think shields make normal radiators a moot point- If they didn't stop heat, you'd be dead when the heat from the turbolasers bleeds into the ship and causes the air to become a plasma.

You're an idiot. "Stop heat"? What the fuck does that mean? Clearly the energy is not perfectly deflected or lost to space, the shielding system (however well insulated) must absorb and control it, it must then lose that energy back into the environment in order to lower its temperature. Or I guess you just know thermodynamics better than Dr. Curtis Saxton, Ph.D. Astrophysics, since he thought active neutrino radiators were a necessary contrivance to make their performance make thermodynamic sense.

Heat is a process, not an object. Stopping heat would mean stopping the transfer of energy. He is absolutely correct in his statement. If shields did not stop the process normal radiators would be a moot point as they would be insufficient in dealing with the incoming energy. Check your temper.

Ender wrote:Well on one hand we do know that part of the reason for the DS size change was heat dissipation - the old EGVV tells us it was covered in lots of pinhole sized exhaust ports rather than one moderate sized hole. So you might be able to make a case there. But beyond that I don't think this tracks - you assume that neutrinos interact with the radiator because the radiator produces them. This need not be the case at all - neutrino emission could be the response of tibanna gas when it is subjected to high energy, much like how noble gases emit light when energized (all things do but neon bulbs are the easiest to relate conceptually).

That's... well that'd be a curious phenomenon from tibanna, for it to be a super-duper non-glowing neutrino radiator as well as turbolaser fuel. While neutrinos are indeed a natural phenomenon, intentional stimulated emission of neutrinos in lieu of thermal effects is completely unknown to science. I think it's reasonable to consider that neutrino-emitters for shielding have the property that they block/absorb at least a substantial fraction of the neutrinos directed at them.

As to them being "magic" and never seen by science, you do realize that supernovas release about half their energy in the form of neutrinos, right?

You're talking about a one-time large-scale destructive event vs. an engineered solution to getting rid of energy that has to be in the 99%+ range of efficiency. I think I'm justified in calling the latter "magic".

Ender wrote:I'm interested in the line of thought here. Do you have examples of such problems neutrinos could represent, or any examples of limitations they would pose?

There aren't at the moment, but we do know that neutrinos do however interact with matter sufficiently that you could detect them in a huge water chamber with photodiodes plastered at the side. Now at the moment, neutrinos aren't sufficiently of high intensity to make a difference (though there was one experiment where they put one of the huge detectors in front of a nuclear reactor in France if I am not wrong) but I would imagine that it is possible that the neutrino count might be high enough to say spike false readings in photodiodes.

Now, let's take ion traps for example. They are currently used for example in quantum computation experiments, but to achieve high efficiency, work has been done to actually cyrogenically cool the traps and chambers to reduce the noise level and produce more efficient trapping than before. That's how important quantum noise can be for high precision experiments. The physicists involved in that experiment were trying to make a high precision clock if I am not wrong.

Sterile neutrinos (those theoretical ones interacting only through gravity) would be even less interactive, and help lower the interactivity problem of waste heat even more.

erik_t wrote:

Ender wrote:Well on one hand we do know that part of the reason for the DS size change was heat dissipation - the old EGVV tells us it was covered in lots of pinhole sized exhaust ports rather than one moderate sized hole. So you might be able to make a case there. But beyond that I don't think this tracks - you assume that neutrinos interact with the radiator because the radiator produces them. This need not be the case at all - neutrino emission could be the response of tibanna gas when it is subjected to high energy, much like how noble gases emit light when energized (all things do but neon bulbs are the easiest to relate conceptually).

That's... well that'd be a curious phenomenon from tibanna, for it to be a super-duper non-glowing neutrino radiator as well as turbolaser fuel. While neutrinos are indeed a natural phenomenon, intentional stimulated emission of neutrinos in lieu of thermal effects is completely unknown to science. I think it's reasonable to consider that neutrino-emitters for shielding have the property that they block/absorb at least a substantial fraction of the neutrinos directed at them.

They have have never been TL "fuel", just a necessary part of them that is consumed in the process. If the weapons use an open cooling system you would lose some tibanna each time it was used (and despite it being more logical to employ a closed system, it being open would match visuals better). As to attributing those properties to the radiators, it may be reasonable in theory, but observation condemns it. Note that the radiators on the Venator and Acclamator are very thick, and that on things such as the Eta and TIE series have radiators at 90 degrees to each other. If neutrinos interacted with the radiators this would be very illogical.

As to them being "magic" and never seen by science, you do realize that supernovas release about half their energy in the form of neutrinos, right?

You're talking about a one-time large-scale destructive event vs. an engineered solution to getting rid of energy that has to be in the 99%+ range of efficiency. I think I'm justified in calling the latter "magic".

On terms of efficiency in energy transfer certainly, but not in existence of the process.

Ender wrote:They have have never been TL "fuel", just a necessary part of them that is consumed in the process. If the weapons use an open cooling system you would lose some tibanna each time it was used (and despite it being more logical to employ a closed system, it being open would match visuals better). As to attributing those properties to the radiators, it may be reasonable in theory, but observation condemns it. Note that the radiators on the Venator and Acclamator are very thick, and that on things such as the Eta and TIE series have radiators at 90 degrees to each other. If neutrinos interacted with the radiators this would be very illogical.

I regret the use of the word "radiator", as it strongly implies passive thermal radiation. I am henceforth using the term "emitters", which I think will help everyone avoid the mental pitfall of thinking of neutrino emission as heat radiation.

Anyway, I see no reason to believe that neutrino radiators are necessarily thick or thin, or one- or multi-directional. As to your specific examples, an ISD-scale installation might be able to devote additional mass to a more elaborate system that was more efficient, whereas a fighter would be more concerned with mass and might use a one-directional less-efficient neutrino emitter (the back side being cooled by passive thermal radiation to remove that last 1% or whatever).

I think, overall, it's more worthwhile to think of them as an integrated system like a stack on a ship, which will drive the shape of the superstructure to get more efficiency (a giant tall mack) if there is enough tonnage to play with, etc. To equate them with simple passive thermal radiators masks the physics that are probably at work. They're empatically not thin sheets of copper like the block on your CPU.

]You're talking about a one-time large-scale destructive event vs. an engineered solution to getting rid of energy that has to be in the 99%+ range of efficiency. I think I'm justified in calling the latter "magic".

On terms of efficiency in energy transfer certainly, but not in existence of the process.

If you believe I suggested that neutrino emission was "magic", I regret that. I never meant to suggest such. Let's move on to more fruitful discussion.

Contemporary high-speed aircraft use the fuel tanks as heat sinks. I do wonder if it is possible to dump heat into the hypermatter fuel somehow. If the fuel is tachyonic atoms or ions then presumably it would then radiate tachyonic photons once hot, which would have little to no interaction with the fabric of the ship. I like the parsimony of this explanation, in that it would seem to remove the need for an additional piece of magi-tech ('neutrino radiators'), but someone with more knowledge of particle physics than me will have to say whether it's plausible.

erik_t wrote:I regret the use of the word "radiator", as it strongly implies passive thermal radiation. I am henceforth using the term "emitters", which I think will help everyone avoid the mental pitfall of thinking of neutrino emission as heat radiation.

Anyway, I see no reason to believe that neutrino radiators are necessarily thick or thin, or one- or multi-directional. As to your specific examples, an ISD-scale installation might be able to devote additional mass to a more elaborate system that was more efficient, whereas a fighter would be more concerned with mass and might use a one-directional less-efficient neutrino emitter (the back side being cooled by passive thermal radiation to remove that last 1% or whatever).

I think, overall, it's more worthwhile to think of them as an integrated system like a stack on a ship, which will drive the shape of the superstructure to get more efficiency (a giant tall mack) if there is enough tonnage to play with, etc. To equate them with simple passive thermal radiators masks the physics that are probably at work. They're empatically not thin sheets of copper like the block on your CPU.

Allow me to check here for clarity - you posit that, given the mechanism is unknown, it is possible that neutrino radiators can absorb neutrinos in addition to emitting them, as a part of their being composed of an exotic material/system that releases neutrinos rather than photon when energized. Thus you think it is necessary for them to be spread out over a greater area, to minimize incidence and thus the energy being reabsorbed into the system, correct?

If this is correct, then I again ask what about systems that have a great overlap of incidence like the TIE and Eta series? And why would this be good on say the death star, where the neutrinos need only sluice through the matter of the craft to hit the radiators on the other side. This would in essence require the radiators to be "directional". If so, let me do some digging, I covered this potential once on SB. Don't expect a full reply anytime soon however, I'm just about done for the night.

Let's move on to more fruitful discussion.

Well I don't want to sidetrack the thread from its current topic, but the overall consideration of ship limitations, I think the different types of engines are worth considering - long cylinders in which the entire system is self contained is used in some cases, and shot "bells" with the majority of the system distributed in the hull volume are used in others. This is something worth considering - why the difference?

Illuminatus Primus wrote:Sterile neutrinos (those theoretical ones interacting only through gravity) would be even less interactive, and help lower the interactivity problem of waste heat even more.

The trouble would be that each star destroyer for example has a reactor that emits enough power to equal a star. If a lot of the waste energy is emitted in the form of neutrinos etc., then the intensity of the emission would be far greater by a quite a few orders of magnitude than what we are typically used to.

Starglider wrote:If the fuel is tachyonic atoms or ions then presumably it would then radiate tachyonic photons once hot, which would have little to no interaction with the fabric of the ship.

Unfortunately its incoherent because photons are luxons (they are massless and always travel at c by definition); particles with mass can travel below the speed of light (tardyons or bradyons) or above it (tachyons) but never at it.

Ender wrote:Allow me to check here for clarity - you posit that, given the mechanism is unknown, it is possible that neutrino radiators can absorb neutrinos in addition to emitting them, as a part of their being composed of an exotic material/system that releases neutrinos rather than photon when energized. Thus you think it is necessary for them to be spread out over a greater area, to minimize incidence and thus the energy being reabsorbed into the system, correct?

If this is correct, then I again ask what about systems that have a great overlap of incidence like the TIE and Eta series? And why would this be good on say the death star, where the neutrinos need only sluice through the matter of the craft to hit the radiators on the other side. This would in essence require the radiators to be "directional". If so, let me do some digging, I covered this potential once on SB. Don't expect a full reply anytime soon however, I'm just about done for the night.

To be clear:

1. The smallest indivisible portion of an active neutrino emitter is directional.
2. Neutrino emitters are not neutrino-transparent, and so take the relevant measure of their size is area.
3. There is some point of diminishing returns in which one can only effectively dump a certain amount of energy into a certain area of neutrino emitter. Thus there is some design pressure to have large ship surface area into which to bury the emitters.
4. (optional) More massive neutrino emitter systems are probably more efficient per unit area; lower-mass systems may have lower efficiency which may also require radiative thermal cooling of the emitter itself, hence the arrays seen on TIEs and the Eta. One might suspect that the emitters only emit neutrinos outward.

Well I don't want to sidetrack the thread from its current topic, but the overall consideration of ship limitations, I think the different types of engines are worth considering - long cylinders in which the entire system is self contained is used in some cases, and shot "bells" with the majority of the system distributed in the hull volume are used in others. This is something worth considering - why the difference?

Agreed. I don't know. The color of the exhaust (and therefore the temperature, and therefore probably the efficiency) should also be considered. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe we've ever seen red bells, or blue/white cylinders.

erik_t wrote:o be clear:

1. The smallest indivisible portion of an active neutrino emitter is directional.
2. Neutrino emitters are not neutrino-transparent, and so take the relevant measure of their size is area.
3. There is some point of diminishing returns in which one can only effectively dump a certain amount of energy into a certain area of neutrino emitter. Thus there is some design pressure to have large ship surface area into which to bury the emitters.
4. (optional) More massive neutrino emitter systems are probably more efficient per unit area; lower-mass systems may have lower efficiency which may also require radiative thermal cooling of the emitter itself, hence the arrays seen on TIEs and the Eta. One might suspect that the emitters only emit neutrinos outward.

Ok, thought so. This is a topic I have devoted a considerable bit of brainpower to in the past, so I can probably give some answers (or have someone like Kurenko step in and correct me). However I won't have time to do it tonight. Apologies for the delay on that front.

Agreed. I don't know. The color of the exhaust (and therefore the temperature, and therefore probably the efficiency) should also be considered. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe we've ever seen red bells, or blue/white cylinders.

Yes we have. I expect that though is related to passive thermal emitters rather than thrust. In AOTC, when Jango and Boba arrive at Geonosis, their engines are glowing yellow. We then cut inside, and above Jango's head a diagram of the ship can be seen, with nothing coming from the engines. He then begins to maneuver as they notice Obi-wan, as we see the diagram change to showing thrust coming from the engines. But outside the engines remain yellow. So even if my hypothesis as to their purpose is incorrect, we still know that color is unrelated to active use of the engine for thrust.

Potentials differences for the cylinder vs bell:
* Exhaust velocity (and thus fuel efficiency) - the cylinder has longer to accelerate and is thus more efficient
* Maneuverability
* Cooling
* Structural Stress
* Maintenance (and thus an implication n the ships deployment schedule and thus fuel and supplies)