Aerodynamics doesn't mean shit in space, but proper weight distribution would still be an important point when designing spaceships. AKA the acceleration will tear out those four wings.
I believe the in-universe reasoning for the X-Wing is that the surface area of the wings acts as a heat-sink for the cannons. Especially in space where vacuum acts as an insulator, heat build-up could be an issue.
I believe the in-universe reasoning for the X-Wing is that the surface area of the wings acts as a heat-sink for the cannons. Especially in space where vacuum acts as an insulator, heat build-up could be an issue.
> Heat build up in space where vacuum acts like insulator. I'm sorry, do you even science?
While it would be true that heat transfer via conduction would be almost impossible in space, heat also gets transmitted by radiation. You know, how sun delivers heat to Earth? That's not even including the fact that heat energy will try to 'even' itself around, so whatever heat the thruster generates will dissipate in the coldness of space.
Except when they're flying near a star, I suppose.
Please re-read whatever contradiction you're posting twice. Heatsink won't work in a vacuum.
It might be a similar premise to how ships in Mass Effect work, where they will store up heat until they can reach a location (typically planet) where they can start discharging the excess heat they've built up.
> Heat build up in space where vacuum acts like insulator. I'm sorry, do you even science?
While it would be true that heat transfer via conduction would be almost impossible in space, heat also gets transmitted by radiation. You know, how sun delivers heat to Earth? That's not even including the fact that heat energy will try to 'even' itself around, so whatever heat the thruster generates will dissipate in the coldness of space.
Except when they're flying near a star, I suppose.
The weapons also accumulate heat, and in combat situations could plausibly do so far faster than the weapon housings could radiate it to space. Planetside, convective cooling does a lot more work than radiative cooling, but there's no convection in space.
It might be a similar premise to how ships in Mass Effect work, where they will store up heat until they can reach a location (typically planet) where they can start discharging the excess heat they've built up.
Yeah, that part still bothers me to no end because how illogical it was. If they had a freaking FTL drive then why the hell they can't make a thermal dissipation device? You basically only need to divert the heated cooling liquid through thin tubes on sail-like panels while the panels are in the shade, since the heat will dissipate through radiation passively. While this method is indeed, not as efficient as direct conduction method, it can be used practically everytime the vessel exits the nearest star's illumination range.
Mithiwithi said:
The weapons also accumulate heat, and in combat situations could plausibly do so far faster than the weapon housings could radiate it to space. Planetside, convective cooling does a lot more work than radiative cooling, but there's no convection in space.
There's a simpler way to get around this: propellant. By rerouting the excess heat into the engine the craft would be able to use the expansion of propellant material as heatsink, and activate the propellant. Same reason why gas cylinders became cold when you're using them: because expansion of material absorbs heat.
Yeah, that part still bothers me to no end because how illogical it was. If they had a freaking FTL drive then why the hell they can't make a thermal dissipation device? You basically only need to divert the heated cooling liquid through thin tubes on sail-like panels while the panels are in the shade, since the heat will dissipate through radiation passively. While this method is indeed, not as efficient as direct conduction method, it can be used practically everytime the vessel exits the nearest star's illumination range.
There's a simpler way to get around this: propellant. By rerouting the excess heat into the engine the craft would be able to use the expansion of propellant material as heatsink, and activate the propellant. Same reason why gas cylinders became cold when you're using them: because expansion of material absorbs heat.
There is a propellant; the cannon shot. Most of the energy is released when the weapon is fired, but not all. And as for using an excess to deal with heat-build up, that's perfectly valid and is probably incorporated into one design or another in Star Wars. That was one of the great things about the setting, all kinds of engineering and design principles being used and leveraged for some kind of advantage.
Like how the Star Destroyer hull design has angled slopes to maximize forward firepower while still providing flexibility and defense from odd angles. It looks mean and aggressive. Conversely, Mon Cal ships are more curved, giving them a more organic look that makes them kind of bad at frontal assault, but there's fewer weak angles. Less aggressive, more flexible.
And yes, there's certainly "rule of cool" but some thought went into many of the designs you see. Some of them are good ideas, some of them are bad ideas. But that's WWII R&D in a nutshell really.
> Heat build up in space where vacuum acts like insulator. I'm sorry, do you even science?
Do you? Vacuum is the best thermal insulator, which is why thermal bottles are surrounded by a vacuum chamber, or why the Internation Space Station needs to have dedicated heat radiators, without having anything that generates as much heat as some laser blaster (or something of the sort)!
While it would be true that heat transfer via conduction would be almost impossible in space, heat also gets transmitted by radiation. You know, how sun delivers heat to Earth? That's not even including the fact that heat energy will try to 'even' itself around, so whatever heat the thruster generates will dissipate in the coldness of space.
That is including the fact that energy tends to distribute uniformly, because they are the same thing, or rather one is a description of the other.
That was one of the great things about the setting, all kinds of engineering and design principles being used and leveraged for some kind of advantage. [...] And yes, there's certainly "rule of cool" but some thought went into many of the designs you see.
No there isn't. It's all "rule of cool" by the people who make the movies deciding everything about how something looks or is built, and then because there is for some reason a market for "the science of Star Wars", Disney hires some people to desperately try to retcon some sense into decisions made arbitrarily for aesthetic reasons. Star Wars was always all myth and allegory that used a few genres George Lucas liked as a kid like Sengoku Jidai (source of Jedi) samurai flicks, cowboy films (source of Han Solo), World War 2 (source of all space battles in Star Wars having a "universal up" and star destroyers "sinking" in space, plus, you know, the Stormtroopers and general "The Empire is Nazi Germany" motif), and Buck Rogers stuff (source of the "INNNNN SPAAACE" part of "World War 2 INNNN SPAAAACE"). Probably the ultimate example of which are the " Bombers" that straight-up have the cockpits lifted straight from B-29 bombers that do a level bombing run on a "Dreadnaught" where they have to fly "over" the dreadnaught in space instead of just, you know, pulling back on the stick and dropping the bombs from "in front of" the dreadnaught. (And hell, even the original was WW2, they were just a little more subtle about it.)
The "science" in Star Wars has never mattered to anyone making the movies, which is why the way all the technology works changes every goddamn movie. (You can't use hyperspace anywhere near a planet, oh no wait, now you can just jump to directly in the atmosphere. TIE-fighters are one-seaters, oh no wait, now there's a second seat gunner where the engines used to be and it has missile pods - I don't care if it's a redesign, they're deliberately reusing the same frame but giving it a hundred new features in a fraction of the space with only couple decades development time, so it's still bullshit. Hyperspace is a different dimension and if you "drop out" of hyperspace, you can appear inside a star or asteroid, oh no, wait, now you can just ram people at FTL speeds while all our small craft are FTL-capable which seems like a REALLY POWERFUL WEAPON TO ME, WHY IS NOBODY JUST PUTTING HYPERDRIVES ON GUIDED MISSILES IF THIS DESTROYS GIANT STARSHIPS IN ONE GO WITH NO DEFENSE AGAINST IT?!)
With that said, it's not the "fault" of Star Wars for not being realistic, but the fault of people who insist that Star Wars is sci-fi and therefore everything has to make scientific sense while ignoring that Star Wars is mythic and allegorical and runs on the same internal logic as Lord of the Rings. (And tends to have a serious overlap in fanbase because of it.)
Star Destroyers are pale gray pyramids on their sides while TIE-fighters are black hexagons because the Empire is top-to-bottom cold impersonal monochrome geometric shapes whose personnel are in humanity-obscuring black-and-white masks while the Rebellion has clear plexiglass faceplates so you can see they're a multi-ethnic group of individuals from diverse backgrounds and even species who fly around in unique, organic-looking starships that each have their own history and individuality highlighted by even the mass-produced ships like X-wings having unique rust splotches and decals compared to the cold, indistinct, spotlessly clean and shiny mass-produced Imperial ships. This going so far as to have the Empire that was already racist against non-humans actually make its whole army up of clones of just one guy that was a supposed template for a "super soldier" or "ubermensch" if you will. Then the supposed space-age super-armor of the stormtroopers gets defeated by teddy bears with pointy sticks because it was the part of the story where the good guys win, physics be damned! It's almost like they're running with a motif or something about the xenophobic, conformist tendencies of the Nazis, and they don't let science get in the way of the allegory they're trying to craft.
Now people get surprised that there's "political messages in Star Wars" (you know, the one where the last movie before Disney bought it was just a big lead up to the phrase "so this is how Democracy dies - to thunderous applause" that is explicitly an allegory for Hitler becoming Chancellor or Germany via election) because people have been wanking about non-existent "real science of Star Wars" that they've blinded themselves to the metaphors until the execs feel they have to be so loud and blunt they give the audience a concussion.
> Heat build up in space where vacuum acts like insulator. I'm sorry, do you even science?
While it would be true that heat transfer via conduction would be almost impossible in space, heat also gets transmitted by radiation. You know, how sun delivers heat to Earth? That's not even including the fact that heat energy will try to 'even' itself around, so whatever heat the thruster generates will dissipate in the coldness of space.
Except when they're flying near a star, I suppose.
Yeah, "near a star", like anywhere in the habitable zone where things without an atmosphere to protect it, like the surface of the moon, will get to 260 degrees Fahrenheit/127 C just from solar radiation. Or, for that matter, if you intend to use any kind of energy source or life support systems while you're in the void that will generate waste heat.
Vacuum absolutely is an insulator, it completely negates the two most effective forms of heat transfer, conduction and convection. Radiation exists, yes, but it's orders of magnitude less efficient than conduction or convection. You can feel the heat of the radiation of a fire on your skin if you're standing within a couple feet of a campfire, but the marshmellow on the stick a couple feet above the fire, where the heat from the fire is convecting away, is going to actually get burned while your shins are just going to get a little warm from that radiation heat.
Radiation only really starts to kick in for materials like steel as a way to transfer heat when that steel is already glowing hot... because that's what radiation is. (Yeah, you radiate in infrared and radio waves too, but that is, again, orders of magnitude less heat being dissipated.) You're already at the point where you're frying your crew if you let the steel or whatever normal materials you build your hull from gets to the point where it's at an equilibrium of heat radiated to heat absorbed from solar radiation and heat generated from internal power consumption. That's why you need materials explicitly designed to radiate heat at lower temperatures on little things called radiators to radiate that heat away before your ship is red-hot.
Radiation also needs to take place along the surface area of a body to be meaningful, which means having a high surface-area-to-volume ratio speeds up radiation just as much as it does with convection. This is why you want to have long, flat radiator fins that might look a lot like wings (albeit ones a lot thinner and less armored than on an X-Wing), because that's a lot of surface to do more radiating with.
Likewise, while schemes to somehow collect heat and use it for some useful purpose rather than just treating it as waste exist, they can never be even remotely 100% efficient without violating the laws of thermodynamics. You're basically talking about a magic Maxwell's Demon device at that point. Any attempt to corral heat actively would itself generate its own waste heat that defeats the point, so highly conductive material heat sinks tend to be the best you can do. And to that end, putting the biggest waste-heat generators somewhere on the far ends of the ship right next to some radiators so that the heat has to travel past the radiators to get to the more sensitive components of the ship like the cockpit does make sense. I mean, the engines probably generate more heat than the blasters, but hey, it's something.
I'm inclined to think the people designing the ships in Star Wars were from generation where living in space was a real dream. You also had pulp series like Perry Rodan driving people's imaginations. The writers may have taken liberties with how things work because getting a desired result is more important than the nerdy stuff, but the more technically minded people and the artists may have been more serious about such things. I remember reading how in the mind of the man who designed the original Enterprise for the TV-series, the Enterprise was a real ship, and there was a logic behind how everything worked and why it worked that way to a desired end.
It wasn't *hard* sci-fi, but it was a good deal harder than what modern writers put out.
Do you? Vacuum is the best thermal insulator, which is why thermal bottles are surrounded by a vacuum chamber, or why the Internation Space Station needs to have dedicated heat radiators, without having anything that generates as much heat as some laser blaster (or something of the sort)!
That is including the fact that energy tends to distribute uniformly, because they are the same thing, or rather one is a description of the other.
NWSiaCB said: *snip*
And that's why I'm second-guessing the reasoning behind using those wings as heatsink: there's no other way to release the trapped heat aside radiation. Even in the Wookiepedia they mentioned the S-foils (in-universe name for the wings) acts as heat dissipation device, but how? Did they have liquified gases that saps heat by vaporization? Did they rely on passive heat shedding by radiation?
It's my fault to open the can of worms about realistic physics in sci-fi movies, but hot dang I really can't take ANY Star Wars design because of that (and don't get me started on the impossibility of Lightsabers...)
I'm inclined to think the people designing the ships in Star Wars were from generation where living in space was a real dream. You also had pulp series like Perry Rodan driving people's imaginations. The writers may have taken liberties with how things work because getting a desired result is more important than the nerdy stuff, but the more technically minded people and the artists may have been more serious about such things. I remember reading how in the mind of the man who designed the original Enterprise for the TV-series, the Enterprise was a real ship, and there was a logic behind how everything worked and why it worked that way to a desired end.
It wasn't *hard* sci-fi, but it was a good deal harder than what modern writers put out.
Yeah, but Star Trek isn't Star Wars. Even in the original Star Wars, Han Solo refers to how fast his ship is by saying he made The Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs like it's a time when "parsec" is a unit of distance, something that wouldn't take a lot of effort to look up even in an age before the Internet. (A problem so fundamental they'd have to make into the plot of a movie 50 years later to finally fully retcon into somehow making sense.) In pre-screenings of Star Wars, when Lucas had to completely rework the intro with the help of people like Spielberg because it bored audiences to tears, the film literally used WW2 footage as placeholders for its space battle shots while the models were still being worked on, and that was their choreography for how things would go - just literally transplanting WW2 into space. Even the iconic "look" of Star Wars "used future" was made by kit bashing WW2 models for the ships, so they just glued the parts they could find together into something that looked like a space fighter.
Beyond that, have you looked at old-time pulp sci-fi? The stuff Lovecraft's stories would be put alongside? There's all kinds of Plan 9 From Outer Space-level nonsense plots that are on the level of "Oh no, space sharks! We better use the anti-space-shark-ray! Whew, good thing I always keep an anti-space-shark-ray on hand for emergencies, and it's completely safe for anything that isn't a space-shark! Buy one for yourself with enough proofs of purchase at the back of the book, kids!"
Sci-fi doesn't have to be realistic, I actually prefer the use of sci-fi for allegory rather than realism a lot of the time, as it's a tool to set up a test of a specific theory like how cyberpunk dystopias were originally critiques of what could happen if we let rampant deregulation build giant, unstoppable multi-national corporations that see people as products and value money over lives. The realism of the tech wasn't as important as the message. Then we ignored that message, and let unstoppable multi-national corporations rise up that see people as products, etc.
The Arthur C. Clarkes out there doing their best to try to create a "this is what the future might actually look like" are totally valid and interesting as well, of course, and can even capture the imagination more, but I think it's healthier to see hard sci fi as a totally different genre than allegoric "sci fi" that just uses another planet as a setting for their social or political commentary, ignoring the message the story was built to deliver to focus upon how realistic its all-lesbian blue-skinned space babe species's mating cycles really are.
And your average writer for Star Trek doesn't give a shit about the hows and whys of the Enterprise. Some might even resent the fact that they exist at all and are at least tacitly beholdened to them. That's kind of what I'm driving at. There's many hands that go into these kinds of projects and some are more mindful of such things than others. Just because Star Wars plays at allegorical fantasy doesn't mean there wasn't serious thought that went into the various elements, and even if the thought that went in is for better or for worse not treated as gospel, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
And your average writer for Star Trek doesn't give a shit about the hows and whys of the Enterprise. Some might even resent the fact that they exist at all and are at least tacitly beholdened to them. That's kind of what I'm driving at. There's many hands that go into these kinds of projects and some are more mindful of such things than others. Just because Star Wars plays at allegorical fantasy doesn't mean there wasn't serious thought that went into the various elements, and even if the thought that went in is for better or for worse not treated as gospel, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Well, if you want to go down the rabbit hole of Star Trek, instead, Star Trek is probably one of the most notorious examples of "Inmates Running the Asylum" as TV Tropes puts it (besides maybe western comic books) running a series into the ground by being a show that once explored new ideas and concepts instead turning into a show whose writers are only concerned with maintaining and constantly referencing its own continuity and making sure every bit of the story lines up with established lore.
The entire concept of teleporters exists just because they wanted to have shuttles to get the crew to planets, but they weren't ready in time for some early episodes, so enh, let's just say they teleported down, instead. (They did at least have the awareness of the philosophical debate around teleporting to say that it somehow FTL-traveled all the matter constituting a body rather than disintegration and reintegration at the destination, though.) The entire concept of the Prime Directive was invented for the sole purpose of making it more dramatic when Kirk would intervene with the planet of the hats of the week (I.E. the Directive exists for just Kirk to break it, which he pretty much invariably does).
The Original Series tended to be about randomly happening upon yet another planet that just so happened to evolve not only exact copies of humans but humans that are currently going through the exact same history Earth did, and happen to be during the Roman Empire times or something. All of this just being an excuse to have an "Enlightened Man From The Future" (as far as the '60s saw enlightenment, that is) go back in time and tell our ancestors why they were wrong. Or maybe they'd go meet an energy being that says meat is evil and Kirk will tell it off about how awesome the pleasures of the flesh are or something. The Next Generation's most popular episodes, meanwhile, tended to involve the Holodeck, which is basically a magic do-anything device that could also guarantee the main character's safety at the same time. The attention on the Holodeck was so focused that they even went ahead and did a show on a crewman doing what everyone in the fandom said they would do: spending all day in the holodeck reliving a fantasy of punching Riker in the face before spending all day boning Troi (OK, that last part isn't actually directly shown, but it's pretty heavily implied), and the plot mostly revolved around how to keep people actually at their posts when the holodeck world provides every form of gratification.
None of these episodes gave the slightest of a shit about the physics involved, they were just vehicles for exploring the concepts the authors wanted to tackle.
Then later series were all about the Negative Space Wedgie of the week where the technical problem the ship encounters may be real and based on some scientific facts, but the actual way it's dealt with is exactly the same in every episode (the engineer says "I'll reverse the polarity of the underwear elastic!") or even worse, they make an episode entirely about Continuity Porn. For example, remember that Prime Directive? The one that was just made up to give Kirk more orders to ignore because he's too cool for the rules, maaaan? The one nobody should ever take seriously, yet for some mind-blowingly stupid reason Trekkies tend to take as gospel and believe real-life aliens would follow? Well, they made an episode just about how the Prime Directive came to be and why it should always be followed, and in the process accidentally proved why it is a shit idea and Kirk had the right idea all along...
Like, I get the idea behind wanting to know more about your favorite series on a nuts-and-bolts level, I've been a lore geek for a lot of things, but writing a good story should take precedent over trivial plot hole filling. Having to write a whole four-parter comic series for backstory on why a recurring character is wearing a different shirt from one movie to the next (which for some stupid reason has to involve time paradoxes and an existential threat to the universe rather than his old one being in the laundry) is why western comic books suuuuuuuck, and a big part of why I like manga is that Japan actually lets stories be their own discrete things that tell the stories their author wants to tell then end and can start new continuities instead of carrying around the baggage of all the bullshit continuity of a multiverse.
Like, I get the idea behind wanting to know more about your favorite series on a nuts-and-bolts level, I've been a lore geek for a lot of things, but writing a good story should take precedent over trivial plot hole filling. Having to write a whole four-parter comic series for backstory on why a recurring character is wearing a different shirt from one movie to the next (which for some stupid reason has to involve time paradoxes and an existential threat to the universe rather than his old one being in the laundry) is why western comic books suuuuuuuck, and a big part of why I like manga is that Japan actually lets stories be their own discrete things that tell the stories their author wants to tell then end and can start new continuities instead of carrying around the baggage of all the bullshit continuity of a multiverse.
Why Marvel and DC suck*.
There are several comics in the Western industry that are linear and self-conclusive, with popular examples such as Invincible, Hellboy, The Boys, irredeemable, and so on.
These are not exceptions to the rule either. Most stories do not have the level of impact on culture, recognition or iconocity that Marvel and DC possess to last hundreds of issues, with few franchises like Spawn being able to last as long as the aforementioned companies' stories. Most comic book company franchises tend to have a normal life-span, and then are left alone, because as I mentioned, they don't matter enough for the executing directors to ask for a reboot, or continuation of the story. So Comics series ending rather quickly in the industry is not a rare thing, hell, even Marvel and DC have multiple one-shots/self-conclusive stories that are separate from anything in the Mumbo-Jumbo Multiverse and are rather short, DC even birthed a completely different Comics publishing company of stories that have their share of story separate from anything in the DC multiverse (of course, they participate in it, but everything important is separate from what you expect to see in the company) with their conclusion defined. (Like The Sandman and The Lucifer Mornigstar run).
This is a completly unnecesary long comment, but I wanted to give my mind about this topic since I like many Western Comics and I think its unfair and dishonest to do such a large generalization about the whole damn industry.