That the iceball barely increases in surface temperature once you add a nuclear reactor has nothing to do with the iceball's insulating properties though - you could swap the ice with pure copper and it would make virtually no difference to the amount energy radiated from the surface. It has to do with how effective the iceball is as a radiator. A big iceball with alot of surface area will dissipate the energy of the reactor over its whole surface. Note that ALL of the energy produced by the reactor must be radiated from the surface (because eventually all work must become heat per the second law), but a big surface may mean that the increase in watt radiated per meter squared is too small for any sensor to notice.
However, if you stick the same reactor in a smaller iceball with a smaller surface, the same energy must be radiated over that smaller area which will mean that each square meter of the iceball will be hotter.
HOW INSULATING THE ICEBALL IS DOES NOT MATTER. The energy generated by the reactor wants out, and nothin' is stopping it.
And here I thought my post was
too long, when if I'd just spewed a few hundred more words you wouldn't have thought to negate what I was saying in this way.
The part I intentionally deleted to avoid making an overlong post even more overlong was something like this:
...
When it comes to avoiding detection of your heat signature, there are two things you need to worry about. One is temperature, the other is intensity.
A
hot object, as in one with high temperature, emits unusually short-wavelength infrared radiation, compared to its surroundings. Even if the object is not very large, this tends to make it unusually visible, because it is glowing a different color than the background. This is why, for example, a red-hot needle will stand out against the background of a stone floor at night. The floor is glowing in the infrared spectrum (which we can't see with the naked eye), but the needle is glowing in shorter wavelengths we
can see. The needle emits very little total energy in the form of thermal radiation. But what it does emit is still very conspicuous, because it is
different!
By analogy, if a starship emits its "heat" in the form of particles not normally produced by other objects, or runs at a higher temperature than its surroundings, the starship will stand out, even if the total amount of heat energy it emits is rather small.
An
intensely glowing object is one that emits a great deal of energy per unit of its surface area. Surfaces with high emissivity (such as things painted matte black) will emit thermal energy rapidly. Surfaces with different properties will emit energy less rapidly (this is why there are such things as coated windows that save you on heating expenses in winter, because they radiate away less of your house's heat than an un-coated window, despite being at the same temperature).
Now, to mask a ship's thermal radiation signature you need to
both alter its apparent temperature
and reduce the intensity of its glow. The temperature of the ship is roughly constant (if the crew is to survive). However, the glow associated with high temperature can be
blocked by wrapping the ship in some kind of shrouding layer of material or (in soft SF) some kind of exotic force field.
Once this is done, the enemy cannot directly observe the ship's temperature- all it can observe is the surface temperature of the shroud! If the shroud is well designed and has the correct properties, then this may result in them concluding that they're not looking at a ship at all, or even not realizing there's anything TO look at if they're not carefully observing and cataloguing all anomalies.
If the shrouding layer is designed properly (in particular if it is large and has great surface area), then this also serves the purpose of decreasing the intensity of the ship's radiations- because the same amount of power is now divided up among a greater surface area, and is therefore less intense. A power source that looks extremely bright and obvious when floating uncovered in space will be far less obvious when its emissions are coming from a scattered irregular area several kilometers across!
...
Again, you are taking half of a concept that is correct. Unfortunately, half of a correct concept is still wrong.
When speaking of thermodynamics "heat" is a specific term that isn't strictly the same as what we mean by "heat" in ordinary life. Thermodynamic heat is a special category of energy. The other category of energy is "work".
So "work" is energy that can be used (i.e., it's at disequilibrium), "heat" is energy that can't be used (i.e. it is close to equilibrium).
So yes, black holes have thermodynamic heat.
And yes, black holes aren't hot in the way that we find a frying pan hot.
Suffice to say that the problem is that I am communicating these ideas in such a way that you do not become aware that I have the same kind of knowledge you do.
My point has been that black holes
have a temperature, obey the laws of thermodynamics and so on... but do NOT emit electromagnetic radiation into their surroundings the way a hot object made out of atoms would.
I would ask you the courtesy of being willing to allow for the fact that I used "heat them up" in my previous post to you, instead of a more precise Vulcanish phrase like "cause the external thermal emissions of the black hole to increase perceptibly, or cause the temperature of the black hole to increase by a significant degree." I think you will find that everything I said accords with the correct understanding of black holes, at least as well as someone whose graduate physics education stopped at a master's obtained working on particle beams can reasonably be expected to.
The CREW are energy intensive systems. LIFE SUPPORT is an energy intensive system. Compared to the cold of space, anything that sustains humanoid life on it will look like a hot coal.
I could, without too much trouble, design a ship that has a 'hot' crew compartment to sustain life, but which has a 'cold' outer surface. It wouldn't look much like a Star Trek ship, but then I wouldn't be using force field manipulation and whatnot.
The obvious (hard-SF) thing to do, if you don't need to maneuver much or at all, would be to encase your ship in an enormous balloon, something like
this.
The balloon intercepts the EM radiation emitted by your ship, but has a much larger surface area THAN the ship. Assuming your ship already had enough radiator capacity to not die, this means that the balloon will reradiate the heat outward, but appear to have a much lower temperature than the ship did. In the limit as the balloon becomes very large, its surface temperature will begin to approach what you'd expect for a normal object floating featurelessly in space at the same distance from the parent star.
So with the right balloon disguise (possibly with an artificially wrinkly exterior so that it doesn't look too smooth and shiny), you could disguise your 25 degree Celsius starship as a big spherical blob of whatever, a few kilometers across, with a surface temperature
well below the freezing point of water.
At which point an enemy who was looking for inhabited starships will probably not notice you.
[Yes, everyone, this idea is not a joke; it may not work for reasons I haven't thought of, but I have an M.S. in physics and I'd like to think I've covered the basics. If anyone wants to imagine Captain ka'Sharren hiding the
Enterprise from the Cardassians by concealing it inside a giant garbage bag the size of a mountain, they are welcome and indeed encouraged to do so.
]
Likely the most reasonable explanation of why Trek ships find silent running useful in open space is the magical heat dissipation machinery they have is able to take the hot-coal-ness of their ship operating at minimum levels and radiate most of it as things that are harder to detect than EM radiation.
Then perhaps I should feel proud of having thought of this explanation, and used it repeatedly in my last post to you.
Actually, black holes are as close to a perfect thermodynamic system as you can get.
Physics only breaks at the singularity. But physics can deal quite happily with black holes as a whole system. Remember, always respect the black hole's modesty! Don't strip the event horizon away!
My talking about divide by zero errors in physics was poetic license; I
have taken a GR course and know the basics about black holes.
The point is, while they're perfectly well understood systems (at least in theory), they're
different systems than the other observable objects in the universe like stars and planets and cute Starfleet captains. Therefore, while the same physical laws apply to them, they do not
behave in the same ways, because different objects obeying identical laws produce different outcomes.
Therefore, saying "black holes obey thermodynamics" does not negate the statement "black holes could be used as
really good heat sinks." As far as I can determine, they totally could, and AKuz is 100% right about this. A black hole will be in some sense 'warmed' if you feed it hot material, but it will not radiate noticeably more heat as a result, nor will it cause your ship to radiate noticeably more heat than it would have done anyway.
Eventually all that matter and heat you fed the black hole is coming back out as Hawking radiation, but talk about spreading out the emission of the heat across a great amount of time!
If you had a conveniently portable black hole aboard your ship, I honestly think the only hard part of keeping the ship cool would be running out of coolant fluid. Because this is obviously an open-loop coolant cycle; once you've pumped the ship's surplus heat into a tank of hot water and poured the water into the singularity, you're going to need more water if you want to do it again.
The only part of canon I am aware of that states that the Constie is crap is a throw-away line by Picard.
All the other sources I've seen portrays the Constie as a heavy cruiser with capabilities somewhere between a Connie and an Excelsior.
And I made the point about their long service life because people keep bringing up that Picard quote to prove that we should drop the whole class like a hot potato.
Needless to say, I don't see why our policy should be dictated by Picard's off-hand line. Picard's line is contradicted by other canon sources and as you say, what really matters in game is what the in game Constie is like.
The actual game stats of the Constellation make it an extremely useful ship design, in that it fills a role that no other ship design does (i.e., a cheap patrol ship).
Also, one of the elements of investing in the Constellation refit is that refits seem very much tied to flavour in this game. As such, the Constellation, with its service life of 90+ years, should receive more refit opportunities than the Renaissance, which was introduced after the Trek movies and completely retired before TNG started.
In other words, from what we've been told about how the quest works, the Constie looks like a very solid long-term investment.
(I'm sure we could build a better cheap patrol cruiser, but there seems to be zero interest in doing this - so if we ever come up short on br and sr and need combat or defense, the Constie looks to be our only option for some considerable time.)
Honestly, you're right.
I think the problem is that people judge the
Constellation negatively because it compares poorly to the
Centaur-class, and because its low defensive stats make it vulnerable to enemy action in a war zone. It is, however, well suited for responding to events, it's cheap, and its crew costs are mostly centered on "enlisted" crew which are relatively easy to come by I gather.
Personally, I favor the idea of refitting
Constellations, and you may note I've argued in favor of doing so to others. Though maybe not at the political will cost currently on offer.
I just wouldn't be surprised if this is the last refit offer we get, and if we find ourselves having to relegate the ships to rear area duties more and more blatantly, until by the time the TNG era rolls around they're the
Soyuzes of the fleet.
