Re: Temperature and you

At 01:51 PM 4/19/00 -0500, you wrote:
>
>>If I understood correctly:
>>
>>You indicated that ships without thermal protection are visible at 1
LS and
>>hard to detect at 10 LS. 
>>
>>You worked with 300K temp I believe. 
>>
>>You indicated ships could disperse their heat (or maybe even store it
>>internally by some method instead?) and thus (because radiation is a
T^4
>>property), decrease their luminosity by 16 for every halving of
temperature.
>>
>
>Yep,  I am working on the assumption that you are trying to detects
>using IR radiation emitted from the ship.  If the ship does something
>(turns on reaction drives, fires somethign) all of this goes out
>the window.

As an aside, did anyone (in ConUs or otherwise in PBS' broadcast
footprint)
happen to see this week's Nova? In the discussion of CO2 as a nasty evil
greenhouse gas, they did a rather interesting demonstration in which a
FLIR
camera had its vision occluded by nothing more than CO2 of a certain
density.

This would suggest a simple stealth device for ships coasting into a
system: exude a mini-atmosphere of carbon dioxide to mask IR signatures.
This assumes that a) either screens could contain the gas to keep it
with
the ship or b) once the CO2 cloud is out, any course change would move
the
ship out of its protection.

Granted this is a knee-jerk idea without any consideration of real
physical
issues (how dense does the CO2 need to be? How much would it take? How
much
heat can it absorb before it too begins radiating IR?) but does provide
a
PSB justification for a low-mass, charge-based stealth system.

Random thoughts from a sleepless, suddenly talkative lurker. YMMV. :)