hot ships, cold space - but is the beer cold?

Brian, 

You  make some good points. And I agree with 
you on some of them, though I think you are 
somewhat stuck in conventional thought 
patterns. You make an assumption about the 
ship being a thermodynamically closed system. 
Not really outrageous as a starting point, but 
well worth questioning. 

With either the wormhole sump or n-space 
sump, you potentially defeat that basic axiom 
and then you have a place to send the excess 
energy - look at it as focusing your radiations. 
We've already discussed how you could radiate 
mostly in one direction. 

Well, take that to another step and radiate the 
power away into either a) a chunk of your own 
universe further off (wormhole sump) or b) 
someone else's universe. Doesn't affect 
thermodynamic laws - it creates a situation 
where they do not apply. They aren't broken so 
much as sidestepped. 

And though I don't have the link handy, some 
smart laddy just came out with some pretty 
wazoo math to support a drive that 
compresses space (apparently some WizKid 
who liked ST enough to want ot justify warp 
drive - and had the mental capacity to back it 
up). This doesn't mean warp drive is a 
probability, just goes to show that there may 
be plenty of ways to respect established 
physical laws while circumventing their 
limitations - because we establish scenarios 
where  they do not apply. 

If you don't balk at Jump Drive (taking a human 
into some otherspace, maintaining enough of 
his local environment so he doesn't die 
instantly, and bringing him back some place 
spacial far distant), then the idea of bleeding off 
heat into some "other realm" should seem 
almost pedestrian. 

Now, if you turf jump drive, turf acceleration 
compensators/anti-grav, and then you want to 
argue that you can't bleed heat, I'm with you. 
But until that point, I don't feel terribly 
aesthetically offended to say "we'll solve that 
one, given our other obviously outrageous 
advances". 

YMMV, but I believe there are PSBs that can 
work (partly because they resemble the 
magitech you mentioned, and AG and 
JumpDrive that I cite). 

It's all about what you want to do. Jon has left 
us the freedom to build what we want. Let us 
not try to "coral" some sort of "truth" (no 
implication that that is where you were headed, 
BTW - I appreciated your scholarly input). Then 
we'd be playing GW games. Freedom to choose 
is part of what makes Jon's games fun. He's (at 
least as far as setting/PSB/which rules to 
include) pretty much the Open Source Big 
Cheese of gaming. 

Tomb
Who still believes in fantastical things like 
honour, chivalry, non-US spell checkers,