RE: Bradford's comments on IR

Thus spake Thomas Barclay:
>>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.

So, this to me says that if I could drop my temp to 150 K (a long way
from
absolute zero) on the hull, I'd be visible only at 1/16th of a LS
(300,000
km/16 is roughly 20,000 km) . If I could drop my temp to 75K, I'd be
visible
at 1/256th of a LS (1500 km?). 

So, if I read you right, and I can drop my hull temp by even half (to
150K),
I can make detection difficult to inside of 60,000 km (which I'd call a
tactical range). If I can drop it to 75K, I can probably sneak right up
to
within 6000 km (6") in a tactical scale. <<

Making the assumption that you're approaching a target in a system which
has
been inhabited a while (long enough for your adversary to set up sensor
platforms in several locations so you can't radiate heat "away from
him")...
I'd think you'd need to carry a chunk of ice with you to absorb heat.
Alternately you can spread it out over a greater area at a lower
temperature, but you'd still be putting out the same total energy.

(caveat: I passed the toughest physics class at my university...every
day,
when I went to lunch...so the above is not guaranteed to be correct)