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

on 8/11/01 3:43 PM, Thomas Barclay at kaladorn@fox.nstn.ca wrote:

> 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.

    I think you've hit it. The closed system assumption is one that I've
been making mostly to keep things easy. If a ship is not a closed
system,
due to being able to interact at a distance with either your own or
another
universe, I started having troubles figuring out exactly what the
limitations of these ships were.
    One quote that I quite like, and that tends to describe how I
approach
things, is from Exordium, when a character is discussing a new
technology.
To paraphrase, it goes something like this: "Their biggest mistake is
that
they have based all of their new tactics on the strengths of their new
technology. The way to approach a technology is not to use its strengths
to
try to accomplish your mission, but to learn its weaknesses and to find
out
how to accomplish your mission in spite of them."
    I tend to go with that, and thus I'm less interested in what can be
done
than in what can't be done, because I think that that's a much more
useful
way to talk about future technologies. It tells me less to know that
there
might be a "pocket dimension" that heat can be dumped into, than it does
to
know what can't be done with that pocket dimension. Then you have to
figure
out how to do things in spite of those limitations. To be honest, I find
that more interesting.

> 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 this falls into my second major blind spot -- my education in
physics. While it's taught me a lot about how things change (so far, at
least), I've learned at least as much about how things stay the same.
And,
in general, for every neat new idea that works out, there are a bunch
that
don't. There do, however, tend to be constants. The first is that you
never
see a technology that will do everything that people imagine at its
beginnings. The second is that you can never get something for nothing.
I
admit it's irrational, but I tend to cling to these even in the face of
SF.
Mostly, it's because of my first point above. A bit more on that later.

> 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.

    Not exactly. You can introduce FTL without mucking around with
anything
else. You have to modify causality (or special relativity), where modify
is
read as re-interpret (and quite possibly conservation of mass, energy,
momentum, and, most important, angular momentum), but it's somewhat
possible
to have a rabbit-hole form of FTL that doesn't disturb anything else too
much. I tend to assume jump works that way.

> 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.

    True. My personal preference is to work from the limitations. I
would
much rather have a situation where you KNOW that you'll be detected on
entering the system, and you have to figure out how to accomplish your
mission even given that. It might involved using low-thrust and
pretending
to be a merchant. It might involve heavy use of Q-ships. Heck, it might
result in the distinction between merchant and warship being eliminated
entirely, with everyone trying to pretend that they're something they're
not.
    Alternately, if your blackbody emmissions are your only problem,
non-magitech still gives you (possible) ways around that. You have to
decide
when the BEST time is to use your cooling. For how long. What to do with
your window of opportunity. I simply find it a lot more interesting to
play
from the limitations than to handwave them away (actually, I sometimes
include FTL in that, but I suspect that no one else wants a rousing game
of
"Orion" at the moment).

> Tomb
> Who still believes in fantastical things like
> honour, chivalry, non-US spell checkers,
> personal freedoms and reliable software....

    Agreed on most of those, although my education in computer science
has
pretty much removed any hope in the last....

-Brian Quirt

Oh yes, and as for your cold beer, that's a good idea. After all, beer
has
properties far removed from its merely physical characteristics. If you
wanted a heat sink to use (and one that would involve sacrifice, and
tough
decisions), you could do worse than beer. I can see it now....
    "Captain, we have to decloak."
    "Just a bit longer. We're less than two hours from the border
station.
In another hour, we'll be past their patrol fleets."
    "Sir, the beer is already at 15 degrees. It's rising at almost one
degree every minute. In another hour, we won't have any that's fit to
drink.
We have to decloak now."