There are only three logically valid explanations for any object in the Star Wars universe: 1. It looks cool. 2. It advances the story in some way (mainly in the original trilogy), and it looks cool. 3. It gives a character something to fiddle with, and it looks cool.
@Ah_Ftagn the Star Wars universe does indeed use the Luminiferous Aether Theory as is canonized by the SW: Squadrons lore (and was also in old Legends lore.)
To be honest, the shields can act as a radiator. Use a ionized gas to absorb heat, inject the plasma into the shield magnetic field, then collect it once it cools down, and reuse.
funny fact, most modern night vision operates in the "near IR range" [not including FLIR devices which are the "far range"]. When you start heating up items, they will actually start glowing in night vision well before you can see them in the visible spectrum [found that out quite by accident doing a night shoot with some sound muffling devices]
And nearly all consumer grade cameras capture light well into infrared, and have special filters to remove it so that photos don't get random bright spots around objects that are hot but don't glow. In many models removing these filters is quite easy and you can then put a filter that removes visible light but lets infrared through (a piece of fully exposed and developed film from analog camera works just fine - say, from start or end of the roll) and you get a near-infrared camera on the cheap.
@@sharpfang noticed my phone camera was picking up infrared light when I installed my Xbox one in 2014. Hooked everything up and took a picture and noticed the light beams coming out of the kinect.
I always kinda thought it was somebody's left hand. Fold you middle finger down to make the mandible, the thumb is the cockpit, the round shape is a rough trace of the back of the hand. Then it's just a few hours of tweeking the design a bit.
The version of the story that I heard, was Lucas had taken a bite of a hamburger at the time the complaint was made to him and he told the crew to use that shape.
"There's not enough particles in space to actually matter" ...I choose to believe that pun was intentional xDDDDDDD also when I was a little kid and first learning about gravity physics, my headcanon for SW fighters having wings was that they were gravity wave generators that let them "surf" on pulses of gravity to perform fine-tuned maneuvers in a vacuum, like tiny-scale sublight versions of the Star Trek warp drive. I am using this idea in my own stories in the form of gravitational plating that fighters use to pull off crazy maneuvers in zero-G vacuum without the need for a ton of counter-thrusters all over the thing, while also vaguely resembling atmospheric fighters for the aesthetic. Boom, wings on starfighters fixed with one piece of lore, which they could totally do in Star Wars because they have anti-grav technology small and complex enough to build tiny hovering units like the probe droid.
Somewhere in the extended universe they do mention "etheric rudders" so you're on the same track as someone on the writing team, but also IMO came up with a scientifically superior explanation.
I think one of the advantages Space has is the lack of drag would allow you to point your fighter whenever you want instantly. But changing your prograde is more energy consuming. A "Space wing" would ad drag, would make the "pointing" part slower, but it would make changing your prograde less energy consuming and faster. like some sort of trade off. Specially if the "wings" won't need power to work.
So a tidbit of old Legends lore, the space in star wars is not as empty as our universe (which explains a lot of Star Wars phenomenon) and is instead full of stuff labeled the “ether”, which ships make use of using “etheric rudders” which gives them the flight characteristics of in atmosphere fighters from our universe. This was all canonized more recently with SW: Squadrons, and it also explains why ships in Star Wars decelerate in space.
The simplest way you could come up for the x-foil wings would be that the large laser cannons have a dangerous blast that can damage nearby things, so previous model of starfighter had 2 and to prevent damage to main body they were set separated by structural wings, next model wanted moar dakka, so 4 guns, problem, if you stick them together they will damage each other on firing, so 4 wings to separate them from the main body and each other, but oh shit 4 srparate wings take space and are anoying, so foldable foils to reduce space taken and increased visibility on normal flight and landing. Still fails to explain Imperial shuttles
I thought a better explanation for the Imperial shuttle might be that the fins help stabilize it (somehow?) in space flight or particularly in hyperspace, giving a smoother ride to its passengers and cargo. I like your thoughts on the x-wing's wings.
@@eonaon6914 Radiation definitely, concussion no, in space there is no medium for concussion (maybe in atmosphere as the X-wing was saud to be both a void and atmospheric fighter, as oposed to the standard TIE that needed a specialised atmo variant) And thinking it a bit more maybe heat could also play a role if its close enough, not the operating heat, but the actual shots heat. Another explanation could be that laser shots too close to each other interfere amogst themselves and throw aiming to whack
@@dixievfd55 thats what im going for, if the x wing is just an up gunned headhunter, why not keep only two wings (especially if putting 4 interferes with landing, storage and visibility) So best answer is that while firing the guns need to be separate from each other and possibly from the main fusselage too. All this explanation would also need an answer to why the fuck does the basic TIE just break all the rules having its twin lasers side by side and embedded on the main ball just under the pilot, while the TIE interceptor actually has its guns on the outside of its wings and separate, like the X-wing
About the "compressed to a cube" thing, the 24 hours only count if there is noboby inside the ship, wright? Cause I don't remeber where I parked my sloop, and my wife is not answering the phone... Anyways you should make a video on the Donager class of battleships. Everytime you see one, it will explode. But even that, they all look very powerfull. That is good visual storytelling, you can feel the stakes getting higher when they go boom.
It would make sense if it is a "all unattended ships will get compressed into a cube" and a person inside the ship would be attended. But it is entirely possible that 24 hours is 24 hours, no exceptions.
All squishy organics are extracted via tractor beam prior to cubing. They are then compressed into separate cubes. Worry not though, they can be uncubed for a modest fee
The Donager's basically get Worfed, which doesn't really establish any stakes. Had the Donager herself (the first one we ever see) actually held her own and won, then one getting destroyed would mean something. But we only ever see them getting blown up, which takes a lot of the bite out of their bark.
If you ment glowing, yeah it could but trying to actually get in or out would basically cook you or any body part you put on the surface of the ship. Heck even if they were dogfighting in atmosphere there is NO WAY any ship thats gone hypersonic for maneuvering is able to let the pilot out for at least 15 to half a hour so the fuselage cools to the point where he wont be burned. In atmosphere unless the shields are really protecting the ship the outer layer of heavy armor has to gain ALOT of heat maneuvering against the friction atmo creates, space ill concede that if its deep space they may be able to get out sooner but anywhere in a planetary orbit, it could even take longer because of how radiation isnt halved like in atmo but realistically cubed.
for some reason when I hear that this ships use radiators I think of car radiators then I learn about the space station and now I feel stupid and find it funny with that image
You should check out Elite Dangerous then. Every ship has some sort of brightly glowing radiators dedicated to ridding of heat, and each of them is a different design. Some have long banks of glowing pipes, others a series of disks in a square bracket, I think one looked like a row of tick taks scaled up. That game made thermal radiation look cool.
@@eonaon6914 You could do a pump assisted-heat sink mass dump for a fast cooling procedure prior to landing. Basically super cool an outer portion of the ship by pumping the heat from there to a superconductor tank, then dump the tank creating a heat deficit, and let the radiators catch up and take heat from the core back out to the wingtips where the pilot can have a chance to get out of the ship safely. Due to mass limitations this would be an emergency or landing procedure only. One other neat theory I saw was shields as ablative heat sinks. The energy of the shield collects heat, then the medium of the shield is blinked off, dumping the collected heat, then back on to absorb friction heat again. This could severely reduce the overall heat gain in atmo and allow a ship to avoid becoming glowing hot to begin with as they would only get a % of the heat between each dump cycle, instead of the total load.
The Death Star had a bunch of "Thermal Exhaust Ports" so its actively shooting heat out like the waste products of an internal combustion engine... somehow. I would also like to note here that my inner logistician cringes every time I see Star Wars cargo containers because there is no standard shape or size that they come in. It seems that there are many different shapes and sizes thrown around willy-nilly.
To comment on the cargo container thing… They have over 2,000 different species… probably closer to 10 or 20 thousand… all of which have completely different cultures and traditions and are different shapes and sizes… So yeah… you can imagine that there probably is standardisations within different planets… and groups of planets… but there is so Damn many of them…
@@Zadrias6386 indeed. there were imperial/republic standard ones though. The problem is there were countless custom or non-imperial standard ones. It's why transports were designed to handle mixed cargo loads for the majority, or with the ability to adapt to them (aka multiple lockdown points, adjustable mounts, etc)
Please allow me to refer you to Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, from which we could presume that there are perhaps a dozen common container sizes used throughout the known galaxy, and give the matter no further consideration.
I mean, you can vent gas to space, it's how the cooling of the moon landing space suits worked, it vents water vapor when the suit gets too hot. The issue isn't venting coolant to space, the issue is keeping enough coolant onboard for extended operations. Also to a lesser degree, that venting provides thrust, so you have to balance your ports so as not to generate net thrust. Biggest problem is still going to be the endless number of tankers coming to and from the deathstar to top up the coolant they are dumping overboard. A station that big would likely dump olympic swimming pools per second on cooling, meaning that station is likely hoovering up every bit of ice nearby just to keep running, dumping it into space and speeding up entropy at an ungodly rate.
The Death Star exhausts are for a fusion reactor (and MAYBE a combination 'hypermatter annihilation' reactor, too) so it's a bit more than just combustion.
This might be a coutner argument The wings ar meant to be a wide area for the heat handling system to transfer heat to the actuall heat dump, rather than the heat dump itself.
Not nuclear rockets, nuclear rockets need additional radiators, and that's just for fission rockets which have the advantage of expelling large volumes of previously cryogenic hydrogen that takes tons of heat out with it. A fusion torch would generate insane levels of waste heat you could only get rid of via radiation in space, far more than the miniscule propellant feeding through the reactor can deal with. You'd also likely need a secondary reactor to make a fusion torch work, as self sustaining fusion that produces useful energy is unlikely, so that's two nuclear reactors you now have to cool.
@@kauske Somewhere around the internets there's production sketches of the _Discovery_ from _2001: A Space Odyssey_ - canonically propelled by nuclear thermal engines - with honking big radiators. But Kubrick decided they looked like wings and had the final model built without them. And maybe he wanted the ship to look like a spermatozoan.
Good thermodynamics lecture. Unfortunately I believe it has been made canon that space in Star Wars isn't a good vacuum, and instead has "aether" like some early space theories, so other forms of heat transfer besides radiation may work in space in the Star Wars universe. (X-wing wings being radiators are still silly, and T-70 engines are still stupid too.)
It has nothing to do with them being radiators. They are called S-foils because their actual terminology is Strike-foils, designed to increase the spread of coverage from the craft. Now canon and legends do things a little different but generally they serve the same purpose. In canon, while the lasers can fire while the foils are closed, all it does is decrease the spread of fire. In legends the original models could not fire when the foils were closed and some models were modified to allow them to fire while shut, although it was at the cost of reduced power and accuracy.
This cuts right to the heart of the issues I've had with Star Wars since the Prequel Trilogy; the obsessive need to explain every little detail that, when doing so, manages to introduce more inconsistency and makes it much harder to hold onto the suspension of disbelief.
@@jtjames79 The problem with the spread weapons specifically is that In the Star Wars universe, they don't have accurate computer tracking. The in-lore reason is basically that counter-ECM is so advanced for both sides that any form of targetting that isn't human-visual is useless. Hence, the computer can't make these range conversion adjustments, the pilot must instead. And guess what humans have a really hard time doing: Range adjustments when you have absolutely 0 fixed points of reference.
@@jtjames79 We kind of learned since WW2 to not put guns in a converging line of fire. Guns are more of a last resort nowadays for dogfighting, but you’re just making your ship more expensive for a tiny boost in accuracy you probably will never need in an actual dogfight. All it takes in one rotor to not function to screw up your accuracy, on modern jets this isn’t a problem because they are fixed to the side of the aircraft’s hull. Depending on whatever jet you have.
@@jtjames79 it isn’t actually WW2, but it does have WW2 style dogfighting which makes less and less sense the more advanced your computer targeting system is. Conversely, the less advanced your computer targeting is, the less sense it makes to rely on it unnecessarily. If convergence is set manually then you have an overworked pilot, who probably won’t actually touch those controls in combat. You make a good point about the shotgun effect, there IS an argument against an all centreline mounted armament as that would require more precise aiming, however an X-wing is still a poor design. The fact that all 4 guns are mounted out that far means that the range of distances before and after the convergence point where the pilot will actually hit what they’re aiming at is unnecessarily small. If you have 4 guns it makes much more sense to have two of them further in, maybe with a different convergence. That way you still have a shotgun effect but you’ll also hit what you’re aiming at at a greater variety of distances.
@@jtjames79 I would agree with some of your points, there is nothing in canon OR retcon (yes, I see the original as being canon, the House of Mouse can GLUE) but there are some engineering basics it overlooks - the more complex a system is the more likely it is to fail. This would be the reason behind the KISS principle and the firm belief in Murphy's Law that every engineer, amateur or professional, has. Introducing a complex aiming system where mounting the things further inboard would negate this need is still a gamble from this perspective as the only way to guarantee a part won't fail is to never install it in the first instance. That sort of thing is very much pet peeve of mine so please don't feel this is an attack on you, more on the idea that adding something is necessary where taking it away usually makes significantly more sense :)
I am speculating that Star Wars metal must be able to endure high temperatures without compromising the strength to much - as most Star Wars ships can make a fast reentry through atmosphere without shields without burning up. Oh and yeah best not think about Physics to much when Acceleration compensation is 'a thing' in Star Wars. I guess if you wanted to get magical about it you could say that the wing area intersects with the Navigation shield envelope and removes any excess heat via the (very large) surface area of the shields and that there is some sort of convection wave across the shields with new cold entering at the front and heat dissipating at the rear. But I don't know if I think heat dissipation is any sillier than how the shield grid on Star Trek ships is supposed to work. Or what I find especially silly is Warp Plasma in the first place and where it goes and what it does and doesn't do. Oh and Dilithium swirl chambers (such as Voyager's warp core) are kinds daft if you think about them to deeply too. But then I've long thought putting an anti-matter reactor in a built up areas on a planet is the silliest thing of all.
Fun fact: Durasteel is better than titanium at blocking blaster or energy based attacks, this is because its an incredibly conductive material, so yes, Durasteel and derivative Alloys can endure extremely high temperatures. Also, you can kinda see the things that pump out the heat on the wings... they are in the inner area... pretty stupid if you ask me, tie fighters did better on that part, thats what the large panels were also for.
I'm just thinking out loud here.. if there's power generation and propulsion technology where fuel capacity and fuel mass mass is barely even a factor, then you can simply decelerate to match velocity with the planet surface *prior* to approach, and thus do not have to perform atmospheric braking at all.
That was hilarious, you had me in stitches! LOL! Star Wars is space fantasy and I love it for what it is. However, when those technical manuals attempts to explain in a plausible manner how the starships works, the logic and physics breaks down. Just appreciate Star Wars for what it is: Space Fantasy. Anyway, I look forward to seeing more of your videos because you're very funny and entertaining, and you make learning physics fun! I wish all physics teachers were like you! You just earned a new subscriber! :)
THANK YOU SCS! The next time I am talking thermodynamics with someone, which happens surprisingly often, I am going to show them this video and call it a day.
I am going to withhold both how entertained I am by 40k and how much I intensely hate it to simply say you have ...interesting definitions of "best". Albeit since space is known to be An Ocean, the Aeldari ships looking like fish is, of course, correct.
@@Pyre the imperium's starships are surprisingly sensible in general properties. Rather than being all steel and stuff, it really does make more sense to build ships out of concrete once you have significant orbital shipyards. They're laid out with a big armored prow that is sharply angled with lots of weapons poking around and through so they go nose in and fire away while closing the distance to the enemy because their targeting systems sucks and they need to get close to hit anything, and then they have lots of weapons laid out on broadsides with pretty good traverse behind that armored prow to do a bunch of damage as they make their close pass. That's pretty reasonable design over all. Obviously they have magic gravity plates for decks and limited automation to reload the weapons, but the design is actually pretty sensible. If theyd lay out the decks like a skyscraper and just say its using thrust gravity it would be even better.
@@davidthomas2870 Let's just not speak of some of the grim derp where building-sized warheards need to be loaded manually because the Mechanicus are arseholes.
@@Pyre WTAF are Aeldari? oh, wait, did they do that so they can copyright "Eldar?" (Still, the Eldar SHOULD have the capability to utterly smash everyone and every thing.)
13:40 I think they'd say something like "Full Hypermatter reactors on capital ships are near perfect energy and/or can dump waste heat directly into hyperspace."
The best explanation for why snub-fighters have wings is a complex interaction of various energy emission fields that are key to everything working right, and giving some physical distance is the best engineering solution for whatever reason. Larger ships either can't play the same games or have enough mass to not care. Assuming you REALLY want to keep the radiator bit, the least bad explanation I can think of is that SW uses the term 'Radiator' the same way it does 'Turbolasers', which have very little to do with LASERs, but became the catch all term for a big ship mounted energy weapon. Just what nonsense physics slight-of-hand is in the same territory as 'how do hyperdrives work', but the straightforward radiation of heat via emissions ain't it.
If we take a Watsonian approach ("it looks like this, and if it were a real universe, there must be a reason why, let me figure out what it is"), then that's a reasonable explanation.
Considering that we call air-cooled tubes of liquid on every engine on Earth a 'Radiator' the assumption that SW Radiators MUST work exclusivly via radiation and thus obey T^4 cooling rates is wholely unjustified. Conductive cooling with an unseen medium is plausable and the description of 'nutrino radiators' in the lore give us exactly that implication.
Ackshually! Star Wars is something that only has a passing relationship with physics. It irks me from time to time, but I am usually able to ignore the baloney. When can I NOT ignore the baloney? When the death star weapons "combine" green beams of 'something' from various angles to shoot a bigger green beam at a target. And that combining happens in nothing at some point in front of a depression on the over-compensation eyeball weapon.
Radiating heat into space is much more efficient if you use heat-pumps to concentrate the heat into a smaller area that can glow red-hot, rather than using enormous passive radiators. That works for the International Space Station because they don't need to worry about inertia, and it lets them conserve power by not running heat-pumps, but a spaceship with an ample supply of power would do better to use heat-pumps to concentrate the heat into glowing-hot active radiators.
What I like most about your channel is that even an iconoc fighter such as the X-Wing isn't too sacred or immune to criticism. Most fans are too forgiving of impractical design and are so defensive when someone actually takes a serious look at it.
@@TheNobleFive Well, it doesn’t make for a practical troop transport they literally hot drop troops like Starship troopers. It’s like putting up a big SHOOT ME sign for any cheeky antiair or simple insurgent rpg. You could the same about regular helicopter, but the thing is they are much smaller and have a smaller surface area to be shot at.
As far as I recall, what seemed to be the intent was that PART of the X-Wing wings were COOLING surfaces, exposed to space (thus only the inner surfaces, and then maybe only parts of those) So NOT radiators. So I understand it. The ships that DO SEEM to have large radiators, are called Tie Fighters.
One thing left out, for time I presume is "view factor" that is for how much a surface radiates depends on what other surfaces are around that surface. Or what the surface "sees'. Think of it that a radiating object won't lose much heat if it's surrounded by surfaces at the same temperatures (which could also be radiating). Why is this relevant? Well if the S Foils on the X-Wing are radiators, and they move position to increase their surface area (thus exposing those inside surfaces) then they are even more dopey. Because even when in the fully separated position, the inside of the upper S Foil will mostly "see".... the inside of the lower S Foil. Which is.... counter to good radiator design.
Also, all it really needs is some heat VENTS on the inner side of the wing. It's not required for the WHOLE surface to be a radiator (which is exactly what Tie Fighter wings DO in fact look like, come to that) But whether that's the most efficient process for an X-Wing, is another factor.
I always figured the wings on the X-Wings was to take some of the load off the repulsor lifts when flying in atmosphere. Also to provide more manuverability in atmosphere. But this was back when I figured, if you open both the doors on a Matchbox car, the car should be able to fly.
If the wings actually had reactive control surfaces to like angle flight I would go for it....but so far as I can see all the wings in star wars are both solid parts and dont have aerodynamics to even coast without the repulsors. Seriously all winged vehicles I've seen have the aerodynamics of a brick without repulsors lift. Let alone any ship that has moving wings.
Mass Effect actually uses advection on military grade craft; a droplet radiator to dump waste heat as fast as possible when radiation isn't good enough, of course, this only works so much before you run out of coolant and have to go back to port to refill before you can engage in combat again, so it's a limiting factor on endurance whereas a radiator just works until it breaks.
I actually got a surprising amount of mileage out of my twenty or thirty-some dollars 8 years ago (or however long ago it was) just on the development content alone. I keep meaning to load up what they have now, just never seem to find the time...
@@Chasmodius Given that many aren't i the know, even those put in money in early on apparently, guess I should have said thousands for *one* virtual item. For a game yet to be officially released.
The only way this would ever make sense is canonizing the whole "fluid space" thing for the Star Wars galaxy/universe. Which would also explain the need for constant thrust in space and how ships fly like airplanes (the reason the fluid idea came up to start with). But then we'd have yet another stupid thing the creators would never manage to be consistent with, that makes 500 other things make no sense and requires even more dumb retcons. The best they could attempt without screwing up everything else is going the Mass Effect route of having them be heatsinks, rather than radiators, that require periodically entering an atmosphere to dump heat. Spraying liquid out on the leading edges, like the Normandy is seen doing, might be plausible for ships large enough to carry spare water. Just not trying to explain rule of cool things with bad science would be a better idea, but it's probably still better than retconning fluid space.
Actually those metal pipes on cooler are heat pipes or vapor chambers, so while some of the heat is moved via conduction (through the copper), the majority of it is done by advection/convection (not quite sure what channeling a vaporized liquid and then recondencing it counts as).
From what I know about star wars, I've almost never heard the X-wings folding wings be referred to as "radiators", despite what I look into and like most being starfighter and starship combat. I *have* heard them be referred to as S-foils or wings. Due to how repulsor and maneuvering technology works in star wars, I believe opening the wings reduces the effect of maneuvering systems built into the wings cancelling one-another out, and having the laser cannons be spread further apart and not in physical contact helps them not heat up as quickly, as they won't heat eachother as much. Additionally, when the wings are closed, the engines on each side connect and improve the total input, although why you wouldn't just design the ship to have the wings be spread and the engines connected mechanically doesn't make sense. I wonder if this has something to do with the "specialized" modes being for specific scenarios, and thereby allowing the craft to be more "efficient" by having two modes specialized for different things?
The full term for the expandable wing design, as I understand it, is "strike foil". I've heard speculation that the s-foils help keep the laser cannons from damaging or interfering with each other in some way, though whether that's heat management or something specific to whatever technobabble governs their operation is unclear. It's not an instant-death thing if they started shooting with wings closed - Rogue Squadron considered powering up weapons in one of the Legends novels during a patrol where they were prevented from opening the s-foils - but it might shorten combat duration or accelerate wear and tear on mission-critical parts. I've also seen speculation that the s-foils had a load of tiny RCS thrusters built into them to help the ship's maneuverability during dogfights, though there's no visual reference for it - and I'm not sure whether that would help enough alongside the thrust vectoring the main engines already perform to be worth the added complexity, cost, and maintenance.
@@tba113 X wings are fully capable of firing their weapons with their wings closed, as shown in things like Star Wars X-wing the board game, Star Wars Empire At War, and star wars Rebels. Possibly the improvement in maneuverability might simply be the gimbaled engines are spread out further, allowing the effect of each individual engine to be much greater, as the engines are spread out a good bit. I wonder if the wings being closed allowing the engines to be more powerful might in fact just be the engines drawing some of the power intended for the laser cannons, resulting in lowered firepower?
@@peridot6507 That was my assumption on the speed vs. firepower choice of locking the s-foils, yeah: that if the s-foils are closed, then only one cannon on each side would be firing at a time, so the power plant can therefore redirect more juice to the engines.
13:49 I mean... It did have "Thermal Exhaust ports" (One of which at least lacked good shielding) That was something of a plot point. But that runs into the "Venting mass will run out of mass real fast" issue.
12:57 I liked the Space Forklift idea for the Mandibles! (They were IIRC called Cargo Mandibles as far back as like the Brian Daley Han Solo books that came out before even ESB, but I don't think the forklift use for them was actually a thing till uhhh, sometime in the late 90s early 2000s.)
As a former wrench and listening to this I have one line of text to convey my perfect understanding of this subject. I like your funny words magic man.
Some people want fantasy and reality to intersect so bad, but really what they push for is being in the fantasy instead. I do understand this myself, I just also like an adult, remember there are limitations in the real world. Some of our best fantasy almost always comes form ideas that cannot work in our known physics. That is the very basis of magic fantasy. Thermodynamics is a buzz kill, but let fantasy be fantasy. ANd I direct this to those making the retcons. Sorry, some things people can imagine will not work. Doesn't mean the story is bad.That is based on character usage. Which is why the last 4 SW stories haven't got a dollar from me directly so far. Personally, I think the retconing is to distract from the new garbage stories, after all, arguing about physics at least has logic to it, where mary sue writing is just dumb.
Damn, I remember when the BS explanation for the wings was to improve their mobility and the Falcon's mandibles was a freight loading lift, which solo broke installing the missile launcher... damn that was back in the 90s
To be fair, from what I've heard the containers on the front isn't a retcon, but something someone doodles with the original concepts. I'd accept it being a space tug, as I can't see any other way it can be a cargo ship, it doesn't have an internal cargo bay at all, so how else would it cargo? And it's not like we don't have designs for pusher and puller space tugs in reality. Look up the Russian 'Parom orbital tug'; it's more or less the same idea of pushing and pulling external cargo by docking it to either the front of the back, and having engines wider than the load so it doesn't damage its cargo with exhaust. I can also attest to how useful a long term orbital tug works from games with realistic orbital mechanics. Push or pull, in space it doesn't matter. You can push anything too wide for you to pull without damaging, or even push and pull at the same time. Soyuz push cargo plenty by docking to stations a boosting their orbits; so I can't say being a pusher is a bad design, it's a lot simpler than being able to push or pull, and more versatile than pull only.
@@ferdinandhenkel4567 You wouldn't make a space tug that is also a surface to orbit and orbit to surface transport. That's just stupid, that's like saying a container ship should be able to drive up onto land to deliver goods inland instead of transferring them to trucks and trains. If anything, the falcon landing on planets is a convenience for the plot. But design-wise, it makes perfect sense to build a space-pusher for transferring cargo between planets or other orbiting bodies. Star wars is advanced enough they should have orbital elevators, making ground to space and vice versa a non-issue for cargo. If memory serves, many planets do have orbital elevators, but under the odd name of 'gravity hooks.'
@@ReddwarfIV Uh, in reality you need just as much strength to push as to pull. KSP just has janky physics. If you can't push something at full thrust without robbing apart, you couldn't pull it either.
@@kauske No, no, you misunderstand. A pull tug can have its cargo in tension, rather than compression. That means you only need it to be able to take the acceleration forces. You could tow a giant slinky with no issues - if it starts wobbling, it'll be pulled back into position behind the tug. By comparison, a push tug's cargo must be rigid. If it was bendy, the force of the tug pushing would send the cargo off to one side or another. Consider the _Venture Star_ from _Avatar._ All the cargo and passengers are towed behind the engine section by a long, stretchy tether truss. If you turned the engines around, that truss would just collapse in on itself.
Greetings Sacred Cow Shipyards, I found your channel a few weeks ago and have found your analysis on ships to be both fascinating and at times hilarious, though I wish to make a request. Seeing your to do list I saw the presence of the Space Battleship Yamato there, which I was very much hoping to see. But I'm curious, would you be willing to compare the ship design philosophies of the factions, mainly the Gamilas Empire, the White Comet Empire, and the Cosmo Navy/Cosmo Federation. I in my humble opinion think it would be a very interesting video, however it is of course up to you. I will hope you see this message, and that you have a great day, good luck to you dockmaster.
@@SacredCowShipyards that's all I could ask for, my thanks dockmaster, I've noticed very few channels that do sci-fi ship analysis bother with ships from SBY other than Yamato, so my thanks for at least considering it. Hope you have a good day
@@SacredCowShipyards also I hope you not mixing the old SB Yamato lore and the new reboot SB Yamato lore about the construction of the Space Battleship Yamato in the new reboot anime so you don’t start ranting about why using steel from a ship sunk in middle of Pacific some 200 years ago to make starship is a bad idea (in fact the recent SBY 2202 movie revealed that pior to the event of SBY 2199 the Japanese Government had done some very interesting things to the wreckage of Yamato in 2141and while unfortunately the entire movie is available outside Japan yet there was a 20+ minutes long video on Bandai Namco Art Channel show the first 20 minutes of the movie that also including the scene where they done thing to Yamato) th-cam.com/video/ZLnTeb3V9mY/w-d-xo.html
Shit, the Death Star was SO thermally efficient it only had a single thermal exhaust port, and it would get clogged if they hit a stray vacuum-dessicated womp rat someone flushed out of their cargo hold in a last ditch attempt at pest control.
The TIE fighter is so obviusly trying to maximize radiator space and even looks like radiator panels that it boggles my mind that anyone ever proposed that solar panel nonsense. The fact that TIE's can fly in the dark makes it dead on arrival even if you were to ignore the inadaquacy of the wattage.
The pusher config for the YT series, despite being retconned (and despite the fact that other YT series dont have a usable mandable) actually makes more sense than pulling the load. It's the same reason we dont use rockets with the engines on top (pendulum rockets). Stability, specifically, having too much of it. It's much easier to turn a stack of things that you are pushing than rather than pulling. Comparing it to a train implies that it is a flexible connection. The only reason trains (and similarly trucks) tow is because they have wheels and tracks (or just straight up friction with the road) that makes them want to stay in line with their wheels and constrained to one line. You dont have that in the void. Imagine trying to turn your friction free space train (assuming star wars aircraft like turning) and your tail end still wants to go in the direction you were going rather than the new heading. You would get pulled around and spun out.
I mean, honestly, that's about all I can come up with. A- and Y-Wings seem to make do without them, so someone was just going for Style Points one day.
I would love to hear your take on some of the Elite Dangerous ships. You can equip your ships in that game to use advection cooling by putting heat sinks in the support slots(heat sinks, chaff launcher, point defense turret). When triggered it rapidly swaps out the coolant taking heat from the core to the radiators with fresh and ejects the tank full of now hot coolant. As you mentioned this is a limited use item before you need to replace the loads but useful for a fire fight using guns that get very hot or when your sneaking around in silent running(heat vents closed to minimize scanner detection)
Don't forget that some ships basically open the entire thermal core for maximum radiation when things get too hot. Unless you're Gutamaya or Saud Kruger. In that case, hehe overheating ship look pretty
I was the Number 1 Attack Team leader for the Flying Squad aboard the Kitty Hawk from 2000-2002. Our NFTI Naval FireFighting Thermal Imager was a first generation coffee can sized thing. It was also my first experience with thermal imaging and not being used to it was creepy looking at people wearing glasses because you'd just see these 2 big black holes where their eyes should be. I did have a little fun with the system finding creative uses for it, I also unwittingly seriously pissed off our embarked seal team, but that's another story lol.
Ahh. Even more of this. Incredibly funny as expected. Otherwise, would you mind covering the Behemoth-Class Battlecruiser and Wraith Starfighter from StarCraft?
Maybe I missed it but I dont think you touched on the other issue, the bottom surface of the top wing and top surface of the bottom wing due to their relative angles will mostly be radiating into each other. You can't effectively move heat into an equally hot body so those surfaces are even more useless. Next cover the Tie fighters solar panels, just how little power they could apply to these machines that must consume vast amounts of power even under ideal circumstances.
My headcanon is that what look to us like engine exhaust nozzles are actually mainly directional heat radiators- it just so happens that they're a convenient place to put the exhausts for the reaction engines too. Why else would those "engines" be glowing *when the ships aren't moving*? They still can't be efficient enough to get rid of enough heat to keep the ships from melting. Same applies to Star Trek ships- those retconned "photon spill ports" on the warp nacelles should not glow when a ship isn't at warp, so they pretty much have to be heat radiators. Same same for their impulse drives that also glow brightly when the ship isn't moving. That doesn't get us past the efficiency problem- when you're generating terawatts of directed energy (for thrust, weapons, shields etc.) you're still generating at least hundreds of megawatts of waste heat, and those "photon spill ports" should be glowing in the extreme UV, not the visible. The ships should still melt. What's left, dumping heat into subspace or something?
Even if the wings were radiators, they would be so damn hot from all that stuff they power that the ships would glow like little fireballs an probably cook the driver. In atmosphere they would literally be constantly igniting the air around them as they literally burned across the sky from the millions of degrees of heat
As we have seen in the movie "Solo" The YT-1300 Light Freighter model's front pointy pieces originally actually house a forward escape pod. So in order to carry cargo as the diagram suggests, that would require crews operating YT-1300s to either order one without the Forward Escape Pod (a bad idea, if possible) or jettison it themselves (a worse idea). Furthermore, the YT-1300 has variations of cockpit mounting locations, available on request from the buyer. The possibilities are Port Mounted, Starboard Mounted (As the Falcon is) or Center mounted. If the front pointy bits are meant to hold cargo as the diagram suggests, how will the crew see out of the cockpit? This cannot be the case. The front pointy bits cannot be for holding cargo, as both the Forward Escape Pod AND Possibly Center Mounted Cockpit would not allow for it. Now onto a tangent I forgot to say in the original X-Wing video I believe the T-65 (and later T-70) were meant not as precise fighters, but as anti capital ship fighters. From my experience in the Disney Infinity Star Wars Campaign, The T-65 is excellent for attacking Imperial Class Destroyers and the occasional Lambda Class shuttle. However, when chasing and engaging TIEs at close range, the T-65 suffers, due to the aiming issue with Parallax. While having the fastest fire rate of any playable ship on account of it's four cannons, it's weakness is exposed when engaging TIEs and TIE Interceptors, as you will find no trouble in getting kills when using one due to the superior aiming (thanks to center mounted cannons). Furthermore, while it has decent speed and handling, TIEs have the advantage in speed for one reason. While the S-Foils are deployed, you fly at the regular speed. You can apply the brakes to fly very slowly, (good for very tight turns or attacking ground targets) or push the throttle and speed up. however, doing so closes the S-Foils, and therefore does not allow you to use the weapons when flying at top speed. TIEs do not have this issue, and can freely push the throttle while firing all the same. This takes us to the Millennium Falcon. Using it's center mounted turret, it has perhaps the greatest precision when firing out of the available ships to use. However, due to it's high precision, it makes it not the best choice when engaging Capital Ships. The T-65 can spray a large area of laserfire due to it's 4 cannons (perfect for large targets like Destroyers) while the Falcon remains the better ship to ship fighter, with it's high speed and precision weapons Sorry for the wall of text. Another great vid, making use of real world dynamics and principles.
The pod was an after market add on for the ship, it has never been impled to be standard in any lore which it apeared in, the idea LONG preceeded the movie. Thus you wold never buy it if your using the mandibles for cargo handling. Likewise a center mounted cockpit option on a YT-1300 would have omitted the docking clamps in the mandibles right at their tips, but most of the rest of the wedge they sit on has important systems that can't be done away with.
Awesome! I love your videos :D. Additionally, can you please do a video dissecting the tie line, in both design of the fighters and the training of their pilots some time in the future?
Once again I'm going to bring up mass effect ships because I think the lore behind the way they work is amazing and also because I like their methods of heat management. When it comes to a mass effect ship, heat management is very important. Civilian ships feature large fragile radiator panels that are impossible to armor. Warships use Defused Radiator Arrays(DRAs). These consist of ceramic strips along the exterior hull that glow under infrared. As the stripe pattern depends on the internal layout of the ship, each ship has a unique pattern under infrared. On older ships, these stripes can glow red or white hot. Giving them the nickname "tiger stripes" or "War paint." DRAs are no as efficient as radiators, but if damaged, the ship only loses a fraction of its total radiation capacity. DRA allows a Warship to cruise with little issues. Operations within inner solar systems can cause some problems. During combat ships generate titanic amounts of heat from weapons fire and maneuvering burns. This makes DRA less effective. During combat in high heat environments, ships deploy droplet heatsinks. Heat generated is captured in tanks of lithium or sodium then sprayed out the bow through spray nozzles as millions of micrometer droplets. These droplets are then captured at the stern and recycled back into the ship. Droplet heat sinks can manage heat 10-100 times faster than DRAs. When ships turn, the droplets peal off, resembling the wake of a surface ship. Even with all this radiation and heat management, mass effect ships still produce more heat than can be radiated and this plays a major part in combat endurance. If a battle goes on to long the ship can begin to overheat. When that happens, the ship must retreat via FTL. Once they've escaped combat, they shut down all non-essential systems and activate radiation equipment. This process can take hours. Combat endurance varies between ships and location. Battles in deep space can go on for quite some time, while battles near stars are frantic and often inconclusive as one side always retreats due to overheating
@@TheMhalpern the heat sinks from Normandy's IES stealth system are a lot more advanced. They are capable of completely sinking all the ship's heat for hours or even days. And these were also droplet sinks. So combat endurance doesn't affect the Normandy
The "Wings" are called "S-Foils," aka "Stabilizer Foils." There may be some kind of cooling veins in the S-foils, but they would only be used for something small scale, like cooling for the computers on board. The main purpose of the "Wings" is for stabilization of the craft. Within the "wings" are EM field generators for creating and controlling etheric control surfaces. Or, in other words, the control flaps that interact with ionized particles.
Then ya dun hecked up again. Because that doesn't make any sense either. Copius amounts of 'fighter' sized ships in the same universe do not require any such interaction, and are somehow capable and often times better. It's almost as if the 'rule of cool' means the more maneuverable a space fighter is (in cannon), the less 'wings' it has. Less surface area for interacting with 'etheric control surfaces'. Not more. A-wings. The entire TIE series. All the goofy prequal not-actually-A-wings-but-gotta-be-close stuff. If they can generate artificial gravity (and they can) then the idea of 'control flaps' for interacting with any kind of particle as a method of maneuver, is bunk as heck. It's space magic. Wings are dumb.
They are called S-foils because their actual terminology is Strike-foils, designed to increase the spread of coverage from the craft. Now canon and legends do things a little different but generally they serve the same purpose. In canon, while the lasers can fire while the foils are closed, all it does is decrease the spread of fire. In legends the original models could not fire when the foils were closed and some models were modified to allow them to fire while shut, although it was at the cost of reduced power and accuracy.
They could make the wingtips "gravity anchors" or some other technobabble that brakes/anchors the craft so it can swiftly stop without using thrusters, or activate only one of the four so it can turn around that one anchor. Idk.
Explains why they lock them in attack position at the start of dogfighting. Better geometry for nimble maneuvers rather than straight line acceleration
@@SacredCowShipyards yeah, the tech should only come up where it plays into the story Stuff like "these are the rules of how FTL works in this 'verse", which is all bullshit anyways, and allows you to create the kind of stories you want (things like the jumpgate network in B5 and the strategic value of ships with their own jump engines, it's useful worldbuilding) But yeah, unless you're doing super hard sci-fi, the more handwaves the better
The one thing that has always bothered me about the X-Wing, and its close cousin, the Viper from BSG, is having the pilot pressed up at the back of each ship, inches away from the engines. I would list everything that's wrong with that configuration, but I simply don't have the time, other than to say, it's really stupid.
Okay, who here wants to see the AI on Sacred Cow Shipyard play a heavily modded game of Factorio, Space Engineers, or the mmo StarBase? Because it would Science the F*** out it!
I just fall back on Suspension of Disbelief and Remember my wonder of seeing that scrolling intro for the first time in 1977 as a 11 year old with one working ear. And that eardrum had just been reconstructed the year before.
Acktually, the excess heat serves 2 purposes in the xwing: first and most important is keeping the survival rats in the cargo pod warm and ready for any impromptu picnics and/or luring in exiled jedi masters. Any excess beyond that was used to keep the plot armor warm and flexable. Rumor has it porkins was hoping to catch a mace windu, pokemon style, and packed a bit too heavily on the nerf nuggs.
WELL ACKTUALLY… One of the tech manuals (I forgot which) shows that ships in SW have an “etheric rudder”. So the implication (and there is some fan theory on this somewhere) is that there is a luminiferous ether in that universe, I.e., a medium in space. This then accounts for why fighters maneuver as if in an atmosphere while in space. One could then argue for the context of this video that you have another potential source that can take heat from the ships. 🤷🏼♀️ … but yeah, the wings as radiators? No. It ain’t gonna work.
And yet in universe, the more maneuverable a fighter is, the less 'wing' it has. Wh....what? So. Wings aren't for maneuvering either because the existence of them explains how UNmaneuverable a ship is. Not how maneuverable it is. The bigger the wings, the less it turns. EVERY. SINGLE. EXAMPLE in star wars bears this out. A-Wings. TIE's of all shapes and sizes. Anything in cannon said to be 'nimble' has less surface area, not more. So no. Wings are not a good explanation even if we accept 'etheric rudder'. An X-wing with just its engines strapped on and the 4 cannons bolted to it's side would, by the star wars logic, be better at turning than with it's wings.
"The X-Wing achieves it's remarkable maneuverability through a combination of three factors. Differential thrust from its four fusial Ion engines is the first. High-mass electromagnetic gryos in each of the four retro thrusters add a turning effect that helps to swing the ship in tight curves. Finally, precise bursts of retro-thrust fire forward through the turbine nozzles to add further control..." -Complete Cross-Sections All fighters and ships would likely use similar methods, so the wings aren't meant to affect maneuverability in the slightest. For example, the Jedi Starfighter that Obi-Wan uses in Ep2 uses "Electromagnetic nozzle elements direct and pinch the relativistic thrust stream"
The increase in mobility would be negligible for the engines positioned where they are. If the engines and cannons were swapped, it would improve their maneuverability and accuracy. The x-foil position just wastes mechanical space, so put them permanently open and save the weight, while reinforcing the structure. You've seen THAT design before. It actually functions.
Actually, the X-Wing needs to have its lasers on its wings to avoid hitting its propeller, and since the Original Trilogy takes place before WW1, the Synchronization Gear had not been invented yet.
According to the Essential Guide to Vehicles & Vessels, the X-Wing's wings exist and open to provide a larger field of fire for their powerful canons. In fact, the Cross-sections book, reveals that the wings of an X-Wing is where the ship houses its power couplings. Only Clone Wars era ships are shown/mentioned to house heat sinks and radiators in their wing flaps. The guns themselves on the X-Wing do have cooling systems, but it doesn't say what kind if coolent it uses or how it works. There is no mention beyond that of how the X-Wing expels heat. It is mentioned to be one of the most advanced Starfighters in history, but that obviously doesn't explain how the hell it deals with heat.
I think the concept of a space freighter where the drive section is pushing the cargo section might originate from the naval shipping industry. Cargo Ships. The engines, crew section, flying bridge, etc, are all at the back of the ship with the cargo in front. I have seen that method in a few other sci-fi shows, which also feature the cargo section being detachable so the freight could be dropped off at a space station and the drive vehicle then hops over to another freight section. And in just about every case, your looking at massive freight sections compared to the drive vehicle. In the case of Earth 2; the drive vehicle connected to the freight section, pushed it out of the station, set it on a coasting coarse to the destination, then detached and proceeded to the destination ahead of the freight section.
Stormtrooper; We're going to impound this X-wing. The radiators don't meet safety regs. Obi-wan; Waves hand. Nah. It'll be fine. ST; These aren't the radiators we're looking for. Go on through.
I remember hearing somethign about it more like being a cooling system that actually the part of the system that actually dumps the heat. SO can you answer if having a wide and big cooling system for the heat to disperse over a long area with lots of piping on it's way to the heat dump or sandwitched between the heat sinc? Because all I really remember from the loore is saying that it handls the heat and is for cooling, not how it is handled. Although, it might have said radiate too, but an and statement is kind of meaningless anyway, since negligetable heat is technically part of that and and is true if not effective. If the nozles are great for dumping heat like in real rockets for example, then how more realistic is having more heat exchange and more matter to disperse the heat into? I want to say that I am mostly satisfied. I mean, this needed to be addressed. Thanks. But your not done.
I thought as a kid that they had more to do with the interference between the cannons themselves, and how in the lore they tended to be a little... unstable.. to run. Their positions made no sense for radiator panels, but perfect sense for a short term heat dump until the nozzles can catch up, and for spacing them away from eachother and the Pilot's Tub.
Got a story I'm working on where the ships have massive radiators & capacitor banks for heat storage & release. (They have an option B that involves dumping all the heat in fold space the in universe ftl. But doing that is like setting off a massive I am over here flare for anyone paying attention.) So most vessels will spend the time to slow bleed their capacitors in real space before doing anything crazy. (You also dont want to jump into your own capacitor bleed in fold space, has a similar effect to skimming a stars Corona sphere, except all the delicate ftl equipment isn't tucked under its usual meter thick ablative plating. Fast way in universe to get a visit from authorities is to fold dump your capacitors in a busy trade route. First their going to check everyone is ok. Then their going to own you for the next decade or two depending on what and who had to abort their jump because the equipment started melting & the route is closed for the next 1to 3 cycles.
13:48 Do you see any heat sinks on the Death Star? ...I do recall something about it having thermal exhaust ports, actually... I think they were important.
Amazing, on many levels. Your performance in this video. The passion, the exuberance, the backhanded humor, the math and attention to detail, the myriad of ways you find to verbally describe the subject and those that partake in such fallacy, and in detail describe exactly how they will be reamed again and again in the most descriptive way to boot is one of the most outstanding rants I've heard since the last Razorfist video I watched. He took on the koolaid-haired warriors bringing 'equity' to BattleMech after being banned from some forums they took over. This retconning into oblivion, this overthinking on soy has ruined so many good things. It even seriously affects my realm of Doom Metal now. The Ackshuully's (sic)are out there. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with... AH! You know the drill. And I suppose the air conditioners on the Eagle 5 in Spaceballs actually were dissipating 'heat' according to these people as well? {snort}
@@SacredCowShipyards Damn right, thanks! And I've always been intrigued by Thermodynamics. I never had any hard study of them, just practical use in things like heating and cooling my home efficiently while my polar opposite hot-blooded Italian wife likes to fling open windows in winter and crank AC in the summer. Or get that proper 'yes' to a Martini or keep my tube amps from melting down. But I can always learn more, and I have! Thanks!
Heat pipes conduct, but that's not how they move heat. The mechanism is a low pressure allows a working fluid (water) to boil in a vacuum near the heat, and condense in a vacuum near the cold. Gravity or capillary wicking pulls the fluid back to the hot side to repeat the process; the phase change carries immense amounts of heat around, as is typical.
If I remember correctly, heat pipes for computers use a phase-change fluid to carry away heat instead of conduction. The fluid then moves back to the heat source via capillary action. Some other complaints I've read about thermal management have been how some radiators get in the way of other radiators. But, I read an article earlier this year suggesting researchers have discovered a way to make a material radiate in a specific direction. If true, that could be game-changing for spacecraft design.
Was looking for this. Heap pipes as an example for heat conduction is questionable at best. I would put them closer to Convection since they transport heat by moving (circulating) matter (fluid & gas).
TBH people keep on making the whole 'death star weakness' joke and forget that it's a thermal exhaust port. Is it far too small to be effective at expelling heat? Yes, but it's also understandable that if it were damaged then the hypermatter reactor wouldn't be able to properly manage it's heat output and would tear itself apart. It's like stuffing a car's exhaust.
I was thinking about the avduction sacrificial idea, and it occured to me that would have actually looked pretty cool. Xwings spiraling through dogfights trailing basically afterburner/wing plumes corkscrewing all over the place. Taking the waste heat and transferring it to an onboard gas and then venting it. Very anime. The wings opening could be to expose the ports to vent it more efficiently.
I feel like the Salvare (from another life) needs a little bit of criticism. Along with the technology progression, because I think those gravity plates are a jump ahead of the FTL technology on the tech tree but apparently they had gravity panels before they had an FTL ship. Never mind that their impulse engines apparently can propel a ship from Jupiter to earth in under a day but they need to slingshot around stars so close they’re scraping stellar atmosphere. I’m also peeved that they call scraping seller atmosphere an orbit. At least they acted like gravity still affected it even in Warp.
5.67e-8 may sound small but powering temperature by 4 is no joke. Actually try the numbers with some common numbers like 273 kelvin (around water freezing point) 373 Kelvin around water boiling point and you'll soon see the wattage output is definitely significant. Radiation heat loss is why foil blankets exist. If the issue was so small they wouldn't exist. For example at 300 kelvin aka around room temperature the emissions for a perfect emitter is about 460 watts per square meter, or 18.4 kW for 40 square meters, equivilent to about 18 smallish industrial cutting lasers. This is because 300^4 equals 8.1e9, a much bigger number than 5.6e-8. The power radiation will increase 32 fold if you double the kelvins. Edit: On how to achieve such temperatures in space. Well you have a bunch of laser cannons, space engines and power supply. Im sure you can heat up stuff to the required temperature quite easily. t. a mechanical engineer. I wanted to respond sooner but I suspected this video was gonna trigger the mechanical nerd in me so i put off watching it until I wasn't as busy.
hmm.. feels like making a weapon system that is powered by waste heat would be a good fix to the whole problem... assuming magical space tech is involved... that also would neatly translate to a video game having some kind of charging ultimate attack type thingy... where exceding safe paramaters for the heat storage could result in damage... so that could be a neat litle detail to work in
My personal headcannon for the whole 'x-foils in attack position' thing is 3 parts. 1) the weapons used generate strong magnetic fields, and do not tolerate other adjacent magnetic fields - the weapons need to be physically distanced from each other to ever fire. 2) the power lines used to power the weapons are carrying non-trivial currents. Enough that if you don't open the wings to separate the power lines, simultaneously firing them would tear the power lines out of your wings. 3) It looks cool.
I remember somewhere that it's stated that the cannon are placed on the tips of the X-wing because of when they fire they put out a bunch of waste heat cause they are relatively heavy weapons for a fighter. So putting them out on the tips was a way to handle the amount of extra heat they put out using the S-foils when extended as heat sinks allowing the cooling system to better handle the heat.
Children of a dead earth is an underrated game, you'll get your radiator fix on that! The hotter the radiators the more heat you can eject, but the less efficient the powerplant is. Also the X Wing's "radiators" are FACING EACH OTHER.
The cargo pods for the YT1300 were made up, I'd guess, in part, because the ship is a freighter...with a shockingly small amount of cargo volume. As a pusher tug, it's not too bad.
The original Foundation books and The Culture books actually address the heat problem. Basically, it amounts to magically radiating the heat into hyperspace/subspace/another dimension. The heat problem is so severe, it actually renders even The Expanse fusion ships into the realm of unphysical Sci-fi drives that defy physics. Those are just sneakier about it than most Sci-fi. (See Scott Manley's video on this.)
There are only three logically valid explanations for any object in the Star Wars universe:
1. It looks cool.
2. It advances the story in some way (mainly in the original trilogy), and it looks cool.
3. It gives a character something to fiddle with, and it looks cool.
I don't think you put enough emphasis on it looking cool.
4. It's a cool WW2 (or thereabouts) gun with cool bits on.
It looks plausibly functional for our lived in space serial adventure space opera. And the concept artists know how to create cool shit.
5. Its cause, mode of operation, and purpose are all but tantamount to space-magic. And it does look cool.
6. its a piece of shit, the TIE interceptor looks better and so does the ETA and the ARC-170
As much as I love Star Wars, having seen the logic brought up about the frankly silly design of the X-Wing has been enjoyable
X-Wing = Space F-14
@@hellacoorinna9995 Naw. Space F-14 = Macross Valkyrie.
@@phluphie This chad gets it, Space F-14 is my favorite.
@@hellacoorinna9995 so they're the best interceptor and air superiority fighter of their time?
We all just need to remember that Star Wars is FANTASY not Sci-Fi, because once you start talking science it's REALLY dumb.
"Look at the Death Star! Do you see any heat sinks on that thing?"
Well, it does have a small thermal exhaust port... ^_~
It had like 8
@@SkylerLinux plus multiple much smaller ones, the crown at the top was to dump most of the heat.
@Ah_Ftagn the Star Wars universe does indeed use the Luminiferous Aether Theory as is canonized by the SW: Squadrons lore (and was also in old Legends lore.)
It's in a fluid
To be honest, the shields can act as a radiator. Use a ionized gas to absorb heat, inject the plasma into the shield magnetic field, then collect it once it cools down, and reuse.
funny fact, most modern night vision operates in the "near IR range" [not including FLIR devices which are the "far range"]. When you start heating up items, they will actually start glowing in night vision well before you can see them in the visible spectrum [found that out quite by accident doing a night shoot with some sound muffling devices]
And nearly all consumer grade cameras capture light well into infrared, and have special filters to remove it so that photos don't get random bright spots around objects that are hot but don't glow. In many models removing these filters is quite easy and you can then put a filter that removes visible light but lets infrared through (a piece of fully exposed and developed film from analog camera works just fine - say, from start or end of the roll) and you get a near-infrared camera on the cheap.
@@sharpfang noticed my phone camera was picking up infrared light when I installed my Xbox one in 2014. Hooked everything up and took a picture and noticed the light beams coming out of the kinect.
Future real space combat (such as it might be) will certainly use passive IR sensors for detection. There's no stealth in space.
@@noahdoyle6780 laser weapons can take advantage of the lack of radiation abilities and just cook the enemy space vehicle
The entire IR spectrum is 100 times bigger than the visible spectrum.
Pulls out lawn chair: “Dis Gon be Gud.”
*shows up with popcorn
@@thomasl8810 i got the libations.
::cracks beer- sips::
I got da camera and fridge *opens a cold one*
The birth of the Millennium Falcon:" I want a ship that it looks like a Hamburger and sails like a Sunfish"
What a epic beginning...
Cute cat, homie
Does explain a lot.
I always kinda thought it was somebody's left hand. Fold you middle finger down to make the mandible, the thumb is the cockpit, the round shape is a rough trace of the back of the hand.
Then it's just a few hours of tweeking the design a bit.
It was more like "make the Millennium Falcon not look like the Eagle transports"
The version of the story that I heard, was Lucas had taken a bite of a hamburger at the time the complaint was made to him and he told the crew to use that shape.
"There's not enough particles in space to actually matter" ...I choose to believe that pun was intentional xDDDDDDD
also when I was a little kid and first learning about gravity physics, my headcanon for SW fighters having wings was that they were gravity wave generators that let them "surf" on pulses of gravity to perform fine-tuned maneuvers in a vacuum, like tiny-scale sublight versions of the Star Trek warp drive. I am using this idea in my own stories in the form of gravitational plating that fighters use to pull off crazy maneuvers in zero-G vacuum without the need for a ton of counter-thrusters all over the thing, while also vaguely resembling atmospheric fighters for the aesthetic. Boom, wings on starfighters fixed with one piece of lore, which they could totally do in Star Wars because they have anti-grav technology small and complex enough to build tiny hovering units like the probe droid.
Somewhere in the extended universe they do mention "etheric rudders" so you're on the same track as someone on the writing team, but also IMO came up with a scientifically superior explanation.
I think one of the advantages Space has is the lack of drag would allow you to point your fighter whenever you want instantly. But changing your prograde is more energy consuming.
A "Space wing" would ad drag, would make the "pointing" part slower, but it would make changing your prograde less energy consuming and faster. like some sort of trade off. Specially if the "wings" won't need power to work.
So a tidbit of old Legends lore, the space in star wars is not as empty as our universe (which explains a lot of Star Wars phenomenon) and is instead full of stuff labeled the “ether”, which ships make use of using “etheric rudders” which gives them the flight characteristics of in atmosphere fighters from our universe. This was all canonized more recently with SW: Squadrons, and it also explains why ships in Star Wars decelerate in space.
The simplest way you could come up for the x-foil wings would be that the large laser cannons have a dangerous blast that can damage nearby things, so previous model of starfighter had 2 and to prevent damage to main body they were set separated by structural wings, next model wanted moar dakka, so 4 guns, problem, if you stick them together they will damage each other on firing, so 4 wings to separate them from the main body and each other, but oh shit 4 srparate wings take space and are anoying, so foldable foils to reduce space taken and increased visibility on normal flight and landing.
Still fails to explain Imperial shuttles
Are we talking radiation or physical force here? If radiation I could understand that explanation, concussive force not so much.
I thought a better explanation for the Imperial shuttle might be that the fins help stabilize it (somehow?) in space flight or particularly in hyperspace, giving a smoother ride to its passengers and cargo. I like your thoughts on the x-wing's wings.
The Z-95 is literally the previous model.
@@eonaon6914 Radiation definitely, concussion no, in space there is no medium for concussion (maybe in atmosphere as the X-wing was saud to be both a void and atmospheric fighter, as oposed to the standard TIE that needed a specialised atmo variant)
And thinking it a bit more maybe heat could also play a role if its close enough, not the operating heat, but the actual shots heat.
Another explanation could be that laser shots too close to each other interfere amogst themselves and throw aiming to whack
@@dixievfd55 thats what im going for, if the x wing is just an up gunned headhunter, why not keep only two wings (especially if putting 4 interferes with landing, storage and visibility)
So best answer is that while firing the guns need to be separate from each other and possibly from the main fusselage too.
All this explanation would also need an answer to why the fuck does the basic TIE just break all the rules having its twin lasers side by side and embedded on the main ball just under the pilot, while the TIE interceptor actually has its guns on the outside of its wings and separate, like the X-wing
About the "compressed to a cube" thing, the 24 hours only count if there is noboby inside the ship, wright?
Cause I don't remeber where I parked my sloop, and my wife is not answering the phone...
Anyways you should make a video on the Donager class of battleships.
Everytime you see one, it will explode. But even that, they all look very powerfull.
That is good visual storytelling, you can feel the stakes getting higher when they go boom.
SCS: I missed the part where that’s my problem. Try looking at the squishy bits section.
Which interstellar standard hour are they using?
It would make sense if it is a "all unattended ships will get compressed into a cube" and a person inside the ship would be attended. But it is entirely possible that 24 hours is 24 hours, no exceptions.
All squishy organics are extracted via tractor beam prior to cubing. They are then compressed into separate cubes. Worry not though, they can be uncubed for a modest fee
The Donager's basically get Worfed, which doesn't really establish any stakes. Had the Donager herself (the first one we ever see) actually held her own and won, then one getting destroyed would mean something. But we only ever see them getting blown up, which takes a lot of the bite out of their bark.
You know having going radiators on the ships could actually make them look cooler. Great video as usual!
If you ment glowing, yeah it could but trying to actually get in or out would basically cook you or any body part you put on the surface of the ship. Heck even if they were dogfighting in atmosphere there is NO WAY any ship thats gone hypersonic for maneuvering is able to let the pilot out for at least 15 to half a hour so the fuselage cools to the point where he wont be burned. In atmosphere unless the shields are really protecting the ship the outer layer of heavy armor has to gain ALOT of heat maneuvering against the friction atmo creates, space ill concede that if its deep space they may be able to get out sooner but anywhere in a planetary orbit, it could even take longer because of how radiation isnt halved like in atmo but realistically cubed.
for some reason when I hear that this ships use radiators I think of car radiators then I learn about the space station and now I feel stupid and find it funny with that image
You should check out Elite Dangerous then. Every ship has some sort of brightly glowing radiators dedicated to ridding of heat, and each of them is a different design. Some have long banks of glowing pipes, others a series of disks in a square bracket, I think one looked like a row of tick taks scaled up. That game made thermal radiation look cool.
@@eonaon6914 You could do a pump assisted-heat sink mass dump for a fast cooling procedure prior to landing. Basically super cool an outer portion of the ship by pumping the heat from there to a superconductor tank, then dump the tank creating a heat deficit, and let the radiators catch up and take heat from the core back out to the wingtips where the pilot can have a chance to get out of the ship safely.
Due to mass limitations this would be an emergency or landing procedure only.
One other neat theory I saw was shields as ablative heat sinks. The energy of the shield collects heat, then the medium of the shield is blinked off, dumping the collected heat, then back on to absorb friction heat again. This could severely reduce the overall heat gain in atmo and allow a ship to avoid becoming glowing hot to begin with as they would only get a % of the heat between each dump cycle, instead of the total load.
"looks cooler" haha... I get it...
The Death Star had a bunch of "Thermal Exhaust Ports" so its actively shooting heat out like the waste products of an internal combustion engine... somehow.
I would also like to note here that my inner logistician cringes every time I see Star Wars cargo containers because there is no standard shape or size that they come in. It seems that there are many different shapes and sizes thrown around willy-nilly.
To comment on the cargo container thing…
They have over 2,000 different species… probably closer to 10 or 20 thousand… all of which have completely different cultures and traditions and are different shapes and sizes…
So yeah… you can imagine that there probably is standardisations within different planets… and groups of planets… but there is so Damn many of them…
@@Zadrias6386 indeed. there were imperial/republic standard ones though. The problem is there were countless custom or non-imperial standard ones.
It's why transports were designed to handle mixed cargo loads for the majority, or with the ability to adapt to them (aka multiple lockdown points, adjustable mounts, etc)
Please allow me to refer you to Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, from which we could presume that there are perhaps a dozen common container sizes used throughout the known galaxy, and give the matter no further consideration.
I mean, you can vent gas to space, it's how the cooling of the moon landing space suits worked, it vents water vapor when the suit gets too hot. The issue isn't venting coolant to space, the issue is keeping enough coolant onboard for extended operations. Also to a lesser degree, that venting provides thrust, so you have to balance your ports so as not to generate net thrust. Biggest problem is still going to be the endless number of tankers coming to and from the deathstar to top up the coolant they are dumping overboard. A station that big would likely dump olympic swimming pools per second on cooling, meaning that station is likely hoovering up every bit of ice nearby just to keep running, dumping it into space and speeding up entropy at an ungodly rate.
The Death Star exhausts are for a fusion reactor (and MAYBE a combination 'hypermatter annihilation' reactor, too) so it's a bit more than just combustion.
7:37 rocket engines are actually surprisingly efficient at removing heat that way. Just dump it all together with the exhaust.
This might be a coutner argument
The wings ar meant to be a wide area for the heat handling system to transfer heat to the actuall heat dump, rather than the heat dump itself.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_engine#Cooling
Go down to cooling, I know it's wiki, just research more after Dump cooling.
Not nuclear rockets, nuclear rockets need additional radiators, and that's just for fission rockets which have the advantage of expelling large volumes of previously cryogenic hydrogen that takes tons of heat out with it. A fusion torch would generate insane levels of waste heat you could only get rid of via radiation in space, far more than the miniscule propellant feeding through the reactor can deal with. You'd also likely need a secondary reactor to make a fusion torch work, as self sustaining fusion that produces useful energy is unlikely, so that's two nuclear reactors you now have to cool.
@@kauske Somewhere around the internets there's production sketches of the _Discovery_ from _2001: A Space Odyssey_ - canonically propelled by nuclear thermal engines - with honking big radiators. But Kubrick decided they looked like wings and had the final model built without them. And maybe he wanted the ship to look like a spermatozoan.
I have always tought that the best way to cool a ship in Sci-Fi is to use heat-exchanger to preheat your reaction drive fuel.
Good thermodynamics lecture. Unfortunately I believe it has been made canon that space in Star Wars isn't a good vacuum, and instead has "aether" like some early space theories, so other forms of heat transfer besides radiation may work in space in the Star Wars universe. (X-wing wings being radiators are still silly, and T-70 engines are still stupid too.)
It has nothing to do with them being radiators. They are called S-foils because their actual terminology is Strike-foils, designed to increase the spread of coverage from the craft. Now canon and legends do things a little different but generally they serve the same purpose. In canon, while the lasers can fire while the foils are closed, all it does is decrease the spread of fire. In legends the original models could not fire when the foils were closed and some models were modified to allow them to fire while shut, although it was at the cost of reduced power and accuracy.
This cuts right to the heart of the issues I've had with Star Wars since the Prequel Trilogy; the obsessive need to explain every little detail that, when doing so, manages to introduce more inconsistency and makes it much harder to hold onto the suspension of disbelief.
I shouldn't have laughed so hard when there not being enough stellar mass floating around to 'matter' walked into that bad pun.
I recently found your channel and I gotta say I'm loving it. Your no BS look at design is great.
Welcome aboard!
Star Wars has a Ather so physics in space is the same as physics in an atmosphere.
The wings are there to put the guns as far away from the targetting system as possible, it improves accuracy..... the designer said. ;-)
@@jtjames79 The problem with the spread weapons specifically is that In the Star Wars universe, they don't have accurate computer tracking. The in-lore reason is basically that counter-ECM is so advanced for both sides that any form of targetting that isn't human-visual is useless. Hence, the computer can't make these range conversion adjustments, the pilot must instead. And guess what humans have a really hard time doing: Range adjustments when you have absolutely 0 fixed points of reference.
Mounting them on the wings make them about as accurate as a shotgun. I remember playing xwing and having tie fighters pass between the bolts.
@@jtjames79 We kind of learned since WW2 to not put guns in a converging line of fire. Guns are more of a last resort nowadays for dogfighting, but you’re just making your ship more expensive for a tiny boost in accuracy you probably will never need in an actual dogfight. All it takes in one rotor to not function to screw up your accuracy, on modern jets this isn’t a problem because they are fixed to the side of the aircraft’s hull. Depending on whatever jet you have.
@@jtjames79 it isn’t actually WW2, but it does have WW2 style dogfighting which makes less and less sense the more advanced your computer targeting system is. Conversely, the less advanced your computer targeting is, the less sense it makes to rely on it unnecessarily. If convergence is set manually then you have an overworked pilot, who probably won’t actually touch those controls in combat.
You make a good point about the shotgun effect, there IS an argument against an all centreline mounted armament as that would require more precise aiming, however an X-wing is still a poor design. The fact that all 4 guns are mounted out that far means that the range of distances before and after the convergence point where the pilot will actually hit what they’re aiming at is unnecessarily small. If you have 4 guns it makes much more sense to have two of them further in, maybe with a different convergence. That way you still have a shotgun effect but you’ll also hit what you’re aiming at at a greater variety of distances.
@@jtjames79 I would agree with some of your points, there is nothing in canon OR retcon (yes, I see the original as being canon, the House of Mouse can GLUE) but there are some engineering basics it overlooks - the more complex a system is the more likely it is to fail. This would be the reason behind the KISS principle and the firm belief in Murphy's Law that every engineer, amateur or professional, has. Introducing a complex aiming system where mounting the things further inboard would negate this need is still a gamble from this perspective as the only way to guarantee a part won't fail is to never install it in the first instance.
That sort of thing is very much pet peeve of mine so please don't feel this is an attack on you, more on the idea that adding something is necessary where taking it away usually makes significantly more sense :)
I am speculating that Star Wars metal must be able to endure high temperatures without compromising the strength to much - as most Star Wars ships can make a fast reentry through atmosphere without shields without burning up.
Oh and yeah best not think about Physics to much when Acceleration compensation is 'a thing' in Star Wars.
I guess if you wanted to get magical about it you could say that the wing area intersects with the Navigation shield envelope and removes any excess heat via the (very large) surface area of the shields and that there is some sort of convection wave across the shields with new cold entering at the front and heat dissipating at the rear.
But I don't know if I think heat dissipation is any sillier than how the shield grid on Star Trek ships is supposed to work.
Or what I find especially silly is Warp Plasma in the first place and where it goes and what it does and doesn't do.
Oh and Dilithium swirl chambers (such as Voyager's warp core) are kinds daft if you think about them to deeply too.
But then I've long thought putting an anti-matter reactor in a built up areas on a planet is the silliest thing of all.
Fun fact: Durasteel is better than titanium at blocking blaster or energy based attacks, this is because its an incredibly conductive material, so yes, Durasteel and derivative Alloys can endure extremely high temperatures.
Also, you can kinda see the things that pump out the heat on the wings... they are in the inner area... pretty stupid if you ask me, tie fighters did better on that part, thats what the large panels were also for.
I'm just thinking out loud here.. if there's power generation and propulsion technology where fuel capacity and fuel mass mass is barely even a factor, then you can simply decelerate to match velocity with the planet surface *prior* to approach, and thus do not have to perform atmospheric braking at all.
Why do people STILL insist that Star Wars ships do not have shields?
@@gpgpgpgp1000 because in movies and shows they do tend to take a lot of damage immediatedly, as if there are no shields. Especially fighters.
That was hilarious, you had me in stitches! LOL! Star Wars is space fantasy and I love it for what it is. However, when those technical manuals attempts to explain in a plausible manner how the starships works, the logic and physics breaks down. Just appreciate Star Wars for what it is: Space Fantasy.
Anyway, I look forward to seeing more of your videos because you're very funny and entertaining, and you make learning physics fun! I wish all physics teachers were like you! You just earned a new subscriber! :)
Thanks!
THANK YOU SCS! The next time I am talking thermodynamics with someone, which happens surprisingly often, I am going to show them this video and call it a day.
he called the empire the imperium?
does that mean he's been reading up on 40k lore? to review some of the best sci fi ship designs?
I am going to withhold both how entertained I am by 40k and how much I intensely hate it to simply say you have ...interesting definitions of "best".
Albeit since space is known to be An Ocean, the Aeldari ships looking like fish is, of course, correct.
@@Pyre the imperium's starships are surprisingly sensible in general properties. Rather than being all steel and stuff, it really does make more sense to build ships out of concrete once you have significant orbital shipyards. They're laid out with a big armored prow that is sharply angled with lots of weapons poking around and through so they go nose in and fire away while closing the distance to the enemy because their targeting systems sucks and they need to get close to hit anything, and then they have lots of weapons laid out on broadsides with pretty good traverse behind that armored prow to do a bunch of damage as they make their close pass. That's pretty reasonable design over all. Obviously they have magic gravity plates for decks and limited automation to reload the weapons, but the design is actually pretty sensible. If theyd lay out the decks like a skyscraper and just say its using thrust gravity it would be even better.
@@davidthomas2870 Let's just not speak of some of the grim derp where building-sized warheards need to be loaded manually because the Mechanicus are arseholes.
@@Pyre WTAF are Aeldari? oh, wait, did they do that so they can copyright "Eldar?"
(Still, the Eldar SHOULD have the capability to utterly smash everyone and every thing.)
@@AAhmou yes but it would be hilarious to see SCS loose his shit about it. Especially the depictions of how they reload the reactors. Its real bad
13:40 I think they'd say something like "Full Hypermatter reactors on capital ships are near perfect energy and/or can dump waste heat directly into hyperspace."
The best explanation for why snub-fighters have wings is a complex interaction of various energy emission fields that are key to everything working right, and giving some physical distance is the best engineering solution for whatever reason. Larger ships either can't play the same games or have enough mass to not care. Assuming you REALLY want to keep the radiator bit, the least bad explanation I can think of is that SW uses the term 'Radiator' the same way it does 'Turbolasers', which have very little to do with LASERs, but became the catch all term for a big ship mounted energy weapon. Just what nonsense physics slight-of-hand is in the same territory as 'how do hyperdrives work', but the straightforward radiation of heat via emissions ain't it.
If we take a Watsonian approach ("it looks like this, and if it were a real universe, there must be a reason why, let me figure out what it is"), then that's a reasonable explanation.
Considering that we call air-cooled tubes of liquid on every engine on Earth a 'Radiator' the assumption that SW Radiators MUST work exclusivly via radiation and thus obey T^4 cooling rates is wholely unjustified. Conductive cooling with an unseen medium is plausable and the description of 'nutrino radiators' in the lore give us exactly that implication.
Ackshually! Star Wars is something that only has a passing relationship with physics.
It irks me from time to time, but I am usually able to ignore the baloney.
When can I NOT ignore the baloney? When the death star weapons "combine" green beams of 'something' from various angles to shoot a bigger green beam at a target. And that combining happens in nothing at some point in front of a depression on the over-compensation eyeball weapon.
Radiating heat into space is much more efficient if you use heat-pumps to concentrate the heat into a smaller area that can glow red-hot, rather than using enormous passive radiators. That works for the International Space Station because they don't need to worry about inertia, and it lets them conserve power by not running heat-pumps, but a spaceship with an ample supply of power would do better to use heat-pumps to concentrate the heat into glowing-hot active radiators.
What I like most about your channel is that even an iconoc fighter such as the X-Wing isn't too sacred or immune to criticism. Most fans are too forgiving of impractical design and are so defensive when someone actually takes a serious look at it.
My thoughts on the Pelican orbital troop transport, but only holds ~10 people. It’s as big as a C-130 according to the specifications.
@@klutzspecter3470 Sounds like achieving the "orbital" part takes up a lot of its mass.
@@klutzspecter3470 Hell yea ooo fuckin rah
@@TheNobleFive Well, it doesn’t make for a practical troop transport they literally hot drop troops like Starship troopers. It’s like putting up a big SHOOT ME sign for any cheeky antiair or simple insurgent rpg. You could the same about regular helicopter, but the thing is they are much smaller and have a smaller surface area to be shot at.
As far as I recall, what seemed to be the intent was that PART of the X-Wing wings were COOLING surfaces, exposed to space (thus only the inner surfaces, and then maybe only parts of those) So NOT radiators.
So I understand it. The ships that DO SEEM to have large radiators, are called Tie Fighters.
One thing left out, for time I presume is "view factor" that is for how much a surface radiates depends on what other surfaces are around that surface. Or what the surface "sees'. Think of it that a radiating object won't lose much heat if it's surrounded by surfaces at the same temperatures (which could also be radiating).
Why is this relevant? Well if the S Foils on the X-Wing are radiators, and they move position to increase their surface area (thus exposing those inside surfaces) then they are even more dopey.
Because even when in the fully separated position, the inside of the upper S Foil will mostly "see".... the inside of the lower S Foil. Which is.... counter to good radiator design.
Also, all it really needs is some heat VENTS on the inner side of the wing.
It's not required for the WHOLE surface to be a radiator (which is exactly what Tie Fighter wings DO in fact look like, come to that) But whether that's the most efficient process for an X-Wing, is another factor.
Armchair version.
The heat is being bounced back and forth like a ping pong ball between the insides of the 'wings'.
@@chrissonofpear1384 It's always been my head-canon that the panels on the TIE are radiators.
I tend to agree yes, ever since reading Curtis Saxton's article on the force dot ne-t, in his Technical Commentaries.
You should look at the single most grounded and realistic mech design ever made Gurren Lagaan and it various other configurations
I always figured the wings on the X-Wings was to take some of the load off the repulsor lifts when flying in atmosphere. Also to provide more manuverability in atmosphere. But this was back when I figured, if you open both the doors on a Matchbox car, the car should be able to fly.
You mean M.A.S.K. lied to me about opening Gull-wing doors allowing cars to fly?
Oh matchbox cars can fly. Have you never had a car fight with your brother?
If the wings actually had reactive control surfaces to like angle flight I would go for it....but so far as I can see all the wings in star wars are both solid parts and dont have aerodynamics to even coast without the repulsors. Seriously all winged vehicles I've seen have the aerodynamics of a brick without repulsors lift. Let alone any ship that has moving wings.
@@eonaon6914 Yeah. But I think it makes more sense than the wings being heat syncs.
Mass Effect actually uses advection on military grade craft; a droplet radiator to dump waste heat as fast as possible when radiation isn't good enough, of course, this only works so much before you run out of coolant and have to go back to port to refill before you can engage in combat again, so it's a limiting factor on endurance whereas a radiator just works until it breaks.
That’s great and all, but when are you gonna start talking about Star Citizen? Your sarcasm is very much needed there
Doesn't that only really involve paying thousands of real dollars for virtual items?
@@Bobby90 Yeah but being a social outcast with a bit of money to spare, I bought a lot of shit.
@@bogustoast22none25 Well, your money would have my condolences, but then its just money....
I actually got a surprising amount of mileage out of my twenty or thirty-some dollars 8 years ago (or however long ago it was) just on the development content alone. I keep meaning to load up what they have now, just never seem to find the time...
@@Chasmodius Given that many aren't i the know, even those put in money in early on apparently, guess I should have said thousands for *one* virtual item. For a game yet to be officially released.
The only way this would ever make sense is canonizing the whole "fluid space" thing for the Star Wars galaxy/universe. Which would also explain the need for constant thrust in space and how ships fly like airplanes (the reason the fluid idea came up to start with). But then we'd have yet another stupid thing the creators would never manage to be consistent with, that makes 500 other things make no sense and requires even more dumb retcons.
The best they could attempt without screwing up everything else is going the Mass Effect route of having them be heatsinks, rather than radiators, that require periodically entering an atmosphere to dump heat. Spraying liquid out on the leading edges, like the Normandy is seen doing, might be plausible for ships large enough to carry spare water. Just not trying to explain rule of cool things with bad science would be a better idea, but it's probably still better than retconning fluid space.
His Rage is contagious and hilarious.
We need him reviewing old 1920s serial Buck Rodgeres ships and The Batwing.
Actually those metal pipes on cooler are heat pipes or vapor chambers, so while some of the heat is moved via conduction (through the copper), the majority of it is done by advection/convection (not quite sure what channeling a vaporized liquid and then recondencing it counts as).
Ok, it's truly scary when I was actually eating Cheetos when the dockmaster said "eating your Cheetos". Great video.
**shifty eyes**
From what I know about star wars, I've almost never heard the X-wings folding wings be referred to as "radiators", despite what I look into and like most being starfighter and starship combat. I *have* heard them be referred to as S-foils or wings. Due to how repulsor and maneuvering technology works in star wars, I believe opening the wings reduces the effect of maneuvering systems built into the wings cancelling one-another out, and having the laser cannons be spread further apart and not in physical contact helps them not heat up as quickly, as they won't heat eachother as much. Additionally, when the wings are closed, the engines on each side connect and improve the total input, although why you wouldn't just design the ship to have the wings be spread and the engines connected mechanically doesn't make sense. I wonder if this has something to do with the "specialized" modes being for specific scenarios, and thereby allowing the craft to be more "efficient" by having two modes specialized for different things?
The full term for the expandable wing design, as I understand it, is "strike foil". I've heard speculation that the s-foils help keep the laser cannons from damaging or interfering with each other in some way, though whether that's heat management or something specific to whatever technobabble governs their operation is unclear. It's not an instant-death thing if they started shooting with wings closed - Rogue Squadron considered powering up weapons in one of the Legends novels during a patrol where they were prevented from opening the s-foils - but it might shorten combat duration or accelerate wear and tear on mission-critical parts.
I've also seen speculation that the s-foils had a load of tiny RCS thrusters built into them to help the ship's maneuverability during dogfights, though there's no visual reference for it - and I'm not sure whether that would help enough alongside the thrust vectoring the main engines already perform to be worth the added complexity, cost, and maintenance.
@@tba113 X wings are fully capable of firing their weapons with their wings closed, as shown in things like Star Wars X-wing the board game, Star Wars Empire At War, and star wars Rebels. Possibly the improvement in maneuverability might simply be the gimbaled engines are spread out further, allowing the effect of each individual engine to be much greater, as the engines are spread out a good bit. I wonder if the wings being closed allowing the engines to be more powerful might in fact just be the engines drawing some of the power intended for the laser cannons, resulting in lowered firepower?
@@peridot6507 That was my assumption on the speed vs. firepower choice of locking the s-foils, yeah: that if the s-foils are closed, then only one cannon on each side would be firing at a time, so the power plant can therefore redirect more juice to the engines.
13:49 I mean... It did have "Thermal Exhaust ports" (One of which at least lacked good shielding) That was something of a plot point. But that runs into the "Venting mass will run out of mass real fast" issue.
12:57 I liked the Space Forklift idea for the Mandibles! (They were IIRC called Cargo Mandibles as far back as like the Brian Daley Han Solo books that came out before even ESB, but I don't think the forklift use for them was actually a thing till uhhh, sometime in the late 90s early 2000s.)
"Yesss, yessss, let the heat ...flow through you..."
Best comment today
I thought the same thing when they said that.
As a former wrench and listening to this I have one line of text to convey my perfect understanding of this subject. I like your funny words magic man.
Some people want fantasy and reality to intersect so bad, but really what they push for is being in the fantasy instead. I do understand this myself, I just also like an adult, remember there are limitations in the real world. Some of our best fantasy almost always comes form ideas that cannot work in our known physics. That is the very basis of magic fantasy. Thermodynamics is a buzz kill, but let fantasy be fantasy. ANd I direct this to those making the retcons. Sorry, some things people can imagine will not work. Doesn't mean the story is bad.That is based on character usage. Which is why the last 4 SW stories haven't got a dollar from me directly so far. Personally, I think the retconing is to distract from the new garbage stories, after all, arguing about physics at least has logic to it, where mary sue writing is just dumb.
Damn, I remember when the BS explanation for the wings was to improve their mobility and the Falcon's mandibles was a freight loading lift, which solo broke installing the missile launcher... damn that was back in the 90s
To be fair, from what I've heard the containers on the front isn't a retcon, but something someone doodles with the original concepts. I'd accept it being a space tug, as I can't see any other way it can be a cargo ship, it doesn't have an internal cargo bay at all, so how else would it cargo? And it's not like we don't have designs for pusher and puller space tugs in reality. Look up the Russian 'Parom orbital tug'; it's more or less the same idea of pushing and pulling external cargo by docking it to either the front of the back, and having engines wider than the load so it doesn't damage its cargo with exhaust.
I can also attest to how useful a long term orbital tug works from games with realistic orbital mechanics. Push or pull, in space it doesn't matter. You can push anything too wide for you to pull without damaging, or even push and pull at the same time. Soyuz push cargo plenty by docking to stations a boosting their orbits; so I can't say being a pusher is a bad design, it's a lot simpler than being able to push or pull, and more versatile than pull only.
When i play KSP, I always try to go for pull tugs. Requires no stabilisation or structural rigidity.
Yes that space tug makes sence (at least when you dont consider landing)
@@ferdinandhenkel4567 You wouldn't make a space tug that is also a surface to orbit and orbit to surface transport. That's just stupid, that's like saying a container ship should be able to drive up onto land to deliver goods inland instead of transferring them to trucks and trains.
If anything, the falcon landing on planets is a convenience for the plot. But design-wise, it makes perfect sense to build a space-pusher for transferring cargo between planets or other orbiting bodies. Star wars is advanced enough they should have orbital elevators, making ground to space and vice versa a non-issue for cargo.
If memory serves, many planets do have orbital elevators, but under the odd name of 'gravity hooks.'
@@ReddwarfIV Uh, in reality you need just as much strength to push as to pull. KSP just has janky physics. If you can't push something at full thrust without robbing apart, you couldn't pull it either.
@@kauske No, no, you misunderstand. A pull tug can have its cargo in tension, rather than compression. That means you only need it to be able to take the acceleration forces.
You could tow a giant slinky with no issues - if it starts wobbling, it'll be pulled back into position behind the tug.
By comparison, a push tug's cargo must be rigid. If it was bendy, the force of the tug pushing would send the cargo off to one side or another.
Consider the _Venture Star_ from _Avatar._ All the cargo and passengers are towed behind the engine section by a long, stretchy tether truss. If you turned the engines around, that truss would just collapse in on itself.
Greetings Sacred Cow Shipyards, I found your channel a few weeks ago and have found your analysis on ships to be both fascinating and at times hilarious, though I wish to make a request. Seeing your to do list I saw the presence of the Space Battleship Yamato there, which I was very much hoping to see. But I'm curious, would you be willing to compare the ship design philosophies of the factions, mainly the Gamilas Empire, the White Comet Empire, and the Cosmo Navy/Cosmo Federation. I in my humble opinion think it would be a very interesting video, however it is of course up to you. I will hope you see this message, and that you have a great day, good luck to you dockmaster.
The Yamato's on the list.
The rest... I'll consider.
@@SacredCowShipyards that's all I could ask for, my thanks dockmaster, I've noticed very few channels that do sci-fi ship analysis bother with ships from SBY other than Yamato, so my thanks for at least considering it. Hope you have a good day
@@SacredCowShipyards also I hope you not mixing the old SB Yamato lore and the new reboot SB Yamato lore about the construction of the Space Battleship Yamato in the new reboot anime so you don’t start ranting about why using steel from a ship sunk in middle of Pacific some 200 years ago to make starship is a bad idea (in fact the recent SBY 2202 movie revealed that pior to the event of SBY 2199 the Japanese Government had done some very interesting things to the wreckage of Yamato in 2141and while unfortunately the entire movie is available outside Japan yet there was a 20+ minutes long video on Bandai Namco Art Channel show the first 20 minutes of the movie that also including the scene where they done thing to Yamato)
th-cam.com/video/ZLnTeb3V9mY/w-d-xo.html
Shit, the Death Star was SO thermally efficient it only had a single thermal exhaust port, and it would get clogged if they hit a stray vacuum-dessicated womp rat someone flushed out of their cargo hold in a last ditch attempt at pest control.
Wrong. The Death Star had many smaller exhaust ports, including a large main port.
Could be worse. The Tie fighter solar panels. Also I think the cooling is for the weapons not the main reactor or engines.
The TIE fighter is so obviusly trying to maximize radiator space and even looks like radiator panels that it boggles my mind that anyone ever proposed that solar panel nonsense. The fact that TIE's can fly in the dark makes it dead on arrival even if you were to ignore the inadaquacy of the wattage.
The pusher config for the YT series, despite being retconned (and despite the fact that other YT series dont have a usable mandable) actually makes more sense than pulling the load. It's the same reason we dont use rockets with the engines on top (pendulum rockets). Stability, specifically, having too much of it. It's much easier to turn a stack of things that you are pushing than rather than pulling. Comparing it to a train implies that it is a flexible connection. The only reason trains (and similarly trucks) tow is because they have wheels and tracks (or just straight up friction with the road) that makes them want to stay in line with their wheels and constrained to one line. You dont have that in the void. Imagine trying to turn your friction free space train (assuming star wars aircraft like turning) and your tail end still wants to go in the direction you were going rather than the new heading. You would get pulled around and spun out.
Now I am really interested in your take for an in universe explanaion for the s-foils. Apart form beaing aestetically pleasing of course
I mean, honestly, that's about all I can come up with.
A- and Y-Wings seem to make do without them, so someone was just going for Style Points one day.
I would love to hear your take on some of the Elite Dangerous ships.
You can equip your ships in that game to use advection cooling by putting heat sinks in the support slots(heat sinks, chaff launcher, point defense turret). When triggered it rapidly swaps out the coolant taking heat from the core to the radiators with fresh and ejects the tank full of now hot coolant. As you mentioned this is a limited use item before you need to replace the loads but useful for a fire fight using guns that get very hot or when your sneaking around in silent running(heat vents closed to minimize scanner detection)
Don't forget that some ships basically open the entire thermal core for maximum radiation when things get too hot.
Unless you're Gutamaya or Saud Kruger. In that case, hehe overheating ship look pretty
I was the Number 1 Attack Team leader for the Flying Squad aboard the Kitty Hawk from 2000-2002. Our NFTI Naval FireFighting Thermal Imager was a first generation coffee can sized thing. It was also my first experience with thermal imaging and not being used to it was creepy looking at people wearing glasses because you'd just see these 2 big black holes where their eyes should be.
I did have a little fun with the system finding creative uses for it, I also unwittingly seriously pissed off our embarked seal team, but that's another story lol.
This is my favorite f***ing episode so far.
Why thank you.
Ahh. Even more of this. Incredibly funny as expected. Otherwise, would you mind covering the Behemoth-Class Battlecruiser and Wraith Starfighter from StarCraft?
Or even better, cover the C(had)-14 Impaler Gauss Rifle that can shoot at low orbit space ships.
@@JohnTrustworthy The Chad-14 gauss rifle. Absolutely stealing that, I love it.
Didn't we see in Star Wars Solo that their was an escape pod in-between the prongs on the Falcon, so did they retcon a retcon.
All this being said, droplet cooling would be absolutely beautiful to see in a movie or TV show.
Maybe I missed it but I dont think you touched on the other issue, the bottom surface of the top wing and top surface of the bottom wing due to their relative angles will mostly be radiating into each other. You can't effectively move heat into an equally hot body so those surfaces are even more useless.
Next cover the Tie fighters solar panels, just how little power they could apply to these machines that must consume vast amounts of power even under ideal circumstances.
Yeah, I wore myself out on the math and completely forgot the view factor.
My headcanon is that what look to us like engine exhaust nozzles are actually mainly directional heat radiators- it just so happens that they're a convenient place to put the exhausts for the reaction engines too.
Why else would those "engines" be glowing *when the ships aren't moving*?
They still can't be efficient enough to get rid of enough heat to keep the ships from melting.
Same applies to Star Trek ships- those retconned "photon spill ports" on the warp nacelles should not glow when a ship isn't at warp, so they pretty much have to be heat radiators. Same same for their impulse drives that also glow brightly when the ship isn't moving.
That doesn't get us past the efficiency problem- when you're generating terawatts of directed energy (for thrust, weapons, shields etc.) you're still generating at least hundreds of megawatts of waste heat, and those "photon spill ports" should be glowing in the extreme UV, not the visible. The ships should still melt.
What's left, dumping heat into subspace or something?
I’m shocked you didn’t mention how the sequel x-wings literally split the turbines in half. Anyways, glory to the Dockmaster!!
That's already been cowed (cubed?) in a previous episode.
Even if the wings were radiators, they would be so damn hot from all that stuff they power that the ships would glow like little fireballs an probably cook the driver. In atmosphere they would literally be constantly igniting the air around them as they literally burned across the sky from the millions of degrees of heat
Here I am listening to radiator technology's use in a scifi fantasy while playing Skyrim as a fire mage. Sometimes life just plans things out for you.
Corellian Engineering Company corporate motto: _"It seemed like a cool idea at the time."_
As we have seen in the movie "Solo" The YT-1300 Light Freighter model's front pointy pieces originally actually house a forward escape pod. So in order to carry cargo as the diagram suggests, that would require crews operating YT-1300s to either order one without the Forward Escape Pod (a bad idea, if possible) or jettison it themselves (a worse idea). Furthermore, the YT-1300 has variations of cockpit mounting locations, available on request from the buyer. The possibilities are Port Mounted, Starboard Mounted (As the Falcon is) or Center mounted. If the front pointy bits are meant to hold cargo as the diagram suggests, how will the crew see out of the cockpit? This cannot be the case. The front pointy bits cannot be for holding cargo, as both the Forward Escape Pod AND Possibly Center Mounted Cockpit would not allow for it.
Now onto a tangent I forgot to say in the original X-Wing video
I believe the T-65 (and later T-70) were meant not as precise fighters, but as anti capital ship fighters. From my experience in the Disney Infinity Star Wars Campaign, The T-65 is excellent for attacking Imperial Class Destroyers and the occasional Lambda Class shuttle. However, when chasing and engaging TIEs at close range, the T-65 suffers, due to the aiming issue with Parallax. While having the fastest fire rate of any playable ship on account of it's four cannons, it's weakness is exposed when engaging TIEs and TIE Interceptors, as you will find no trouble in getting kills when using one due to the superior aiming (thanks to center mounted cannons). Furthermore, while it has decent speed and handling, TIEs have the advantage in speed for one reason. While the S-Foils are deployed, you fly at the regular speed. You can apply the brakes to fly very slowly, (good for very tight turns or attacking ground targets) or push the throttle and speed up. however, doing so closes the S-Foils, and therefore does not allow you to use the weapons when flying at top speed. TIEs do not have this issue, and can freely push the throttle while firing all the same. This takes us to the Millennium Falcon. Using it's center mounted turret, it has perhaps the greatest precision when firing out of the available ships to use. However, due to it's high precision, it makes it not the best choice when engaging Capital Ships. The T-65 can spray a large area of laserfire due to it's 4 cannons (perfect for large targets like Destroyers) while the Falcon remains the better ship to ship fighter, with it's high speed and precision weapons
Sorry for the wall of text. Another great vid, making use of real world dynamics and principles.
The pod was an after market add on for the ship, it has never been impled to be standard in any lore which it apeared in, the idea LONG preceeded the movie. Thus you wold never buy it if your using the mandibles for cargo handling. Likewise a center mounted cockpit option on a YT-1300 would have omitted the docking clamps in the mandibles right at their tips, but most of the rest of the wedge they sit on has important systems that can't be done away with.
I didn't even have to get to the end to know that this would be great and I added my like. I was not disappointed at all.
Awesome! I love your videos :D. Additionally, can you please do a video dissecting the tie line, in both design of the fighters and the training of their pilots some time in the future?
And with the advent of this video, you completely destroyed the lightsabers and most blasters in StarWars.
Once again I'm going to bring up mass effect ships because I think the lore behind the way they work is amazing and also because I like their methods of heat management.
When it comes to a mass effect ship, heat management is very important. Civilian ships feature large fragile radiator panels that are impossible to armor. Warships use Defused Radiator Arrays(DRAs). These consist of ceramic strips along the exterior hull that glow under infrared. As the stripe pattern depends on the internal layout of the ship, each ship has a unique pattern under infrared. On older ships, these stripes can glow red or white hot. Giving them the nickname "tiger stripes" or "War paint." DRAs are no as efficient as radiators, but if damaged, the ship only loses a fraction of its total radiation capacity. DRA allows a Warship to cruise with little issues. Operations within inner solar systems can cause some problems.
During combat ships generate titanic amounts of heat from weapons fire and maneuvering burns. This makes DRA less effective. During combat in high heat environments, ships deploy droplet heatsinks. Heat generated is captured in tanks of lithium or sodium then sprayed out the bow through spray nozzles as millions of micrometer droplets. These droplets are then captured at the stern and recycled back into the ship. Droplet heat sinks can manage heat 10-100 times faster than DRAs. When ships turn, the droplets peal off, resembling the wake of a surface ship.
Even with all this radiation and heat management, mass effect ships still produce more heat than can be radiated and this plays a major part in combat endurance. If a battle goes on to long the ship can begin to overheat. When that happens, the ship must retreat via FTL. Once they've escaped combat, they shut down all non-essential systems and activate radiation equipment. This process can take hours.
Combat endurance varies between ships and location. Battles in deep space can go on for quite some time, while battles near stars are frantic and often inconclusive as one side always retreats due to overheating
and then there's the SSV Normandy, both versions
@@TheMhalpern the heat sinks from Normandy's IES stealth system are a lot more advanced. They are capable of completely sinking all the ship's heat for hours or even days. And these were also droplet sinks. So combat endurance doesn't affect the Normandy
The "Wings" are called "S-Foils," aka "Stabilizer Foils." There may be some kind of cooling veins in the S-foils, but they would only be used for something small scale, like cooling for the computers on board. The main purpose of the "Wings" is for stabilization of the craft. Within the "wings" are EM field generators for creating and controlling etheric control surfaces. Or, in other words, the control flaps that interact with ionized particles.
Then ya dun hecked up again. Because that doesn't make any sense either. Copius amounts of 'fighter' sized ships in the same universe do not require any such interaction, and are somehow capable and often times better. It's almost as if the 'rule of cool' means the more maneuverable a space fighter is (in cannon), the less 'wings' it has. Less surface area for interacting with 'etheric control surfaces'. Not more. A-wings. The entire TIE series. All the goofy prequal not-actually-A-wings-but-gotta-be-close stuff.
If they can generate artificial gravity (and they can) then the idea of 'control flaps' for interacting with any kind of particle as a method of maneuver, is bunk as heck.
It's space magic. Wings are dumb.
That honestly sounds even worse... Literally any silly retcon someone makes only makes it worse, it was pure fantasy and never needed an explanation.
None of that made sense, TLDR a retarded reason that equals to useless
They are called S-foils because their actual terminology is Strike-foils, designed to increase the spread of coverage from the craft. Now canon and legends do things a little different but generally they serve the same purpose. In canon, while the lasers can fire while the foils are closed, all it does is decrease the spread of fire. In legends the original models could not fire when the foils were closed and some models were modified to allow them to fire while shut, although it was at the cost of reduced power and accuracy.
@@wolffothewolfgod8794 This explanation does make a bit of tactical sense if you don't spend too much time thinking about it.
Excellent vid, my guy :) in fact, all your critiques or in some small way helping with my sci-fi writing.
They could make the wingtips "gravity anchors" or some other technobabble that brakes/anchors the craft so it can swiftly stop without using thrusters, or activate only one of the four so it can turn around that one anchor. Idk.
That's actually a cool idea. Like a weird maneuvering thruster lol
Nonsense so far outside of the realm of "tech" would make more sense than the radiators.
Explains why they lock them in attack position at the start of dogfighting. Better geometry for nimble maneuvers rather than straight line acceleration
I would contend that the Death Star doesn't need heatsinks because it clearly uses advection/sacrificial mass- hence the thermal exhaust port
Which doesn't seem to be exhausting... anything.
@@SacredCowShipyards yeah, it's pretty magical
As you said, the more they try and solve real life problems in SW, the more they create
@@347Jimmy Just tell the story, and use the tech as a backdrop. So many other 'verses can do this.
@@SacredCowShipyards yeah, the tech should only come up where it plays into the story
Stuff like "these are the rules of how FTL works in this 'verse", which is all bullshit anyways, and allows you to create the kind of stories you want (things like the jumpgate network in B5 and the strategic value of ships with their own jump engines, it's useful worldbuilding)
But yeah, unless you're doing super hard sci-fi, the more handwaves the better
The one thing that has always bothered me about the X-Wing, and its close cousin, the Viper from BSG, is having the pilot pressed up at the back of each ship, inches away from the engines. I would list everything that's wrong with that configuration, but I simply don't have the time, other than to say, it's really stupid.
I'd love to see you delve into the ships of the Mass Effect universe. I'm so glad I found this channel as I have had many good laughs so far!
Okay, who here wants to see the AI on Sacred Cow Shipyard play a heavily modded game of Factorio, Space Engineers, or the mmo StarBase?
Because it would Science the F*** out it!
I just fall back on Suspension of Disbelief and Remember my wonder of seeing that scrolling intro for the first time in 1977 as a 11 year old with one working ear. And that eardrum had just been reconstructed the year before.
Acktually, the excess heat serves 2 purposes in the xwing: first and most important is keeping the survival rats in the cargo pod warm and ready for any impromptu picnics and/or luring in exiled jedi masters.
Any excess beyond that was used to keep the plot armor warm and flexable.
Rumor has it porkins was hoping to catch a mace windu, pokemon style, and packed a bit too heavily on the nerf nuggs.
WELL ACKTUALLY…
One of the tech manuals (I forgot which) shows that ships in SW have an “etheric rudder”. So the implication (and there is some fan theory on this somewhere) is that there is a luminiferous ether in that universe, I.e., a medium in space. This then accounts for why fighters maneuver as if in an atmosphere while in space. One could then argue for the context of this video that you have another potential source that can take heat from the ships. 🤷🏼♀️
… but yeah, the wings as radiators? No. It ain’t gonna work.
Why even bother having a radiator in space when there’s a medium? I mean besides for the engine guns won’t need radiators
And yet in universe, the more maneuverable a fighter is, the less 'wing' it has. Wh....what? So. Wings aren't for maneuvering either because the existence of them explains how UNmaneuverable a ship is. Not how maneuverable it is. The bigger the wings, the less it turns. EVERY. SINGLE. EXAMPLE in star wars bears this out. A-Wings. TIE's of all shapes and sizes. Anything in cannon said to be 'nimble' has less surface area, not more. So no. Wings are not a good explanation even if we accept 'etheric rudder'. An X-wing with just its engines strapped on and the 4 cannons bolted to it's side would, by the star wars logic, be better at turning than with it's wings.
"The X-Wing achieves it's remarkable maneuverability through a combination of three factors. Differential thrust from its four fusial Ion engines is the first. High-mass electromagnetic gryos in each of the four retro thrusters add a turning effect that helps to swing the ship in tight curves. Finally, precise bursts of retro-thrust fire forward through the turbine nozzles to add further control..."
-Complete Cross-Sections
All fighters and ships would likely use similar methods, so the wings aren't meant to affect maneuverability in the slightest.
For example, the Jedi Starfighter that Obi-Wan uses in Ep2 uses
"Electromagnetic nozzle elements direct and pinch the relativistic thrust stream"
The increase in mobility would be negligible for the engines positioned where they are. If the engines and cannons were swapped, it would improve their maneuverability and accuracy.
The x-foil position just wastes mechanical space, so put them permanently open and save the weight, while reinforcing the structure.
You've seen THAT design before. It actually functions.
Actually, the X-Wing needs to have its lasers on its wings to avoid hitting its propeller, and since the Original Trilogy takes place before WW1, the Synchronization Gear had not been invented yet.
"Entropy is nonconsensually f'ing you in an orifice" should be a T-shirt
According to the Essential Guide to Vehicles & Vessels, the X-Wing's wings exist and open to provide a larger field of fire for their powerful canons. In fact, the Cross-sections book, reveals that the wings of an X-Wing is where the ship houses its power couplings.
Only Clone Wars era ships are shown/mentioned to house heat sinks and radiators in their wing flaps.
The guns themselves on the X-Wing do have cooling systems, but it doesn't say what kind if coolent it uses or how it works. There is no mention beyond that of how the X-Wing expels heat. It is mentioned to be one of the most advanced Starfighters in history, but that obviously doesn't explain how the hell it deals with heat.
I think the concept of a space freighter where the drive section is pushing the cargo section might originate from the naval shipping industry. Cargo Ships. The engines, crew section, flying bridge, etc, are all at the back of the ship with the cargo in front. I have seen that method in a few other sci-fi shows, which also feature the cargo section being detachable so the freight could be dropped off at a space station and the drive vehicle then hops over to another freight section. And in just about every case, your looking at massive freight sections compared to the drive vehicle. In the case of Earth 2; the drive vehicle connected to the freight section, pushed it out of the station, set it on a coasting coarse to the destination, then detached and proceeded to the destination ahead of the freight section.
And in mediums where currents exist and maneuvering is complicated, that makes perfect sense.
This doesn't.
I’m in my bedroom eating cheese Fries thank you very much.
Stormtrooper; We're going to impound this X-wing. The radiators don't meet safety regs.
Obi-wan; Waves hand. Nah. It'll be fine.
ST; These aren't the radiators we're looking for. Go on through.
I remember hearing somethign about it more like being a cooling system that actually the part of the system that actually dumps the heat.
SO can you answer if having a wide and big cooling system for the heat to disperse over a long area with lots of piping on it's way to the heat dump or sandwitched between the heat sinc?
Because all I really remember from the loore is saying that it handls the heat and is for cooling, not how it is handled. Although, it might have said radiate too, but an and statement is kind of meaningless anyway, since negligetable heat is technically part of that and and is true if not effective.
If the nozles are great for dumping heat like in real rockets for example, then how more realistic is having more heat exchange and more matter to disperse the heat into?
I want to say that I am mostly satisfied. I mean, this needed to be addressed. Thanks. But your not done.
I thought as a kid that they had more to do with the interference between the cannons themselves, and how in the lore they tended to be a little... unstable.. to run. Their positions made no sense for radiator panels, but perfect sense for a short term heat dump until the nozzles can catch up, and for spacing them away from eachother and the Pilot's Tub.
X-Wing = Space F-14
Got a story I'm working on where the ships have massive radiators & capacitor banks for heat storage & release. (They have an option B that involves dumping all the heat in fold space the in universe ftl. But doing that is like setting off a massive I am over here flare for anyone paying attention.) So most vessels will spend the time to slow bleed their capacitors in real space before doing anything crazy.
(You also dont want to jump into your own capacitor bleed in fold space, has a similar effect to skimming a stars Corona sphere, except all the delicate ftl equipment isn't tucked under its usual meter thick ablative plating. Fast way in universe to get a visit from authorities is to fold dump your capacitors in a busy trade route. First their going to check everyone is ok. Then their going to own you for the next decade or two depending on what and who had to abort their jump because the equipment started melting & the route is closed for the next 1to 3 cycles.
I understand the Mass Effect 'verse does something similar.
13:48
Do you see any heat sinks on the Death Star?
...I do recall something about it having thermal exhaust ports, actually... I think they were important.
Amazing, on many levels.
Your performance in this video. The passion, the exuberance, the backhanded humor, the math and attention to detail, the myriad of ways you find to verbally describe the subject and those that partake in such fallacy, and in detail describe exactly how they will be reamed again and again in the most descriptive way to boot is one of the most outstanding rants I've heard since the last Razorfist video I watched. He took on the koolaid-haired warriors bringing 'equity' to BattleMech after being banned from some forums they took over. This retconning into oblivion, this overthinking on soy has ruined so many good things. It even seriously affects my realm of Doom Metal now. The Ackshuully's (sic)are out there. They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with... AH! You know the drill. And I suppose the air conditioners on the Eagle 5 in Spaceballs actually were dissipating 'heat' according to these people as well? {snort}
But at least now you have new ammunition to deal with them.
@@SacredCowShipyards Damn right, thanks! And I've always been intrigued by Thermodynamics. I never had any hard study of them, just practical use in things like heating and cooling my home efficiently while my polar opposite hot-blooded Italian wife likes to fling open windows in winter and crank AC in the summer. Or get that proper 'yes' to a Martini or keep my tube amps from melting down. But I can always learn more, and I have! Thanks!
Heat pipes conduct, but that's not how they move heat. The mechanism is a low pressure allows a working fluid (water) to boil in a vacuum near the heat, and condense in a vacuum near the cold. Gravity or capillary wicking pulls the fluid back to the hot side to repeat the process; the phase change carries immense amounts of heat around, as is typical.
If I remember correctly, heat pipes for computers use a phase-change fluid to carry away heat instead of conduction. The fluid then moves back to the heat source via capillary action.
Some other complaints I've read about thermal management have been how some radiators get in the way of other radiators. But, I read an article earlier this year suggesting researchers have discovered a way to make a material radiate in a specific direction. If true, that could be game-changing for spacecraft design.
Was looking for this. Heap pipes as an example for heat conduction is questionable at best.
I would put them closer to Convection since they transport heat by moving (circulating) matter (fluid & gas).
TBH people keep on making the whole 'death star weakness' joke and forget that it's a thermal exhaust port. Is it far too small to be effective at expelling heat? Yes, but it's also understandable that if it were damaged then the hypermatter reactor wouldn't be able to properly manage it's heat output and would tear itself apart. It's like stuffing a car's exhaust.
I was thinking about the avduction sacrificial idea, and it occured to me that would have actually looked pretty cool.
Xwings spiraling through dogfights trailing basically afterburner/wing plumes corkscrewing all over the place. Taking the waste heat and transferring it to an onboard gas and then venting it.
Very anime.
The wings opening could be to expose the ports to vent it more efficiently.
I feel like the Salvare (from another life) needs a little bit of criticism. Along with the technology progression, because I think those gravity plates are a jump ahead of the FTL technology on the tech tree but apparently they had gravity panels before they had an FTL ship. Never mind that their impulse engines apparently can propel a ship from Jupiter to earth in under a day but they need to slingshot around stars so close they’re scraping stellar atmosphere. I’m also peeved that they call scraping seller atmosphere an orbit. At least they acted like gravity still affected it even in Warp.
5.67e-8 may sound small but powering temperature by 4 is no joke. Actually try the numbers with some common numbers like 273 kelvin (around water freezing point) 373 Kelvin around water boiling point and you'll soon see the wattage output is definitely significant.
Radiation heat loss is why foil blankets exist. If the issue was so small they wouldn't exist.
For example at 300 kelvin aka around room temperature the emissions for a perfect emitter is about 460 watts per square meter, or 18.4 kW for 40 square meters, equivilent to about 18 smallish industrial cutting lasers. This is because 300^4 equals 8.1e9, a much bigger number than 5.6e-8. The power radiation will increase 32 fold if you double the kelvins.
Edit: On how to achieve such temperatures in space. Well you have a bunch of laser cannons, space engines and power supply. Im sure you can heat up stuff to the required temperature quite easily.
t. a mechanical engineer.
I wanted to respond sooner but I suspected this video was gonna trigger the mechanical nerd in me so i put off watching it until I wasn't as busy.
hmm.. feels like making a weapon system that is powered by waste heat would be a good fix to the whole problem... assuming magical space tech is involved...
that also would neatly translate to a video game having some kind of charging ultimate attack type thingy... where exceding safe paramaters for the heat storage could result in damage... so that could be a neat litle detail to work in
My personal headcannon for the whole 'x-foils in attack position' thing is 3 parts.
1) the weapons used generate strong magnetic fields, and do not tolerate other adjacent magnetic fields - the weapons need to be physically distanced from each other to ever fire.
2) the power lines used to power the weapons are carrying non-trivial currents. Enough that if you don't open the wings to separate the power lines, simultaneously firing them would tear the power lines out of your wings.
3) It looks cool.
I remember somewhere that it's stated that the cannon are placed on the tips of the X-wing because of when they fire they put out a bunch of waste heat cause they are relatively heavy weapons for a fighter.
So putting them out on the tips was a way to handle the amount of extra heat they put out using the S-foils when extended as heat sinks allowing the cooling system to better handle the heat.
Language please, there's no "degree Kelvin", it's Kelvin, period.
Thanks for the vid.
Children of a dead earth is an underrated game, you'll get your radiator fix on that! The hotter the radiators the more heat you can eject, but the less efficient the powerplant is. Also the X Wing's "radiators" are FACING EACH OTHER.
The cargo pods for the YT1300 were made up, I'd guess, in part, because the ship is a freighter...with a shockingly small amount of cargo volume. As a pusher tug, it's not too bad.
I was going to say the same thing. Its internal volume is shockingly low for a dedicated freighter.
The original Foundation books and The Culture books actually address the heat problem. Basically, it amounts to magically radiating the heat into hyperspace/subspace/another dimension. The heat problem is so severe, it actually renders even The Expanse fusion ships into the realm of unphysical Sci-fi drives that defy physics. Those are just sneakier about it than most Sci-fi. (See Scott Manley's video on this.)