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Never been more hyped for heat regulation

I really liked that comment about deploying radiators as an indicator of surrender. It’s like a futuristic reversal of age of sail ships striking colors

My single biggest pet peeve in so so many IP's, franchises, shows, movies, whatever, is people instafreezing when exposed to space. You're totally right that it's down to pure ignorance and failure to conduct a 5 second google as research.

i've always thought a cool potential explanation for why many sci fis starships appear to always be under thrust is that they actually forcefully radiate their waste heat out what look to us like rocket cones, but aren't

Glad you included elite dangerous in here as heat management is a somewhat significant part of the gameplay, and the radiators on ships are incorporated really well into the designs.

Radiators are definitely an underrated design feature; I definitely have them on pretty much every ship in my stories in the form of panels and strips along with internal emission sinks for stealth and protecting the obviously vulnerable radiators during transit or combat!

Absolutely correct! Heat management should be more than an afterthought. Especially for stealth ships, as infrared light gives away the ship in the dark background.

In the video game called The Outer Worlds, there is a quest called "Happiness Is A Warm Spaceship", where the player is tasked with retrieving radiator parts for an old colony ship turned space port called the Groundbreaker. After you find the parts, you then have to go into the Engineering shaft to cycle the droplet pumps to cool the radiator system that is filling the ship interior with super-heated air. ;)

It can also play a role in ship detection If thermal detection is a big thing a ship might try to radiate heat into pellets it can drop all at once to remain stealthy for a while It has the disadvantage of giving stealth ships a fixed limited time in stealth, but that adds tension It can also be a distraction or work as a flare to fool thermal sighted weapons, for example A stealth ship has run out of heat pellets and has to engage its cruising radiators and is spotted, it gets locked on by thermal torpedoes and drops its pellets last second, the torpedoes barely miss and the stealth ship manages to run away

Got to love radiators, they're both so underrated and underappreciated that I now include them on all spaceships I build in games, not only do they make the ships feel more realistic, they also look magnificent with their orange glow breaking the shadows!

In space engineers, i make wings out of heat vent blocks to try to emulate radiators, i find it neat that when i shoot a railgun it lights up pretty colors

They're often very subtle, but many Gundam warships, particularly in the Universal Century, have radiators on the underside of their ships. The Federation Magellan and Salamis class have radiators that are flush with the hull, and ships on both sides in the Char's Counterattack movie have highly visible radiator panels sticking out from the ventral hull, typically near the engine blocks.

I kind of want to see a sort of siege warfare space battle now, where several small ships with weapons too weak to penetrate the defenses of a larger ship, but strong enough to damage the vulnerable radiators, force the larger warship to retract her radiators. Then they just...force the larger ship to keep the radiators retracted for fear of having them destroyed until the larger ship surrenders despite having no threat to its superstructure at all.

Having heat management factored in a space battle would definitely make it interesting. You can’t just have your spaceguns to continuously shoot. It’ll generate heat faster than the rate of what the radiator able to remove. And talking about warframe, this is why we have that heat bar in railjack weapon. Having radiators could also be one of the justification why you have a wing-like structure in your spaceship. The other is to have maneuver thrusters on the wingtips.

The long awaited Radiator Video!

I love it how Spacedock more and more becomes a channel dedicated to explain how to write proper hard scifi.

The UNSC has a really cool solution to heat management: The ENTIRE hull is both a heatsink and a radiator. They pump heat directly into the meters-thick Titanium-A armor plating. As it's a *LOT* of mass, as well as the entire exterior surface area of the ship, it works amazingly well.

Excellent. As a battletech/mechwarrior player Heat Sinks are drilled into my thinking and that extends to ships. It’s an easy reality win in my eyes to add

Currently taking Engineering Thermodynamics 1, and I have to say, you can prove with basic arithmetic that this is one of the hottest Spacedock videos of all time.

The concept of using your coolant and dumping it overboard is something we use IRL. The rocket fuel or oxidizer(not sure which) flows round tubes in the nozzles and cool them before passing into the combustion chamber.

In a game like Elite Dangerous where heat is an actual game mechanic, I love how their ship design deals with it. Most ships when dealing with a lot of heat will expose their radiators more. Also just charging all the heat into a heat sink and chucking it overboard is just hilarious to me.

I still like the idea of using open cycle heating to super heat a projectile and then make it the enemies problem via ballistic transfer.

I've always thought that adding accurate radiators would make for MORE exciting sci fi space battles instead of less. Like, make it a plot point that your ships all have these giant weak spots that can be retracted behind armored doors in combat, but that limits the time you can fight drastically, so you have tense moments where the crew is weighing keeping their radiators closed but overheating all their systems or opening their radiators early and exposing them to enemy fire. Plus different types of ships would have different sizes of heat sink, so you would end up with interesting lopsided battles where some ships just try to outlast their opponents because they know they have the sink capacity to keep fighting longer than their opponents. Its a shame that so few ips actually have interesting radiators or heat systems in general.

The venture stars descending is my favourite scene in avatar. Such a lovely vessel In my setting, radiators will play a key role in showing the struggle of spaceflight, the limitations of heatsinks, and radiators themselves, with each ships using different types. Heat management can add so much to hard scifi, so i will utilize it

Thanks for bringing more public light to this! Pretty much only project rho nerds who used to dwell on obscure IRC's really lament the lack of radiators, to the point where 2001 was redesigned to exclude radiators because not one laymen would expect it to have "fins"

Open-cycle cooling (such as the "nuclear lightbulb" realistic(-ish) theoretical design) is my headcanon for why The Expanse doesn't bother with radiators on their ships. Especially since they don't JUST use the fusion plasma for their thrust, they run it through a bunch of water to increase the momentum imparted. That water is a perfect place to dump the heat from the interior of the ship as well. (Especially if you use handwavey physics-inspired designs rather than 100%-hard sci-fi numbers.)

One nice thing is that you can pre heat your reaction mass to get rid of heat. Real life rockets does this to cool the rocket engines. And at high trust you can cool better as you use more reaction mass. Also open cool your heavy laser cannons for the muzzle flash effect.

One of the coolest ideas I've seen is using Radiators as, essentially, either chaff, or a sensor decoy, by ejecting them during/before combat to make precise reading of the battlefield more difficult: they could even be used offensively, by making it more difficult to tell when missiles are being launched by basically showering an entire area with radiators made hot enough to melt. As long as the ship can either cool down using more conventional methods (like landing somewhere,) or at least transfer the crew out of the ship so the slower cooling isn't lethal, there isn't even much risk.

A book I read a long time ago ( I don't remember its name) where it was about a mission to venus (near future). In it, they actually addressed this with a clever open cycle heatsink that doubled as a balast system on a smaller parasite craft. It used solid lead to absorb the heat and then it dumped the molten lead. This also served a plot point as it limited the time the craft could spend on the surface and continually changed how it maneuvered. Just a cool concept in my opinion.

One of the best radiator ideas is having an open cycle loop for your BFG, huge laser shot followed by jetting a cloud of glowing plasma/gas around the ship, like a cannon with muzzle suppressor vanes and recoil kicking up dust.

I remember when Renegade Legion Leviathon came out and some people stated that the capital ships looked wrong because of the huge radiators.

I remember reading years ago, in one of Clarke's supplemental books, that the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey was supposed to have radiators attached to the drive assembly at the rear. But the producers thought they may be confused for wings by the viewers, so Discovery had its wings clipped.

Sacrificial heat sinks can be very useful for a combat ship since they can also act as a decoy given that they should temporarily have a significantly higher thermal signature than your ship as long as you don't have the engines pointed at whatever you want to confuse

Knowing how much he loves them, I bet hoojiwana had fun saying "radiators radiating into other radiators"

I'm reminded of a quote I saw on the Atomic Rockets page: "Amateurs discuss rockets, professionals discuss heat management." Thank you for raising this topic; it's so important for spacecraft design but so often missing in fiction.

At 5:26 you mention the coolant boiling to be a problem. Most coolant+panel radiators nowadays like the ones you mention for the ISS use heat pipes, in which the coolant boiling is essential to the proper functioning of the radiator!

Love seeing Torchship representation on this channel. Actually, there's a lot of cool obscure or semi-obscure stuff this episode highlights, which is cool!

The ships for my setting have HUUUGE radiator sails that fold out pretty much whenever the ships aren't in combat or in FTL. I purposely made them connect to the main hull using "masts" to create a sailing ship vibe. In combat though, I just use elite-dangerous esque ejectable heat-sinks. It does put a limit on time in combat though, at least if you don't want mass drivers poking holes in your "Sails"

I like how space in sci-fi slowly shifts from a "here be dragons" superficial fairytale to an actual vision of a place where people might one day live and work. This channel is a perfect example of that.

FINALLY! The most important part of all the equipment on any starship or space station! Edit: Also, phase shifting energy batteries(phase shifting heatsinks) for convenient plot lengths of time to justify space combat duration!

I like a combination of water vapor soft CNT inflatable bags and the ability to selectively pop those bags to offload heat. It doubles as good protection against energy weapons because you can release a bunch of cold vapor as an ice cloud to diffuse particles of, say a maser. Also you're carrying a bunch of water, it's good for drinking im told.

Heat is waste. One of the most important things you can do is figure out a way to get the heat into your exhaust. I'm not saying radiators aren't important. But a good way to illustrate the difference between an efficient design and an inefficient design is adding lots of radiators.

Never thought I'd be so into heat radiation. Really like the direction this channel has taken lately. Love the real world science being applied to hard sci-fi.

This is actually what I've been thinking all along. Wings on an X-wing or "solar panels" on TIE fighters are actually heatsinks. That can also explain why laser cannons are usually mounted on the tip of the wing. Actually the design of TIE fighters are actually quite genius. The panels can radiate heat and protect the cockpit at the same time. And since heatsinks can be easily made redundant, one or two stray shots will not make the whole ship inoperable.

There are a number of sci fi stories that incorporate this concept. Some even deal with issues where a ship can't vent heat out to space or the thermal sensors on a pursuing ship will find them. And what goes on inside the ship while this is happening.

Warframe AND Torchship rep? I expected the latter, but not the former; I’ve been looking forward to this video.

I looove the look of the plasma wings. Such an aggressive, yet elegant looking radiator design.

One additional possibility is to use the heat to improve the energy of propellant from thrusters. By exciting the particles of the propellant, making them leave the exhaust port faster.

I love radiators (and heat management systems in general) but I also like not adding them when I want to show the technological gulf between two spacecraft in the same setting, by showing the ones that do have them meeting the ones to whom the laws of physics are seemingly more optional, and then having characters react accordingly

I was thinking about the stealth system on ME's Normandy - what if you do the opposite. Instead of hiding the heat, output as much as possible, and use it to hide something behind you. Make your little ship (maybe not that little) a big hot angry spot on the enemy heat sensors. Just like radiators, heat itself can be used in interesting ways.

Also makes stealth ships more interesting because to effectively go stealthed you need to stop radiating heat. Which means that you immediately have a downside to otherwise possibly overpowered stealth ships. You can only remain stealthed as long as your crew is not getting cooked to death.

The relationship between radiators and heatsinks feels like it could create a good submarine-esque mood in a story

Glad you mentioned Wlite Dangerous! I love their heat sinks and radiators.

It's nice to see Children of a Dead Earth get a cameo. I love that game, warts and all, and would love to see you guys feature it in a review or Let's Play.

There’s something about the minor but still very important designs of a vehicle in media, fiction and games are my favourite. Vehicle suspension is kinda like my turn on, I love studying, watching, absorbing every detail of a vehicle’s suspension

We also use thermal blankets to manage heat. Satellites will have either reflective or absorbing blankets depending on how heat needs to be managed.

So it would be difficult to build an effective space warship just because of the heat problem, because all the cool stuff you can hit people with generates a lot of heat, especially beam weapons, I guess^^

Dont forget phase change radiators. Depending on the medium, you can dump fantastic amounts of energy into relatively small spaces. You just have to develop the correct gradient to make it work right Also, a nice singularity would be ideal to just pump energy into it over and over and over. Over. However, I'm sure you pump enough energy into a singularity. It's going to eventually grow and create a gravitational field that is uncontrollable.

Ahhhhh! Thank you so much. I love when high tech sci fi uses functional concepts in ship design. The amount of giant craft with giant rear engines and no reverse thrust drives me crazy.

There is also a whimsical concept of forcefields that double as a radiators.

I had an idea for a mass driver weapon for space battleships where the ammunition would be used as a heatsink, thus allowing you to fire long bursts which would be good for point defence weaponry. I wasn't sure exactly how you'd achieve this possibly by having the ammunition feed through the coolant outflow.

I don't know if it's just me, but I LOVE the way radiators look on realistic spacecraft. I know this video was purely about the practical uses, but I think radiators also give you a good excuse to add wide wing-like shapes to your design without running into the "Planes in space" accusation.

Ever since I first watched this video, I've been adding radiators to all my ship designs for my own setting. I have to say, playing with with they can actually look like has been really fun, and it's satisfying to know that not only am I making a lot of my ships look better, I'm also making them more realistic.

A while back I had an idea about metal cloth radiators, with thicker tubes containing the coolant woven into it. Suspended from masts for a very sail-like, yet still plausible spaceships.

I feel like it would also be interesting to bring up cooling systems that use the fuel to cool the engines. Plenty (most?) of modern rockets do this to keep the engines from melting from the massive thermal load, using the cryogenic fuel/oxidizer to cool and then getting rid of the heat by firing the fuel out the back.

Designing the radiator flaps on spacecraft is always a good part of the process, I find. Great for if you have a large unused area where nothing else makes sense. Then again, I love all the things I can do maths around, so maybe that's just me.

for my universe I didn't wanted radiators but I did wanted to take heat management into account, so the way it works is that heat is transformed back into energy and stored in the ship battery, and if the battery is full (notably during battle, since shields also pump energy into the battery when shot at) there are exhaust systems that are basically just very energy-vore lights on the hull to quickly dumps energy out of the battery. most ships can have a few tiny exhausts simply hided in random spots, but ships that need extremely reliable emergency systems (experimental weapons for instance) or that have tiny battery capacity have larger deployable exhausts, and if they start working you know something probably went wrong.

Wait so I could put glowing wings of plasma on my ships and it's still hard sci-fi? Fuck yeah.

Hey, @Spacedock, you have any idea how or if mirrors can be used in space battles, as camouflage or some anti-laser defense armor ?

These kinds of videos are why I love this channel. Y'all do the hardest of hard sci-fi analysis

the droplet system is pretty cool idea, which reminded me of when i was reading about spray pond cooling systems used for some early soviet nuclear reactor facilities. so i can easily see how the concept would work for space

In Star Trek, they have something called intercoolers, which sound like a more advance Sunpower Free-Piston Stirling Cryocoolers, along with plasma vents.

ok the idea of a combat situation based around dodgeing and deflecting most shots coming to an end when one side deploies their radiators becauae they cant be armored sounds like great visual design!

That was one thing I remembered from Mass Effect, the Normandy’s stealth mode would sink heat into the hull instead of trying to radiate it out, with the caveat of course that there’s a crew-cooking time limit on how long you can do this. The scifi Tantalus drive allowed for non-radiative thrust somehow as well.

As someone looking to write my own fictional sci-fi universe, I love these videos that look into the potential designs of futuristic space craft. Obviously, with Sci-fi almost anything can be explained away as some future science-y stuff, but there are still basic components and issues we know that need to be solved!

I love how this video handles the topic. Putting forth a great concept that should be implemented more without presenting it as mandatory, simply a better solution that can be used in many cool and unique ways.

Nice 'High Frontier' board game nod. Need to get that back to the table again soon.

Tabletop Battletech has a heat/cooling mechanic that's critical to gameplay.

The need to radiate heat was a thing a few times in the old Star Wars EU novels. There was one system that mined a planet that orbited quite close to its sun, so getting rid of excess heat was a challenge. For visiting ships, there were special shield ships to chaperone them in from out-system to the inner planets.

As a huge Sci-Fi fan, I love this channel and its attention to detail. I have watched so many videos to make sure the Sci-Fi game we are creating adheres to as many principles (while staying fun and engaging!). Thanks again for making this great content.

Love it. Been hearing you go on about radiators for ages, glad to finally see a video dedicated to them.

The Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey was supposed to have radiators and had them in Clarke's novel, but Stanley Kubrick nixed them because he was worried the audience would think they were fins. About open cycle cooling, I believe the canceled X-20 Dynasor spaceplane was designed to carry water which would be vented through the metal heat shield scales during the hottest part of reentry to shed the heat load.

The idea of using open-cycle radiators for dumping large amounts of heat quickly is particularly interesting, from a story and world-building perspective. Since this uses up coolant and thus requires frequent refueling, it would only be intended for infrequent use. But guess what else is infrequent? Short, intense space battles! So a spaceship could use its closed-cycle radiators for normal operations, and then when in a battle, it could turn them off to avoid thermal detection, instead storing the heat in a disposable liquid. If detected, the ship could dump the superheated liquid overboard as a form of extra propulsion and perhaps defense (to confuse heat-seeking torpedoes). My point is that including radiators insteod of ignoring them can actually enhance the storytelling possibilities. Radiators can lead to interesting decisions and dilemmas, as mentioned in this video (larger radiators present more of a target to enemy weapons, but are necessary for more powerful weapon systems).

Love this type of content! Some realism in our science fiction is great. Really good job on the video explaining the concept!

I was happy to see ED's heatsink ejection referenced. Such a fun game that I really need to get back into (haven't played in years). I remember loving the heat mechanics tho, I tried making a stealth ship using an eagle with no shields and just tougher hull so I could stay in silent running for longer. It kinda worked in some ways, but mostly was just a fun new way to play lol. I had more than 1 heatsink launcher on that one. It was always cool how the windshield would stay icy for a long time on that ship!

In case anyone is wondering, the reason why humans freeze when ejected into space is because of the latent heat of vaporization of water. Liquid water takes 4.2 joules of energy to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius, or 1 Kelvin. To raise it from 0 degrees liquid water to 100 degrees liquid water takes 418 joules. To vaporize (turn from liquid to gas,) 1 gram of water takes 2257 joules of energy. 5 times as much as raising it from "ice cold" liquid water to "boiling hot" liquid water. Water is notable both because of how much the energies of vaporization are, AND because water is unusually high thermal mass. For comparison, the specific heat of fats are around 0.45 joules per gram per degree Celsius. A tiny bit more than 1/10th that of water. Your body is more water than everything else combined, and you are not air tight much less water tight. When exposed to the vacuum of space, the water starts vaporizing, and takes with it the energy requires to overcome the water's hydrogen bonds; it literally boils away as water vapor flies off into space until there's so little energy in what remains that it freezes (no longer has the energy to overcome the solid matter state of the strong hydrogen bonds.) If all of the water inside you freezes ..... you're frozen. It IS convection in the standard models, since it's vapor taking away the heat. Once you're frozen, any solar energy hitting your frozen corpse will sublimate away (go directly from frozen water into water vapor,) until you are a desiccated anhydrous husk of a human.

One thing I learned from DP9 is how much of a vulnerability large/hot radiators (or insufficiently insulated heat sinks) can be. Space warfare depends very heavily on being able to precisely pinpoint your enemy's location and vector while making your own as hard to pin down as possible. This makes your thermal profile something an enemy can use against you. Properly regulating heat during battle would be an intricate dance, and knowing an enemy ship's sensor array would help you know when you can vent a little hotter and when you really do need to rein it in.

Really wanted to add cooling systems to my own ships. It can add more to a story. Didn't find a lot of ways we can do it rapidly with the ISS being the example I think I went with for at least sublight engines and stuff. Things get more complex when you add weapons, shields (at least plasma based), and a functioning warp drive. Glad to know of other methods in the works. Haven't thought about using pellets for example to spray heat away from the ships.

You could put a radiator station at strategic points like shipping hubs or FTL lane intersections. Think a large ring or tube-like space station that sprays coolant at your ship.

I watch Townsends religiously. By far one of the best channels i've watched over a long amount of time. The blacksmithing ones are really nice but its the 1700s cooking videos I truly cherish

In a story I wrote, the ship used supercooled hydrogen in multiple tanks for fuel. Fuel was circulated through the skin to absorb heat from lasers and to preheat for drives. This is effectively an internal heat sink of limited duration; bigger ships didn't necessary last longer even with bigger tanks because they generated proportionally more heat. In ordinary operation it extended radiators in excess of operational needs in order to dump heat from the internal fuel tanks. Lots of minor radiators as well.

I think it’d be cool to see a system where they “eject” heat via coolant pods/canisters/shells. They’d be filled with a coolant of some type and after it’s coolant has gotten to hot, it just ejects it, in a similar manner to any kind of magazine fed weapon ejecting a shell casing. Could look cool and be another thing to be easily “reloaded” in a sort of magazine type thing

Love Jimmy Cameron's designs, the man knows what he's doing and he really thought it out.

Fun trick: Retractable redundant radiators. Have 2 or 3 "sets" of radiators, but only one set in use at any given time, and the others retracted into armoured sections of the ship. If one set of radiators gets damaged, retract them and extend a different set. This lets you dodge the "radiators radiating into other radiators" problem while also giving the benefit of redundancy and *some* of the benefits of retractability

Radiators have a lot of potential in sci-fi stories, for example, imagine this is a ship designed for stealth, so you really dont want yo be emitting thermal radiation around, so you could have a system where you ship "stores" thermal radiation internally and dump after a certain thermal capacity is reached, so imagine if you have this mechanism which only works for limited amounts of time and the longer it goes, the more dangerous it is for the ship, maybe the crew have to deal with increased internal climate or the ship my just explode if it overheats too much. It could be a nice narrative device to create tension in the story.

Ah heatsinks and heat management. Every Battletech players favorite hobby.

In my setting magic and technology are used in tandem. Thus, most radiators on ships use cryomancy to effectively pump heat from cold objects to hot ones, making them radiate away huge amounts of energy. Cryomancy doesn't just cool something down, it makes the heat move away from the target of the spell. Ship generates heat -> cryomancy moves this heat to the radiators and doesn't let it come back to the hull -> heat is radiated away. This exact method can be used to make heatsinks with HUGE capacity. Like straight up a tungsten block which can be pumped with heat until it glows white. Moreover, there are ways to reuse the heat - cryomancy has a lot of uses in this field.

One of the highest performance cooling solutions is "boil off" it is an open loop water based system most famously used in ultra high performance piston aircraft racing such as the Reno Air Race. The idea is super simple instead of cooling the water directly with a radiator, you remove the radiator and let it cycle between a coolant tank and the engine once the water is forced to undergo a phase change to steam you let it escape. By allowing the phase change to happen, the water rejects 5 to 7 times the heat.

I've waited so long for this vid... and the wait was worth it !