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.

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

Pulls out lawn chair: “Dis Gon be Gud.”

"Look at the Death Star! Do you see any heat sinks on that thing?" Well, it does have a small thermal exhaust port... ^_~

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...

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]

"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.

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

You know having going radiators on the ships could actually make them look cooler. Great video as usual!

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.

Star Wars has a Ather so physics in space is the same as physics in an atmosphere.

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.

7:37 rocket engines are actually surprisingly efficient at removing heat that way. Just dump it all together with the exhaust.

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?

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.)

The wings are there to put the guns as far away from the targetting system as possible, it improves accuracy..... the designer said. ;-)

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.

You should look at the single most grounded and realistic mech design ever made Gurren Lagaan and it various other configurations

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."

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.

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 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.

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.

His Rage is contagious and hilarious. We need him reviewing old 1920s serial Buck Rodgeres ships and The Batwing.

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.

"Yesss, yessss, let the heat ...flow through you..."

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.

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! :)

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.

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.

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.

Ok, it's truly scary when I was actually eating Cheetos when the dockmaster said "eating your Cheetos". Great video.

That’s great and all, but when are you gonna start talking about Star Citizen? Your sarcasm is very much needed there

I’m shocked you didn’t mention how the sequel x-wings literally split the turbines in half. Anyways, glory to the Dockmaster!!

"Entropy is nonconsensually f'ing you in an orifice" should be a T-shirt

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.)

All this being said, droplet cooling would be absolutely beautiful to see in a movie or TV show.

Now I am really interested in your take for an in universe explanaion for the s-foils. Apart form beaing aestetically pleasing of course

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).

Corellian Engineering Company corporate motto: _"It seemed like a cool idea at the time."_

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.

Could be worse. The Tie fighter solar panels. Also I think the cooling is for the weapons not the main reactor or engines.

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.

I’m in my bedroom eating cheese Fries thank you very much.

Ahh. Even more of this. Incredibly funny as expected. Otherwise, would you mind covering the Behemoth-Class Battlecruiser and Wraith Starfighter from StarCraft?

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.

The wings are there to make it look bigger and more scary

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

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)

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?

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.

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

Love your videos XD. When I want a smile I come here because you can always make me laugh

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?

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.

Here's a fun retort to anyone who says Star Wars tech is advanced. In lore, technological advances happen ridiculously slow, like they take thousands of years to occur at the most optimistic, and actually degrade at the most realistic. Blaster tech for example has not changed or become more advanced since the old republic era, and has only marginally grown cheaper/more powerful. And then take a look at how the handle firearms. While blasters are cool, it is literally canon that blaster tech has stunted all other forms of ranged tech advances due to blasters being discovered way earlier than what is reasonable. This means that bullets, which can travel farther, faster, can deliver a far greater variety of payloads, and can't be deflected by a lightsaber like a ping pong ball are only used by species so technologically behind that they only recently discovered fire. If any force with actually good weapons came into the Star Wars universe, they'd wipe the floor with all of the factions.

And with the advent of this video, you completely destroyed the lightsabers and most blasters in StarWars.

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.

Excellent vid, my guy :) in fact, all your critiques or in some small way helping with my sci-fi writing.

I still maintain that letting Curtis Saxton write then-canonical reference books was one of the worst mistakes made by LFL pre-Disney.

Another issue of the X-wing S-foils being radiators: 50% of their surface area is looking at each other, thus radiating heat at each other and drastically reducing efficiency.

I can’t wait til the dock master gets around to Serenity

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 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.

Just had the thought that the X Wing is in fact preadolescent B5 Starfury with the engines and guns shifting place during "puberty", the nose getting reabsorbed and the wings bulking up. Gods, what a horrible stream of consciousness that was. o_O

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.

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.

When it all boils down, the only thing that matters is the size of your thermal exhaust port!

--> Introduces reality details to space magic universe: Breaks universe. YES!!! I am totally laughing myself to tears, laughed my @ss off along the way, get the glue!!

I’m a Star Wars fan but I absolutely hate people who will go outa their way to justify the stupid designs in Star Wars with “lore” or bs pseudo science

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.

13:49 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.

Also, about everything about the YT1300: No, the escape pod in the front was not an escape pod. That was the worst part of Solo. No, those cargo containers do not go in front of a YT1300. Those are the "train" cars from Solo. Those don't go into space. That's not how trains work in any universe.

everything is a radiator if you run your engine hot enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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}

I work on boilers and chillers for a day job. I need that entropy game as a shirt. That is so true. I'm pumping 350 degree F water with 200 psi N so it doesn't boil in my pipes over a 10 sq blocks of a college. Entropy is nothing but bad touching to me. Lol

This is the irregularily scheduled regular reminder that, in the Star Wars universe, space isn't a hard vacuum.

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.

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

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.

All they had to do was say the wings were meant to help the x-wing maneuver in atmosphere.

I like how Mass Effect did heat radiation on warships. Was well thought out.

This is my favorite f***ing episode so far.

To everyone saying that SW materials might be able to withstand high temps, no matter how hot they can get, we know they are not at a temperature that makes them glow red-hot, which means they are stuck with terrible efficiency. A glowing X wing would be pretty cool to see

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.

There are people who talk about human operated, human shaped mechs as ridiculously complex, inefficient, and unnecessary from an engineering and design standpoint. Then there are those who built the Kuratas and MegaBots, and then went and fought each other because mechs are cool. We even have Prosthesis Mech Racing. It doesn't matter how stupid an idea is, as long as someone thinks it's cool enough to build it. There only needs to be one justification to build anything in a Universe with enough resources to build a Death Star: "I thought it would look cool."

Didn't know about the flying hamburger thing. I've always assumed the Millennium Falcon was just a conventional flying saucer with a bunch of WW2-esque bomber stuff glued onto it.

Back of the envelope time: Earth tungsten melts around 3700 K, so if we assume the wings are made of high-temp space steel and can run at up to 3000K in prolonged engagements with a surface area of 40 m^2, then they can manage a sustained 184 megawatts (the power generated by a Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine or 2.4 Zumwalt-class destroyers), mostly in the infrared. While some of this would be lost if they made the wings reflective in the visible spectrum (which you might want to do when operating near a star to lower absorption), because emission is proportional to absorption, over 95% of the radiation at that temperature is still in the infrared (which is why tungsten lightbulbs are so horribly inefficient). With a 50% efficient generator, 174 MW of waste heat is more than 2 Zumwalt-class destroyers of usable power. In order to stay below the "obviously glowing" range while cruising, those panels would have to be under 750 K, at which (assuming 40 m^2) they could radiate around 720 kW entirely in the infrared, which should be more than enough to keep the lights on considering that in space, you can just shut your engines off and coast indefinitely. I've seen the figure of 160,000 shaft horsepower thrown around for each of the SR-71 Blackbird's engines (or around 240 MW for both of them), and according to a paper I found in a quick Google search, supersonic turbojets have a thermal efficiency around 60% and an overall efficiency around 40% which I think means if we produce 400 MW of power, we get 240 MW of thrust, 120 MW of wasted kinetic energy, and 240 MW of heat. So we're only 38% over budget for high-atmosphere Mach 3 flight if we swapped out the 4 engines for 2 1970's turbojets. Of course in an actual atmosphere, the airflow makes heat generation basically a non-issue. As for weapon power, let's swap the turbolasers with 50% efficient railguns producing 64 MJ muzzle energy, which the US Navy estimated to do as much damage as a Tomahawk missile. If we produce that power with a 50% efficient generator, then we need to produce 256 MJ per shot, leaving 192 MJ of waste heat. That's a sustained 54 RPM, so If we have some kind of heatsink, we can sustain 270 RPM with a 20% duty cycle, and we never see X-wings laying down continuous fire so that seems entirely reasonable. Obviously the X-Wing doesn't use railguns, but presumably they have the technology to build railguns, so not using them implies turbolasers are better. Honestly I fell into this rabbit hole expecting to decide that wing-radiators don't have nearly enough surface area (and I'm no SW fangirl so I don't have a horse in this race), but if we assume they can run at ridiculously high temperatures, and we give our pilots one hell of a cooling system, then they're surprisingly powerful. What's less likely is everyone in the hangar bay not being spontaneously flash-broiled as soon as they land after a long mission. With 174 megawatts of heat coming off of those wings, anyone running up to greet a victoriously returning X-Wing pilot is going to become a well-done steak in a matter of seconds.

Personally my favourite way getting rid of excess heat is the Refrigeration Laser in David Brins "Startide Rising" because the only thing better than making yourself cool and comfy is making yourself cool and comfy by making your opponent hot and bothered! Also I'm honestly surprised they didn't try and jam Midicloreans in there because they have to shove them somewhere out of sight!

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.

Aaaand now every time I see a sci-fi show I'm going to be asking "where does the heat go?" So. Thanks. I guess. Everything is ruined forever. Or until I next have a nap and forget everything.