Grav Sensor

Jonathan_S wrote:An Honorcon panel a couple years ago.
(Edit: and the infodump MuonNeutrino found)

The second Honorcon I talked to a couple and they mentioned topics they were not going to address. One was stealth in space. The whole heat issue is "a problem". Which David has handwaved into "they dump it through the wedge." Which fails to explains how RMN recon drones and modern RMN missiles with their wedge down and reactor running (and neither can restart the reactor if it shuts down) don't melt or at least show up a rather bright IR sources.

The reactor is noted as being so intensely radioactive that you can't have it anywhere around humans when it's running, even the massive shielding of a LAC reactor won't keep people on the LAC safe. But it's super stealthy.

There are others, like how in the real world a few tons of hydrogen being fused to helium releases more energy than 25,000 tons of pure plutonium fissioning, but somehow you can't keep a fusion reactor fueled in a 25,000 ton LAC but a fission reactor is just the ticket.

So yeah, it's magic. There are certain parts of the Honorverse where you must just push the "I Believe" button for the story to work, and you need to keep that damn dog away from the curtain.

Rawb wrote:Ah, thanks.

In case anyone else reading has the answer, does anyone know how ships in the honorverse deal with waste heat?

Everyone else has mentioned the "magic" that David has come up with, so I'll just illustrate it for you... kinda.

Follow the links in my signature below, mainly the Deviant Art link, and take a look at the Honorverse ships there. Those big black panels mounted on the dorsal and ventral surfaces are radiators. They're mainly for normal operating, and even then, they don't get rid of all the heat. The "thermal sump" into the wedge is provided by what we refer to inside BuNine as "those rolly things", and are the major reason Honorverse ships don't glow red hot.

They're the round structures behind the "conning tower" (not really what it is - bridge and important stuff is deep within the ship(s) - it's mainly for secondary comms, sensors, VIP parties, observation deck, bowling alley, ballroom dances, indoor shotput and javelin competitions, and maybe a Star Trek convention or two every couple years), and they somehow transfer waste heat into the wedge. Don't ask me how. I don't know - I just model the things and pick up stuff every now and then, but frankly, I don't think anyone's really sure.

Thing is, it's science fiction, and I figure 2000 years might allow something like that to happen. I read science fiction (and the Honorverse specifically) to be entertained, not to nitpick at how one or fifty things don't make sense, compared to what we know now.