Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Spinning space station design
Is it cold in here?:
A thermal power cycle requires more mass and more moving parts, and creates a real problem dumping the waste heat. Vacuum is a good insulator. You need big radiators. Big, heavy, radiators. Photovoltaics lose on thermodynamic efficiency but win on mass efficiency.
DSL:
RE: Solar power and heating -- The first publicly released designs for a "wheel" space station, back when von Braun was selling the idea to Collier's Magazine in the 1950s, had the station deriving power from a trough running along one side of the torus which focused sun rays onto a tube of mercury running along the trough's base. The mercury would vaporize and spin a turbine to provide power.
Good point on the radiators, though. Major inaccuracy in "2001" was that Discovery should have had huge radiating panels to dump the heat from what was presumably a big honkin' reactor, but Kubrick didn't want to have to explain what a space-only ship was doing with wings. A decade later, people would accept X-wings uncritically.
Carl-E:
...and then people criticized the wings on Spaceship!
Funny how fashions change the perception of science.
DSL:
Yeah. The good ship EC-101 looks like it'd be at home in a hangar next to the 1960s lifting-body study vehicles, a Space Shuttle, and that X-vehicle that is said to be in orbit. Jeph did what any respectable visual SF storyteller does: Extrapolate from known technology. Plenty of SF TV shows and movies in the 80s and 90s presented spaceships that basically looked like undercooked (or overcooked) Space Shuttles.
Carl-E:
An before the shuttles, it was rockets, rocket, rockets!!
Except when it was saucers.
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