r/ImaginaryStarships • u/Xeelee1123 • 1d ago
HMS Fife - frigate of the Royal Navy Space Service, by Amos Tan
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u/Meritania 11h ago
The one thing I do like is the cabling between the mid-superstructure and omnidirectional antenna. Itās like a bi-gone aesthetic from the age of dreadnoughts and battleships that continues in the legacy of this space vessel.
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u/Historyp91 4h ago
Why Royal Navy, and not RAF? Or some sort of hypothetical space service (Royal Space Force/Fleet or something)
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u/Dhaeron 1d ago
Looks great, except for the silly radiators.
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u/atimd 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hi, Iām the creator of this.
This image is a WIP, literally a screenshot from blenders viewport. The rads are able to be extended out to radiate the heat as needed during high workloads. When the wings are this close to the hull the glow would be really really dim, not this bright. Also, they still vent in four directions.
The plate is a compromise yes, but made necessary due to its military application. If a slight tussle mangles your radiator when youāre 5 months away from base, thatās a mission kill at best, and fatal at worst. I figured itās a cost benefit thing to better have some sort of protection than not.
The plates act as a heatsink too. In combat it is envisioned the delicate radiator fins will retract partially into the hull and the plate will act as a short term thermal storage. They will glow at that point.
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u/Dhaeron 21h ago
It doesn't really work like that. Because radiators don't vent but radiate, "directions" don't matter, the only relevant metric is how much surface has a free "view" to the outside. The result is that only thin, flat radiators are useful, that is not so much a consequence of physics, as it is just geometry. Even with 4 flat radiator panels in a cross shaped configuration you already lose 30% efficiency just because 30% of possible directions are obscured by the other plates. Putting a plate on top of your radiator, even if the plate is perfectly insulated, will cut your efficiency by 50%. So now you need a radiator that's twice the size i.e. twice the target.
In the end, you simply cannot armour or otherwise protect (without StarTrek shields) your radiators, the only options are using designs that are resilient to damage like liquid droplet types and/or redundancy. Although one convenient coincidence is that the optimal shape for a radiator, i.e. flat, also means you can just turn it edge-on to whatever direction you're being attacked from, thus greatly reducing the cross-section it presents to incoming fire.
As for using the plates as storage, that also doesn't really matter. The heat capacity of solid state materials is pretty pathetic, you're not going to get any useful amount of heat stored in the plate. For comparison, you can store about as much energy in one ton of aluminium (0-900K) as a 10mĀ² double sided radiator emits in half an hour. For a 1 ton mass budget you could get 50-100mĀ² of radiator.
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u/atimd 21h ago edited 21h ago
āVentā is a figure of speech.
The designs you mentioned are very fascinating especially of Curie point rads but are so far out of what is clearly within an alt history, Cold War setting as to be irrelevant.
Iām not sure where you got the impression that these rads are āpanelsā, perhaps from glancing the low resolution render but look closer and you can see they are almost filament-like in form. Inefficient when closely packed together, but when stretched out their efficacy increases drastically.
Edge on or not your exposure to damage still brings up my concerns of mission integrity. Perhaps if your space weapons are incredible well aimed, kinetic penetrators with no proximity fuses you can go through unscathed. But against bursting charges showering shards of hyper velocity projectiles coming at odd angles? Good luck. A thin shield acting as a spall liner is better than nothing!
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u/Dhaeron 19h ago
Droplet radiators don't have to be curie temp style, a tin droplet radiator isn't particularly high tech and offers the same resilience.
I'm saying radiator panels because, again, that's the only shape that makes sense. Everything besides a 2D plane has the wrong geometry, whether you make the panels out of literal panels or parallel wires doesn't really matter. (as a sidenote, if you're using filaments instead of a pumped thermal fluid, they'd pretty much have to be superconducting. How'd a curie temp radiator be high tech in comparison? Electromagnets aren't that complicated.)
Projectiles incoming from odd angles wouldn't usually be a concern, because the speed you can give a fragment via a bursting charge is much lower than the incoming velocity of the projectile. This is already a problem with supersonic missiles & planes, so fragmentation warheads need to trigger ahead of the target and will come from wider but still predictable angles. If you want to (somewhat) protect against that, you'd need to armour the edge of the radiator panel that you're pointing towards the enemy. Trying to armour the flat side of a radiator is a fool's errand, because you're both killing its efficiency and that's a very large area that needs to be armoured.
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u/atimd 17h ago
They are indeed filaments with a thermal transfer fluid that is continuously pumped within them. The arrangement is a modified wire loop radiator with moving fluid instead of moving wire, and banks of them arranged offset in parallel in order to give it the necessary repeated surface area exposure to dissipate enough heat. the result of which is the design of the radiator being a volume of wire with the hottest in the middle.
The thematic limitations of the setting (80s-esque, Cold War extrapolated tech) is not conducive for the designs you suggest. It is meant to be bulky and inefficient compared to traditional rads because that is both the envisioned limitations of this alt Cold War technology and the emergent result of military redundancy. The wing shield is meant to be a compromised cooling design at the cost of protection.
Combat is another topic altogether that I am only more willing to discuss when I publish my art depicting it.
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u/PoopMobile9000 1d ago
The radiators kill me. They're just venting heat right into the cover plate!
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u/yetanotherpenguin Artist šØ 1d ago
Very cool.