Mass Effect (video game), thermodynamics, and the stuggle against ignorance

Factual Questions
1

So, here’s the deal. My son, the Err Apparent, scion to my massive holdings, plays a game called Mass Effect (which I am given to understand is enormously popular…)

One tenet of the game play, which takes place in outer space, is the necessity of “heat dumping” of a spaceship. This can only be accomplished, according to the gameplay, by radiating visible light from the spaceship.

Whaaaaa? Says I, Ancient of Daze! Balderdash, young’ un, Tommyrot! Heat is merely a wavelength of light we call “infrared”, a hot object in space will radiate heat with complete aplomb, whether or not it actually gives off any visible light.

Further the game avers the efficiency of a vehicle dipping into atmosphere in order than the heat be shed more efficiently. “Nonsense!”, says I, boxing his ears briskly.

“Let us take the matter to the Highest Court!” is the impudent challenge.

“You mean?..” I cringe

“Yes! General Questions will prove me right, and that your brains have, in fact, turned to cheese.”

Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s truth…

So be it! The goblet is cast down!

What say ye?

(In fairness, the question may be subject to amendation by the aforesaid, and space must be reserved for the abject submission and apology I expect shortly…)

2

I don’t recall it being stated that they had to radiate visible light (as opposed to infrared, which could be considered visible in the sense that it can be detected), but I’ll tackle the atmosphere bit. Vacuum is a great insulator (thermos anyone?), so it can certainly be easier to dump heat into a medium, especially a moving medium. Running into an atmosphere at orbital speeds is going to give you a net heat loss, but clearly we’re dealing with ships with powerful engines that can slow down pretty fast. I’d call it plausible - as I recall, the issue is that they’re saving up all the energy they’d normally be radiating in order to be stealthy, and eventually they need to dump this really fast. Given that circumstance, I’d personally try and get into an ocean, but barring that, the atmosphere has a lot of air to take your heat. Now, where it gets beyond me is whether it’s necessarily easier to dump heat into the atmosphere - that is, whether it would be possible to design a heat radiator that was sufficiently effective in space that the added conduction of the atmosphere wouldn’t be a big deal.

ETA: You cast down a goblet? Do you still slap him with it first?

3

It’s been a while since I played, but if I remember correctly runcible spoon is correct and the game does not specifically say the ship must radiate visible light to dump the heat, rather it must disengange it’s cloaking device to radiate the heat away which makes it visible.

As for flying into an atmosphere to dump the heat, again if I remember right it’s not heat but rather an electric charge that the FTL drive builds up in the hull which must be discharged every now and then otherwise something terrible or another will happen.

Otherwise, strictly speaking heat and infrared light are not the same thing but I’m pretty sure you are correct in that it would radiate infrared rather then visible light (unless it was very, very hot in which case it’s probably too late for the crew). As far as dumping heat in a vacuum vs an atmosphere, I really don’t know but what runcible spoon said makes sense to me.

4

Well, strictly speaking, heat is simply a means of energy transfer. It just so happens that objects with thermal energy also emit infrared radiation.

Sorry to nitpick.

5

Radiating heat doesn’t have to be in the visible wavelengths, but a) it’s easier, because hotter things will glow in the visible spectrum, and b) there’s no reason not to have a detector tuned to whatever wavelength your enemy uses. So my call on the space question is that you’re narrowly right, but the game is still plausible.

And

Since we don’t know how the magic cloaking device works, we can’t say this is implausible.

And it is definitely easier to dump heat into atmosphere (there’s a reason cars have their radiators in the front where the air is moving by), but this is by convection not radiation.

Unfortunately this makes no sense at all. If the ship for some reason has a big positive charge on part of it and a big negative charge on the other, that’s easy to get rid of. Just run a wire between the two points and run your cabin stereo off of the current.

And if the whole ship is somehow positively or negatively charged, that can only happen if it’s emitting electrons or positive ions into space. There’s little reason the ship couldn’t have a device to emit the opposite charge.

I say, keep up with the boxing. It will build character in the young fellow, and possibly teach him some manners and the proper and suitable respect for his elders.

6

Well, objects with a temperature around every day levels do – there’s really nothing special that makes infrared light ‘heat radiation’, if you get things a little hotter, they’ll radiate just as well in the visible spectrum – according to Wien’s displacement law, the peak wavelength of the black-body spectrum is inversely proportional to temperature (the hotter it gets, the shorter the wavelength, in other words).

So I’d say that decloaking for waste-heat dumping is plausible, since, as has been mentioned, there’s no convection in a vacuum. They could, however, also just kick hot stuff out of the airlocks, which could be accomplished jointly with getting rid of biological waste. Bonus points for pelting the enemy’s wind shields with hot shit. (Yes, ejecting as opposed to recycling is probably not a good strategy for a space ship, seeing as how raw materials are kinda hard to come by between star systems, but I went for the joke anyway.)

7

From your lips to the Ears! Alas, years of liberal corruption and indoctrination have rendered such an outcome implausible.

8

my bold. er, is that wordsmithing or one of those nasty typed-as-it-sounds-not-as-it’s-spelt mistakes? If it’s the former, I don’t get it :confused: is it because he often makes mistakes about rocket science?

sorry if I ruined your smithing with my obtuseness.

9

As a matter of fact, according to the game’s conversations, the ship (“Normandy,” incidentally) ALWAYS radiates visible light. The pilot specifically says that no matter what, if you were close enough you could see the ship. The cloaking device works by holding back all forms of radiation that could be detected beyond visual range, rendering Normandy invisible to long range detection.

10

I think that any effective cloaking device would have to eliminate all EM wavelengths or else the ship could be detected. That means that when the ship is cloaked it isn’t emitting blackbody radiation. In order to eliminate any heat in a vacuum, you would have to be uncloaked.

11

When you’re dumping heat into a fluid, you can make a pretty good radiator just by making something with a lot of surface area: Those heat sinks you see on computer processors, for instance, with all the fins sticking up. But for radiating away heat, that doesn’t work: Most of those fins, when they radiate, will just be radiating straight onto another fin. For efficient radiating of heat, you need something that not only has a very high surface area, it has to be spread out over an actually large size: Think something which would cast a very large shadow. Now, you could, I suppose, build an umbrella-like structure on the hull of your ship which can at need unfold into a very large surface, and that would be good for radiatively shedding heat, but I can also imagine that that might be impractical for a number of other reasons.

12

No prob. The pun is based on the custom of referring to the next in line of royal succession as the “Heir Apparent”. i.e., Chuck, Prince of Wales.

13

Correct.

I for one am relieved that the science side of my Asari lesbo love triangle is on a solid footing.

14

In outer space, no one can hear you scream “Oh, God! Yes! Yes!..”