Re: Slow Stealth

On Feb 26, 9:14 am, IsaacKuo <mech...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> I get the feeling that your essential design approach is
> flawed in some sort of fundamental way.  You seem to
> be looking at sources of heat as potential places to
> get energy from, but the real problem that you need to
> be tackling is radiating away waste heat.

Let me just rephrase this slightly.  If you are running a reactor core
of, say, 1 MW at 3000 K, then every second you are generating 333 J/K
of entropy (approximately, assuming your heat engine is running
reversibly).  It is this entropy that you need to somehow get rid of
(preferably without creating much more of it).  Any energy you have
left over that you don't use up while dumping the entropy can do
something useful.  So looking at this from an entropy perspective, a
black body at temperature T and area A will radiate an entropy
S=4/3 sigma_b T^3 A t
in a time interval t, and where sigma_b is the Stefan-Boltzmann
constant.

Luke