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Favorite recurring character? (Select 4)

  • Jack / AIDSMobdy

    Votes: 257 24.0%

  • Josh / the Wizard

    Votes: 77 7.2%

  • Colin (Canadian #1)

    Votes: 460 42.9%

  • Jim (Canadian #2)

    Votes: 230 21.4%

  • Tim

    Votes: 386 36.0%

  • Len Kabasinski

    Votes: 208 19.4%

  • Freddie Williams

    Votes: 274 25.5%

  • Patton Oswalt

    Votes: 27 2.5%

  • Macaulay Culkin

    Votes: 541 50.4%

  • Max Landis

    Votes: 64 6.0%
  • Total voters
    1,073
byuu said:
They're all gonna radiate a little.
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Yeah, I'm a moron, heat sinks are only heat sinks when they specifically cool by convection. How spacecrafts do it is seems more like household radiators.
 
frozenrunner said:
So I have it on good authority (Robert Meyer Burnette, who knows Star Trek better than even Mike does) that season 3 of Picard is... excellent? Legitimately good. A completely different showrunner came in (the dude who did Syfy Channel's 12 Monkeys, which was alright) and did the final season right, apparently.
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If I had a dollar for every time someone said that the next nutrek product would be good and was wrong I'd be able to afford treatment for the cancer they gave me.
 
byuu said:
Don't those also use mostly convection despite the name?
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Yes. Water is heated and moved to a radiator which disperses the heat through the air. But the convection part is only the coolant being heated by components and moved to the radiator in the actual ISS as far as I can tell, when it's dispersed into space that seems to be entirely the radiator, which seems to actually radiate heat unlike household radiators.
 
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A vacuum radiator eliminates heat by conducting it away through pure blackbody radiation, and a spherical shape like the death star is literally the worst form it could take in terms of efficiency. Even though the surface is rough and has smaller structures that would maybe be more effective as we see in the trench run, they would suffer from interreflection, and lose efficiency by absorbing the thermal energy of radiators next to them. Remember, it's literally infrared photons shooting away at perpendicular angles, and it does you no good to recapture them.

I'll take my puzzle pieces.
 
MCLOS Horthy said:
A vacuum radiator eliminates heat by conducting it away through pure blackbody radiation, and a spherical shape like the death star is literally the worst form it could take in terms of efficiency. Even though the surface is rough and has smaller structures that would maybe be more effective as we see in the trench run, they would suffer from interreflection, and lose efficiency by absorbing the thermal energy of radiators next to them. Remember, it's literally infrared photons shooting away at perpendicular angles, and it does you no good to recapture them.

I'll take my puzzle pieces.
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It wouldn't be conduction in a vacuum, would it? You can't "touch" a vacuum.
 

The saga continues: #386, #393, #396, #399, #417, #420...

Yeah yeah, I said in #420 that I was finished with this topic. But the emails keep rolling in, and the possibilities just keep getting bigger! I only have so much self-control...

I do want to make one thing absolutely clear though. I am intensely amused by the ongoing discussion over this particular topic, and not at all angry. It's just an act for the sake of the comic. ;)

On the Laws of Thermodynamics:

These are physical laws that govern the transfer of energy. They can be explained in simple terms thus:

  1. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy is conserved. You can't create energy from nothing, nor can you destroy it. Since heat is a form of energy, you're stuck with it, unless you convert it into some other form of energy or move it away. Since you can't get something for nothing: You can't win.
  2. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that heat will only flow from a region of higher temperature to one of lower temperature. To move it the other way, you need to supply some extra external energy to do the work. So moving energy in any useful direction that doesn't happen naturally requires you to put in additional energy. You can't even use the First Law and say "the total heat content is equal, so just move the heat from the cold place to the hot place" - it won't happen: You can't break even. However, the efficiency with which you move energy around is related to the temperature. The colder the better. If you could get to absolute zero, you could break even, just. But:
  3. The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that it's impossible to reach absolute zero. As you make a system approach absolute zero, the process that you are using to cool it down slows down. It sucks smaller and smaller amounts of heat away (and you're using tons of energy to power this über-refrigerator), and you can never suck away that last bit of heat to get it to absolute zero. Since you can't even get to the place where the Second Law lets you do things with 100% efficiency: You can't get out of the game.
Physics is a bastard sometimes.

Anyone who has studied physics at university, by the way, might recognise an early edition of the venerable Resnick and Halliday (or Halliday and Resnick as I believe they are these days) textbook. Yep, I studied this stuff that long ago.

And if you keep reading this comic long enough, you won't need to study physics. You'll learn it all right here. And have a heck of a lot more fun than I did studying thermodynamics, let me tell you.

2013-03-15 Rerun commentary: This series of strips about the thermodynamics of Coruscant was at least part of what led to my tradition of providing explanations for the physics or wider science behind some of the more obscure or intellectual comics to come. And much later on I would write a more comprehensive rundown of the laws of thermodynamics.

That write-up also introduced:

  1. The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics, which states that any two systems which are in thermal equilibrium with a third system are also in thermal equilibrium with one another. In other words, if A is equally as hot as B, and B is equally as hot as C, then A is equally as hot as C. The "hotness" is what we call temperature.
This one can be expressed in the humorous terms of the other three laws as: There is a game. (An alternative that is sometimes quoted is "You must play the game", but this is really the same thing as the third law stated as a positive instead of a negative. Asserting the mere existence of a game is more in line with what the zeroth law actually says about thermodynamics - it asserts that there is such a thing as temperature.)

This makes the four laws of thermodynamics:
  1. There is a game.
  2. You can't win.
  3. You cant break even.
  4. You can't get out of the game.

The saga continues: #386, #393, #396, #399, #417, #420, #431...

Before he was so rudely interrupted, Anakin started explaining to Jar Jar why huge heat-radiating fins sticking out into the cold depths of space will not help Coruscant to cool down.

Those who remember the material on the Laws of Thermodynamics from #431 might be thinking:

But hang on. Space is cold. Pretty darn cold, if I remember rightly. Near absolute zero, in fact. (Though not at absolute zero because I understand the Third Law of Thermodynamics now; clever dick, aren't I?) And from the Second Law of Thermodynamics I know that heat will naturally flow from a hot place to a colder place. So if we build great big towers full of some heat-conducting material, from the surface of Coruscant so tall that they stick out into space, the heat will naturally flow up the towers away from the planet and into the cold of space! Brilliant!
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Congratulations. You've just come up with an idea that Jar Jar came up with. ;)


So what's wrong with it?

Yes, space is cold. But it's also empty. Heat mostly moves by conduction through matter. And there's bugger all matter in space to conduct that heat away. It will leak away, but very, very slowly. Not fast enough to cool Coruscant appreciably.

Energy can also be radiated away, as electromagnetic radiation. At the high temperature Coruscant will be, it will mostly be infra-red radiation. Now, I've already taken how much heat radiates from the planet itself into account in working out how hot the planet will be. That's the standard way to calculate the temperature of something in physics: Work out how much energy is being produced, and set it equal to the amount of energy radiated away (they must be equal because of the First Law of Thermodynamics). Solve the equation for the temperature, and there you go.

Now, the formula for working out how much energy is radiated from something depends on the temperature and the surface area of the object. So, to radiate an amount of heat sufficient to cool Coruscant appreciably, you need to have those towers have a surface area similar to the size of the planet itself. Which is a lot. And the other problem is all that area will start intercepting the radiation from the planet, making the cooling less and less efficient the more cooling radiators you build.

This material is examinable and will be on the test at the end of the semester.

Oh, and if you thought you'd never see a Star Wars/Pirates crossover strip, think again!
 
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Great President of McHell said:
If I had a dollar for every time someone said that the next nutrek product would be good and was wrong I'd be able to afford treatment for the cancer they gave me.
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The difference here is RMB has actually seen the season from beginning to end (unfinished in terms of special effects and ADR, but it apparently had music at that point), and he's also intensely autistic when it comes to Star Trek. He's hated everything Trek-related since 2009, and he's spent many, many hours ranting about it on his channel. (It's maybe the only thing he really gets negative about on his shows.) And he loathed seasons one and two. If he's wrong, I don't see how it's possible.

Kurtsman is gone from Picard. So is Michael Chabon. If they somehow manage a soft reboot of the show and kind of redeem it at the end, I imagine that would make Mike pretty happy.
 
frozenrunner said:
The difference here is RMB has actually seen the season from beginning to end (unfinished in terms of special effects and ADR, but it apparently had music at that point), and he's also intensely autistic when it comes to Star Trek. He's hated everything Trek-related since 2009, and he's spent many, many hours ranting about it on his channel. (It's maybe the only thing he really gets negative about on his shows.) And he loathed seasons one and two. If he's wrong, I don't see how it's possible.

Kurtsman is gone from Picard. So is Michael Chabon. If they somehow manage a soft reboot of the show and kind of redeem it at the end, I imagine that would make Mike pretty happy.
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Chabon was involved. That makes sense, tried reading one of his books once. Lots of nonsensical plots that went nowhere.
 
frozenrunner said:
So I have it on good authority (Robert Meyer Burnette, who knows Star Trek better than even Mike does) that season 3 of Picard is... excellent? Legitimately good. A completely different showrunner came in (the dude who did Syfy Channel's 12 Monkeys, which was alright) and did the final season right, apparently.

I hope Mike and Rich cover the final season. I want to see them happy about Star Trek again. (Their suffering is great, don't get me wrong. But it would be a change of pace.)
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Yeah, about that....


 
frozenrunner said:
So I have it on good authority (Robert Meyer Burnette, who knows Star Trek better than even Mike does) that season 3 of Picard is... excellent? Legitimately good. A completely different showrunner came in (the dude who did Syfy Channel's 12 Monkeys, which was alright) and did the final season right, apparently.

I hope Mike and Rich cover the final season. I want to see them happy about Star Trek again. (Their suffering is great, don't get me wrong. But it would be a change of pace.)
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Terry Matalas, the creator/showrunner for 12 Monkeys and original TNG writer, was also the showrunner for season 2 of Picard. It was absolute dog shit. So I wouldn't get your expectations up too high.

Season 2 & 3 of Picard were filmed back to back (because everyone was afraid Stewart is gonna drop dead lol) over 13 months and wrapped a few months ago, even the ADR from the cast was done recently I believe so its basically just another few months of VFX and post production.

I'm expecting more dogshit in season 3 but it'll at least be nice to see the full original TNG cast one last time. Hopefully its not just one fucking episode or individual scenes like the abortion of the final Arrested Development season.

Strange New Worlds was great though, really enjoyed that and hope they can continue at that level. Doubt it, but hope springs eternal.
 
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