Two
As the water went through the ice-covered tubes, it would freeze into slush, but not completely because of the constant movement. When it got inside as a coolant, it would melt back into water, and be cooled back down upon expulsion. Consequently, the ice would never completely encase the ship or the tubes, as it would then be absorbing the heat. After that, it would work fine. Damn, I'm good!!!
(Doing Therapy)
That requires a rather tight temperature range on the reactor, or it'd melt the ice when the temperature rose too high.
This is true JTM, but we're talking about a ship completely encased in hundreds and hundreds of tons of ice. If the ship did overheat, it just means it melts an inch more ice all around the ship in the water bubble.
I didn't get what MJ was saying until I thought of a teakettle exploding because the top was covered. The heat would react the same way. I hadn't thought of that. I was thinking "It's encased in ice, of course it's going to be cooled down!!" But first the heat has to go someplace. It wouldn't go anywhere. This way it would. Once the start up sequence was finished, the ice would work as a heat sink. The more heat it generated, the more ice it would melt in the bubble. But only after the start-up sequence was finished and a whole lot of heat was expelled through the tubes and into the water. After that, it only generates enough heat to melt the ice in a six inch bubble around the ship. It wouldn't even have to be 99% efficient for this to work.
That's kind of the way my psychosis works, actually. This board is one of my heat exhaust vents.
(Doing Therapy)
Two
And in fact, if they needed to for some reason, they could even have limited control over the temperature of the surrounding water. Instead of sending the heat to the ice, send it out the tubes. The water bubble would freeze more, and the ship would being spraying out warmer water. Likewise, send more heat out the hull, melt more ice in the bubble, and spray cooler water out the tubes. It would be a balance between melting the ice on the inside versus what temperature water was sent out.
I could see that, if they needed to melt the ice quickly, shunt all the heat out the tubes and none to the ice. It would be spraying out hot water, taking it back in, and spraying it out again. No matter how hot that got, it would still be enough to cool the system.
Or if they were in battle with that ice-clad aircraft carrier mentioned above. They could melt the carrier a lot faster than the carrier could melt them, then just refreeze the ship. It might not even be obvious to an observer why the carrier went down. Even then, a freak thermal draft in the water would explain it. Yeah, that would be an attack they could use against another ice-clad ship. The ice clad rolls past this innocent looking iceberg, which suddenly starts spraying scalding water at the side. The ice-clad goes down, and it would be completely explainable.
(Doing Therapy)
Three
Heat is the lowest form of energy. It can't be converted, and it definitely can't be destroyed.
Heat can't be converted into other forms of energy? What do you think a steam locomotive does? After a process, it transforms heat into forward motion. And that's just one example. Hope that doesn't sound rude. In person it wouldn't.
(Doing Therapy)
A lot
To form the iceberg, the ship generates the force field, which drops the temperature to nearly absolute zero. Whilst this is going on, the intake it pulling in normal water, and the outflow, on the other side of the ship, is spraying out the waste heat. Also, this would push the ship away from the waste heat. Since the intake side would be cooler, the ice would begin forming there first. As the ice collected on the intake tubes, it would cool the water down, maybe until the consistency of a slushy. The would absorb more heat, in turn cooling the ship down faster. The waste heat water would become progressively cooler as the process continued. Eventually, when the ice on the hull was enough to handle it, the process would stop. The waste heat is the same as the water that goes in, and the remaining heat is absorbed in the ice. Keeping the ice to normal ice temperature would only generate enough heat to create the bubble. The bubble could be filled with foam or something for shock absorption.
I just wanted to recap everything, since it's rather disjointed in the above. I think we got it.
(Doing Therapy)
John, you're still not understanding the physics of the thing. (And thanks to the other contributors who have recognized the flaw and supported my arguments.)
The ice forming cools the intake water, and it starts absorbing more and more heat.
Which means that as you are cooling the water to make ice, you are also heating it to turn it back to water; and if you are dumping all the energy into the ice that you used to make the ice, you have warmer water when you are finished than when you began.
It would start as normal water converted to and expelled as steam,
This piece is vague: expelled where? If you mean it will be expelled into the atmosphere, you have managed to vent part of the heat away from the ship, but at a cost of creating a visible plume that marks the position and nature of the device rather clearly. So much for stealth--and a good heat-seeking missile would find that exhaust pipe faster than you could say "release chaff".
But it looks like your approach to the steam is for it to
change into slushy water converted into really hot water, and eventually get to where it was normal water going in, normal water going out.
...Which means that you're dumping all the heat into the water while it's in the ship, and then while it's still in the ship you're taking all the heat back out of the water and putting it--where? Into the ice, so the ice melts and you need to generate more power and thus more heat to cool the ice so it freezes?
The water coolant heats up. The ice wrapped around the tubes helps to cool it down, so it absorbs more heat.
This is how cooling works: heat from the warmer part is transferred to the cooler part.
When you put ice in your drink, the drink gets cold, but the ice melts. This happens because the heat in the drink is transferred to the ice, which warms up the same number of calories (a unit of heat measurement) that the drink loses, until the drink and the ice are the same temperature. Since the drink is probably made of mostly water, unless the ice is supercold the resulting contents will be liquid.
So even if the water entering the tubes is already pretty cold, if it gets colder because of the ice wrapped around the tubes that means it does so by warming up the ice.
After that, it only generates enough heat to melt the ice in a six inch bubble around the ship.
Your mistake here is that you're thinking immediate, not temporally. That is, it only generates enough calories to melt the ice in a six-inch bubble around the ship in what period of time? If it creates that water bubble in seconds, it will continue to melt the ice outward as the number of calories dumped into the water increases; even if it takes days to create that amount of water, the water is continuing to increase in temperature.
For the ice to act as a "heat sink", it has to 1) heat up to a temperature that allows heat to move through it and 2) be within an environment colder than itself into which it can radiate the heat. Otherwise, the "heat sink" properties of the ice amount to those of the ice cube in your drink: it keeps melting gradually as it absorbs the additional heat produced.
There's also another minor problem here, in that once you have surrounded the ship with water you've lost contact with the ice and cannot use the refrigeration system to cool it. Refrigeration would require contact between the cold side compressor coils and the medium to be cooled. That means that it can freeze water as long as that water is in contact with it directly, but if the cold has to pass through water to reach the ice, then it has to freeze the water between it and the ice to conduct the cold to the ice. (If the intervening liquid were alcohol or some other material with a lower freezing point you could supercool it such that water would freeze out of it, but you would not be able to decide where the ice adhered. Besides, you could not contain the alcohol without the ice nor create the ice without the alcohol, so you've got a chicken-and-egg problem as well as the risk of leakage.)
Heat can't be converted into other forms of energy? What do you think a steam locomotive does?
The problem is one of high heat versus low heat. High heat creates pressure which can be converted into other forms of energy. Low heat is the ultimate result of all energy use. Collecting low heat and recycling it is extremely difficult and rather energy-intensive technology.
We are a long way from having "got it".
However, I can do this, and I now know how.
What I need is a matter replication transmat system. I start by focusing on water outside the ship, pulling it into the storage banks of the transmat, then running it through a filter program that draws out a significant amount of its energy and teleporting it where I want it as ice. As I do this, I am storing the heat energy as energy in the replicator. I then "vent" the energy by converting it to matter--more ice by creating water at a low temperature at first, and then when I have finished that I convert it into high-density matter, such as heavy metals, which I can use as shells for my guns, or into atmospheric compounds which I can teleport into the surrounding atmosphere as air.
Thus the way I eliminate the energy is by converting it directly (as it is removed from the water) into matter--the energy-to-matter conversion which is theoretically possible but well beyond present technology.
It would be a T14@5 pattern modification system.
Satisfied?
--M. J. Young
No MJ, I think it's you who isn't understanding me. Activate the force field. That generates heat in the ship. Pump water through the ship. That cools it off. The exit side where the water was coming out would get hot. The intake side would stay the same temperature as the surrounding water. Thus, the intake side would freeze first. The water coming into the intake side would stay the same temperature. As the intake side was freezing, however, the water would cool down. So now the water that gets inside the ship absorbs more heat, and isn't as hot when it comes out. The intake side would freeze first, but eventually, the water running through, being constantly cooled by the process, would cool the entire ship, and the entire force field would freeze solid. The force field keeps the entire block of ice cold, save for the water bubble around the ship.
More than one
Think of the force field as the food compartment in a refrigerator. It stays cold in there. Water is running through the ship, through the force field. The heat goes away, in the water, running through the ship. Since only half of the tubes are hot exhaust, the ice would form first on the cold intake. Eventually, there would be more ice than heat being produced. Or is that the physics problem? I figured with the heat waste water outside the force field and drawing in cold water, it could work.
(Doing Therapy)
The iceberg could also act as an aircraft carrier.
The heat could also be stored by a stealth plane which will probably dump the heat as heat bomb to enemy base or dump it to a colder place such as north pole or outer space.
I also like the transfer heat by light to outer space or back to earth by satellite idea.
If that kind of technology existed, the technology to stealth that kind of light would probably be possible too (using the principle of fiber optic or refraction).
Or would could just scrap the whole thing. It was one of those ideas that sounds really good when you're having a psychotic episode, but later, not so much.
Eventually, there would be more ice than heat being produced. Or is that the physics problem?
That's the physics problem: it always creates more heat than cold.
Think of it this way: to "create cold" you have to pull energy out of the target object; you then have that energy as heat needing to be dispersed. You also had to create and use energy to pull the energy out of the target material, and that "used energy" is now also heat that needs to be dispersed.
Refrigeration technology works like this:
- Take a compressible medium, usually a gas (because gasses have the lowest initial density) such as Freon or chlorine. This is called the "refrigerant". It starts at "room temperature", that is, the temperature of the environment surrounding it.
- Compress the gas, that is, run it through a pump that forces the large quantity of gas into a contained area significantly smaller than its volume. The compression causes the gas to become significantly hotter than the environment. (The compressor also gets hot, but this is the result of the use of energy for the compression.)
- Keeping the refrigerant compressed, pass it through the room temperature environment such that it radiates its heat into the environment. This cools the compressed refrigerant by heating the environment. Eventually the refrigerant is the same temperature as the environment, although the environment is slightly warmer than it was (which impacts cooling efficiency).
- Move the refrigerant into the secondary side of the system and decompress it to normal atmospheric pressure. Since compression caused the refrigerant to heat, decompression causes it to cool; but since the heat has already been vented from it, the cooling causes it to drop significantly below the environmental temperature. It is now "cold", relative to its initial temperature.
- Pass the chilled refrigerant through the target environment such that the heat of the target environment warms the refrigerant. We say that the chilled refrigerant is cooling the environment, just as we say that ice is chilling a drink, but technically it is the reverse: the environment warms the refrigerant and the drink warms the ice, by passing heat from the warmer into the colder material.
- Draw the refrigerant back into the compressor to repeat the process.
--M. J. Young
In other words, it was one of those ideas that sounds really good to a guy having a psychotic episode, but not so good in real life. Oh well, it was fun writing it out, at any rate.
The problem, incidentally, exists for all methods of cooling proposed, with the possible (dependent on exact behavior and efficiency of matter transmuter, because that would have some inefficiency in its circuitry) exception of MJ's. Even that may require a carefully constructed set of refrigeration systems, so as to pipe the heat to where it can be fed back into the converter, though if it can act on any energy in a radius, you can keep the heat pretty low as long as you have something to make with it. The problem with beaming it into space is that the efficiencies on power projection systems are terrible today, and show no sign of getting better by enough. Even with high efficiencies you'd have heat buildup, but perhaps not fast enough to matter.
MJ, this isn't a refrigeration system the likes of which we could even conceive. This system can do exactly what I said. It doesn't produce more heat than cold. If we have to, we can change the laws of physics slightly. You said you wanted to see it made reasonably possible. All things considered, we're pretty close.
(Doing Therapy)
I can't explain any better than MJ did without extensive research. I am no physicist!
Well, it's not worth arguing over, really. I was just saying that the "Possible with advanced technology" clause can cover a multitude of sins in the Sci Fi world. Faster than light travel violates the known laws of physics, but I bet that doesn't bother MJ when he's watching Star Trek, ya know? In some ways, a writer has more power than God. God can't control the actions of people. A writer can.
Quick point about the idea of cooling by lowering a temperature to absolute zero. When you get to that type of temperature difference you actually start affecting the physical properties of the resultant material. My guess is the formed ice would be much more amorphous and much lighter than would be expected, but there are a host of qualities amorphous materials would inherit that I don't think we're aiming for when forming ice. Also, there was a reference of absolute temperatures. It's more accurate to say absolute temperature/pressure combination for a particular phase, since even the absolute temperature for a vapor is only the absolute temperature under normal pressure before it would turn into plasma.
Also, if the idea of using force fields and such is acceptable why bother with temperature so much? Fiddling with pressure through the use of force fields seems much more plausible in this case. Encase the area you want to be ice between two force fields, one at the edge of the ships hull and one at the perimeter of the volume of ice. Then reduce the pressure to 0.00602631579 ATM (pressure with higher temperature of melting for H20). I guess the pressure could be lowered through matter transference?
Unfortunately this doesn't make the ice much more favorable, only raising the melting temperature to .0098 Celsius, so it still doesn't seem feasible, but it's a neat concept.
John, it is a limitation of technology that all work produces heat as both a concurrent by-product and an ultimate end product. The matter transmitter system is a science fiction solution to this because it assumes we can convert energy to matter at a use of less energy than we convert (an essential assumption of teleporter technology or we would fry anyone we transported), but it still results in an increasing quantity of mass that has to be removed somehow. (My article Game Ideas Unlimited: Transmats gives a lot of ways such technology can be used, including removing energy from a target object to make it cold, although this specific application is not there.)
--M. J. Young
OK, what about heat energy sinks? Store the waste heat and use it to power the rest of the ship? The waste heat would charge the energy sink, and they could use it like a battery. Dump that waste heat into a different energy sink. It wouldn't be perpetual motion, but close.
(Doing Therapy)
Low heat can't be converted. That means it can't be used for work, as what work actually does is to take energy out of the energy you have, thereby converting it to a lower form of energy (and eventually heat) in order to power whatever it is you are doing. since you hit a low point where heat-energy can no loner be converted into a lower form (thus giving up no more energy), it becomes impossible to use it for any practical purposes.
You can increase efficiency, so that you arrive at heat later than usual, but you can't stop it without changing the laws of physics. NOTHING happens without using energy.
Brock, this whole thing started because MJ wanted to see a ship made in a way that he could believe. Me, having a psychotic episode, tried to step up to the challenge. I'm not intending to do anything with it. To me, it was just something that seemed fun to think about. If you want to finish it feel free.
Brock was just saying that your heat sink system won't give you reusable energy--it doesn't work that way.
--M. J. Young
I disagree. "Possible with advanced technology."
And I wasn't knocking Brock. I was just saying that, for me, this project is kind of finished. I just thought I could step up to your challenge. I couldn't.
(Doing Therapy)
Ya know, I just had a thought. Back to the original idea of a planet getting knocked out of alignment. If the planet was slowly moving closer to the sun, wouldn't the problem correct itself? The icecaps at the poles would melt. Liquid water weighs more than frozen ice, the extra weight would pull the orbit back away from the sun, at least if it was that unstable. (Or is this too unbelievable as well?) Just a thought.
(Doing Therapy)
Ice is less dense than liquid water, which means that it shrinks when it melts, instead of getting heavier.
And it's lighter. Ice floats to the top of a glass of water. That old wives tale about having enough room in the glass for the ice to melt? Bogus. If anything, the water level would go down. I was watching Twilight Zone, and there was an episode about the earth moving closer to the sun. It made me think of this.
(Doing Therapy)
What JTM is pointing out is the density*volume doesn't change during phase changes like solid to liquid. It happens to go from a lower density, higher volume combination to a higher density, lower volume combination. In either case the mass and weight are equal.
What James means is that it's not the total weight but the total volume that changes.
If you take a cubic inch of water and you freeze it, it decreases in size slightly as it approaches freezing, but then as it moves from very cold liquid to frozen, it increases in size, so your ice cube is larger than a cubic inch. When it melts, it gets smaller.
Since the principle of buoyancy is that an object sinks to the point where it displaces its own weight in water, the ice floats because it contains a cubic inch of water in something larger than a cubic inch, and therefore is lighter per unit volume.
Looked at another way, a cubic inch of ice weighs less than a cubic inch of water, but if you melt the cubic inch of ice you get less than a cubic inch of water--you get the amount of water that weighs exactly as much as the cubic inch of ice.
If you converted all the water on the planet to ice it would have the same weight as it did when it was water. In fact, if you converted all the water in the world to water vapor, it would have the same total weight as it does as water--it would float in the air because it's spread thin enough that it's as light per unit volume as the atmosphere, but it's only because the molecules are spread so far apart making it so big that it's floating. Were you to gather it all together, it would still weigh as much, it just takes up more space.
Ah, here's an example. Take a large block of wood and cut a smaller block of wood out of it, so that you have a hole and a block that perfectly fits in the hole. (We'll assume you have a laser cutting tool that has a zero width cut, so you don't lose any wood doing this.) Now put the smaller piece through a chipper, and fill the hole with the chips. When the hole is full, you'll still have chips left over, and the total weight of the chips filling the hole is less than the weight of the block of wood you originally removed from it (by an amount equal to the chips that don't fit).
Of course, in that case you have "air" between the chips. What happens with ice is something like that--the molecules turn in such a way that, like the wood chips, they have "space" between them, but the space is not filled with anything. Thus like the wood chips the block of ice takes up more space than the "hole" from which it was taken, and if you make the ice block the same size as the hole you have ice left over. Melting the ice is like recompressing the wood chips back into a solid block (if you could do it).
Does that clarify it?
--M. J. Young
I had to mull over what MJ said for a little while, but I think I get it. The ice cube tray weighs the same whether it's full of ice or liquid water. I just had to think about that for a while. Oh well, another psychotic idea down the drain!!
(Doing Therapy)
The ice cube tray weighs the same whether it's full of ice or liquid water.
Yeah, that's it. I should have thought of that.
Oh well, another psychotic idea down the drain!!
I'm reminded of something (Tom Baker) Dr. Who said in The Face of Evil. He had previously come upon a ship whose computer appeared to have shut down, rendering all systems non-functional, so he had overwritten the system with his own brain pattern; but he hadn't realized that the computer had shut down because it had achieved sentience and was trying to make sense of its own existence. Thus he had accidentally given it dual personalities, leaving the crew of the ship in the hands of an insane computer. Ultimately he fixed it by reconnecting to the system and erasing his own brain pattern, leaving only the computer's naturally developed mind.
In talking about it afterwards, the Doctor says he's embarrassed that he'd made that mistake. The computer, Zoanan, responded that it was a simple mistake, and anyone could have made it. The Doctor objected that it was not a mistake just anyone could have made.
There's truth in that. There are some mistakes you can't make unless you are smart enough and well enough informed. This might be one of them.
--M. J. Young
Ya know what though MJ. I still say that my ice-making ship is believable enough as far as the physics are concerned. Give a caveman a piece of steel a half inch thick, and tell him to burn a hole in it. After he uses his new-found invention, fire, to no avail he will declare it impossible to burn a hole through. Then you pull out an acetylene torch. That's how far advanced this ship would be to us. It doesn't generate too much heat to make it work, that's just all there is to it. We're the caveman trying to burn a hole in steel, as far as how advanced this technology is. I don't really want to pick it up again, it was just an attempt to step up to your challenge. I just wanted to make that point.
(Doing Therapy)
It is impossible to not generate too much heat to make it work. The laws of thermodynamics are not that easily defeated.
It is impossible to not generate too much heat to make it work. The laws of thermodynamics are not that easily defeated.
"It is impossible to burn a hole in that piece of metal."
The imagined caveman.
We're the caveman.
Besides, faster than light travel violates the known laws of physics. I bet you don't mind that when you're watching Star Trek.
John--
I often use the phrase "pseudo-rational explanation" when speaking about anything outside our current abilities.
I gave you a solution to your ice problem. You cannot overcome the laws of thermodynamics; you have to have a work-around. But work-arounds are possible.
- It is not possible to exceed the speed of light; but it is possible to move outside the normal dimensions of the universe to cross greater distances in less time, using hyperspace or warp drive or wormhole generation or sub-universe generation, all of which are methods of FTL travel recognized in Multiverser.
- It is not possible to overcome the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and therefore it is not possible to identify both the position and movement/energy of any participle simultaneously so as to create a teleporter; but it is possible to use quantum non-locality to split every particle into two, measure the position of one and the movement of the other, combine the information, and so make the teleporter work.
- It is not possible to create a technological system that produces more cold energy than heat energy; but it is possible to create a matter transmission system that removes energy from matter thus reducing its temperature and using that energy to create other matter, thus producing more cold than heat by converting much of the byproduct heat to mass.
--M. J. Young
It is not possible to create a technological system that produces more cold energy than heat energy; but it is possible to create a matter transmission system that removes energy from matter thus reducing its temperature and using that energy to create other matter, thus producing more cold than heat by converting much of the byproduct heat to mass.
So the ship gets heavier instead of hotter? Or could you convert the mass to some tangible form and either use it or eject it? I'm not certain I understand that at all. Could you convert the mass into say, oxygen for the crew? Matter replication of food? That kind of thing?
If you want an ice ship produced by a technology so far advanced from ours we would think it impossible, that's how you do it.
Thanks. I don't really want to work on it anymore, I just knew there was a way around the laws of thermodynamics. Thanks for giving me that way.
(Doing Therapy)
There are a lot of things you could do with the mass, depending on the limits of your technology; but you could simply materialize it in the water and let it sink to the bottom. In fact, you could probably materialize it as additional ice, increasing the total volume of water on the planet slightly.
--M. J. Young
I also wonder if a mini black hole could be used to absorb the heat.
It could possibly release some kind of radiation at the event horizon.
I wonder what will happen if the black hole expands rather than emit radiation.
Barring faster than light travel of some particle how is it going to emit anything? There can be escape radiation at an event horizon, but that energy is not coming from the black hole, it's coming from energy that's being sucked into the black hole. Feeding anything, even heat energy would add to the mass, albeit slowly, and gradually increase the radius of the event horizon. That said, it'd make for an interesting situation, where they have to balance with dealing with the heat that's a problem now or add to the problem of a slowly growing black hole.
problem of a slowly growing black hole.
Probably could be used as a projectile to deal with a particular target.