Post #4259790

@davidtheeviloverlord@mastodon.social @sundogplanets@mastodon.social You _can_ do it, but the costs are (without irony, word choice intended) astronomical. You could liquid cool the inside of an orbital DC, but you'd still need a TON of surface area in external heat exchangers to passively radiate that heat away, since you can't rely on either convection or conduction—which are much much faster for heat transfer—but also aren't possible in a vacuum. A DC in space is basically the inside of a giant Yeti thermos, and that inside has an operational temperature range up to about 80C, but without cooling will easily get up to 140C or hotter—at which point stuff fails catastrophically; you have move a lot of Joules to keep things operating in range. Which is all to say that it's not _impossible_, but it IS nonetheless wildly impractical. It can also be estimated: DC math isn't hard, and manufacturers include power inputs and thermal outputs in their spec sheets—so omitting that seems very deliberate.