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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9212 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 6, 2026

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and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.

Why do you think you can just say this and not show the math for radiative cooling? The prose about stray cats and sex in a vacuum is cute, again, very Russian-engineer-coded, but the boring reality is that a Starlink satellite is substantially made of, well, chips, which do computations, and it dissipates just fine with a primitive one-sided radiator on the hull. How do you imagine anything ever works in space? How does ISS work? Do you believe that 20 kW is workable but 120 is where physical limits kick in? Care to show this? For example:

Net heat rejection per square meter:

q_net = ε σ (T_rad⁴ – T_sink⁴) – q_env

From there, two quick steps give us the mass:

Required radiator area: A_rad = Q_waste / q_net Radiator mass: m_rad = A_rad × (kg/m² areal density)

At 295 K (est. Starlink V3 baseline), net heat flux is 288 W/m².

At 350 to 355 K StarThink (V1/V2), net heat flux rises to 484 to 569 W/m²

Staying at 295 K would require about 828 m² (StarThink V1) and 1209 m² (StarThink V2) of radiator area. The model’s higher-temperature operation cuts that to 72 m² and 129 m², a massive difference.

…… Near-term, ≈50 kW/ton designs can be closed with conservative assumptions: two-sided, ε ≈0.9, 4 kg/m² areal density at 370 K operation.

This is an engineering question. And your objection is the «Mars has radiation, bet you never thought about that eh» tier smug dismissal, it's plainly disrespectful and incurious. I suspect that you thought of that one too, well, I recommend to read on Suncatcher.

Other items are also trivial.

The fact is that the US cannot compete with China on power generation in the medium term due to political schizophrenia, pathetic industrial base outside some bloated military supply chains and third world logistics at sufficiently low cost per kilogram to orbit, yeeting inference nodes into one makes straightforward economic sense. Freed from gravity, atmosphere, moisture and hail hazard, solar panels become like 50 times more effective per unit of mass (likely more because you can move to lighter substrates). You don't need batteries with 24/7 noon. You don't need cabling. You don't even need a lot of structure.

You have it entirely backwards. Having sex in spacesuits is what we have been doing all this time, running electronics in the wet dirt. Carbon life is made for Earth. Metals prefer the orbit and vacuum.

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