Im curious about the physics of directing waste heat into a beam. You cannot, at all, just stop producing waste heat. So the only way to hide it would be to ensure it goes in a controlled direction. But that would imply prefect infared mirrors which seem unlikely to be possible. Or i suppose you could dump all your waste heat into a heatsink, then periodically eject that sink from the ship. Maybe you could pump all your waste heat from the sink into the exhaust, since when you have your exhaust on there is no stealth anyways? Then when you want to hide it just pumps the heat back into the sink where its stored until next thrust?
I think how hard sci-fi usually does it is how you say at the end. You store it if you need to be dark, then use your propellant to dump it when you don’t need to be dark anymore. You’d actually recover some of the energy as delta-V in this way too I assume.
You do know how refrigeration works right?
That’d essentially be an oven.
Im curious about the physics of directing waste heat into a beam. You cannot, at all, just stop producing waste heat. So the only way to hide it would be to ensure it goes in a controlled direction. But that would imply prefect infared mirrors which seem unlikely to be possible. Or i suppose you could dump all your waste heat into a heatsink, then periodically eject that sink from the ship. Maybe you could pump all your waste heat from the sink into the exhaust, since when you have your exhaust on there is no stealth anyways? Then when you want to hide it just pumps the heat back into the sink where its stored until next thrust?
Better would be to store that heat in your propellant/ejectant giving it more energy to give you some DeltaV.
I think how hard sci-fi usually does it is how you say at the end. You store it if you need to be dark, then use your propellant to dump it when you don’t need to be dark anymore. You’d actually recover some of the energy as delta-V in this way too I assume.
Laser cooling is a thing.
And out of that oven comes Freedom!