Comment by pclmulqdq
19 hours ago
"Radiate" is exactly what you have to do, and that is extremely slow. You need a huge area to dissipate the amount of power you are talking about.
19 hours ago
"Radiate" is exactly what you have to do, and that is extremely slow. You need a huge area to dissipate the amount of power you are talking about.
Basically you concentrate the heat into a high emissivity high temperature material that’s facing deep space and is shaded. Radiators get dramatically smaller as temperature goes up because radiation scales as T⁴ (Stefan–Boltzmann). There are many cases in space where you need to radiate heat - see Kerbal Space Program
"High emissivity, high temperature" sounds good on paper, but to create that temperature gradient within your spacecraft the way you want costs a lot of energy. What you actually do is add a shit load of surface area to your spacecraft, give that whole thing a coating that improves its emissivity, and try your hardest to minimize the thermal gradient from the heat source (the hot part) throughout the radiator. Emissivity isn't going past 1 in that equation, and you're going to have a very hard time getting your radiator to be hotter than your heat source.
Note that KSP is a game that fictionalizes a lot of things, and sizes of solar panels and radiators are one of those things.