Life Support/ Gravity?

[Snowman37]

Right...

[Crazedwraith]

Generally in science-fiction, failure of life support on a space ship is a big danger, because you'll freeze to death. Voyager's "macrocosm" was weird in that the ship was heating up with life support down. Something about plasma conduits?

This is not actually true though. In reality, although space is cold. The lack of atmosphere actually insulates a spaceship, so its hard for it to lose excess heat its power generator generates.

So yeah. Loosing power shouldn't quickly put you in danger of freezing to death very quickly, barring other factors.

[Snowman37]

Then why were the astronaughts freezing during the Apollo 13 disaster?

[Crazedwraith]

Then why were the astronaughts freezing during the Apollo 13 disaster?

*looks up Apollo 13 details*

Crap. You're right. I could just be wrong on that then.

Could be a size thing though. That module was titchy and would have a lot of surface area compared to its internal volume to radiate its heat.

A starship from most franchises have a lot more volume and heat compared to the surface area it comes off from.


eta: Did some asking around. Apparently Apollo was designed to be a very efficient radiator of heat and when they lost power. They lost heating as well. And had nothing on generating heat.

I note their temperature on board dropped to about 4 C according to wiki. It didn't keeping going down to the same absolute zero temperature as space. Presumably it stabilized when
their body heat equalled the amount of energy being radiated.

On a star trek ship, warp cores and impulse engines are going to generate lots of lovely waste heat, as are they going to stay nice and toasty if life support is off and they're still on.

In short, the plasma conduits still being hot. Actually sounds reasonable in this case.