Does heat dissapate differently in the background?

[Terwin]

Does heat dissipate differently when the vehicle is out of focus?

For testing purposes I have tried noting down the heat shown by the debug thermal details(just over 671 in this case), switch to KSC, warp a few minutes and return, and the temp when I went back the temp had barely changed(just under 671, possibly because I was a bit slow selecting the piece to display) but while in focus it was dropping 5-6 degrees per minute.

It is possible I am viewing different parts or some such, but I currently have 3 nuke powered rockets in the Kerbin SOI and they do not seem to be cooling down much when not in focus.

(and one of them explodes a fuel tank if I use non-physical warp when it is in focus, not sure why. Hopefully that will stop once I get the temp low enough(hottest part below 1000k was not sufficient, but perhaps below 800 or 600K will))

Perhaps I am just impatient, but I would not expect a rocket to be almost to the Mun insertion burn and still have lots of heat bars on 2000 degree items like parachutes when the adjacent 1200 degree items like OX solar panels were not burned off(previous burn was at least 3 hours prior).

[Randazzo]

You must exceed 1000x time warp to remove "physical" heating, and sometimes it appears that the ship will still retain a large amount of heat depending on how much you had built up prior to warping. Heat retention on items also depends on their thermal mass. Heavier items will heat up slower but hold that heat for a lot longer.

As for "On-rails" vehicles, I can't say for certain. Generally things that are on-rails (not physics loaded) don't gain or lose things like electric charge, so it may be the same with heat.

Edited June 4, 2015 by Randazzo

[RocketPropelledGiraffe]

I did not do any detailed analysis, but it seems most of the heat is retained when the ship is not in focus.

I had spaceships on an elliptical solar orbit which got a lot of heat and periaps (including temperature gauges showing) while I did my science experiments.

I left the ship on rails and to do other things in my career game and returned to the rocket in apoapsis at about the distance of Kerbin orbit and the gauges were still on. It seems to me that there is basically no heat exchange on rails.

[Terwin]

Thanks for confirming that I am not imaging things.

It does make sense that something on rails would not dissipate heat, but that makes it much more difficult to manage multiple simultaneous nuclear powered missions.

I guess I'll be spending some time baby-sitting my nukes this evening to make sure I don't blow them up during their next burns...

[NathanKell]

Vessels don't update when out of focus. Resources won't be produced or consumed*, temperature won't change, etc. Literally nothing runs on the vessel.

*With the exception of modules that "catch up" when you refocus, like some resource modules or life support modules.