Liquid fuel as coolant for LV-N/Nuclear Thermal Rockets types.

[Gkirmathal]

Been reading a lot about the new heat system and the presumable need now to have radiators on a craft to be able to use the LV-N under thrust.

Well I personally find this, what I know about NTR type engines, rather odd and that's an understatement.

I can understand if it was a Bimodal system and running in power generation mode.

So my request to any who might know:

is it possible, in this new heat system, to model liquid fuel (or any fuel type (H2)), to be able to conduct heat?

Edited April 28, 2015 by Gkirmathal

[hab136]

Fuel tanks already do conduct heat, as does every other part.

>Well I personally find this, what I know about NTR type engines, rather odd and that's an understatement.

Why? Engines heat up propellant to produce thrust. Not all of the heat leaves with the propellant; the rest is radiated or conducted. NTRs produce really high temperatures (2000+ C). Maybe Squad set the amount of heat produced pretty high, but having to have radiators or other thermal management for engines doesn't sound strange at all.

What is strange is that we don't have any radiator parts in stock.

[passinglurker]

I would think an NTR would be designed with waste heat in mind for example some of the cold propellant could be flowed around the outside of the engines hot spots before being fed into the combustion chamber(or ntr equivalent) just like a chemical rocket. Simply config editing the heat away would be the easy way out though. the interesting solution would be for the engine to run hotter when at low throttle than at high throttle to reflect the lack of coolant flowing over the reactor.

now what gets me is that the RTG makes no heat whatsoever while they turn the NTR into some sort of space oven one would think it would be the other way around :/