Managing high Mach cruise heat.

[ajburges]

I've designed a jet for Kerbin survey type contracts that should be capable of circumnavigation with full science at Mach 3, but I'm finding that my science equipment in a cargo bay (rated at 1200 degrees) overheats after a few minutes of flight (1 km/s at 20-22 km). I assume this is due to conduction from the more resilient airframe parts seeing direct heating. I also see a similar effect during reentry and NEVA burns.

Is there a good method to keep the sensitive components cool? Failing that, is there a good way to insulate them from heating so I can fly closer to the airframe tolerance without losing instruments?

[n0xiety]

You either can fly at 25k+ or use a very pointy fairing at the tip of the plane which will make it really hard for your plane to heat up if you are going for a small design.

[georgTF]

The way i've tried to deal with it was by adding small cubic struts as heatsinks. Not sure how well you can see it in the screenshot [click for full size], but there's 6 cubic and an octo structural piece in the bay and their purpose is just to draw heat away from the probe core and radiate it away. Science equipment and cores especially are poo at radiating heat so eventually it seems a lot of heat end ups dumped into them. The heat is distributed evenly but other parts are better at radiating heat, so add more such small, fiddly parts at little cost. In the bay ofc, you don't need drag, even if you're not fuel-critical, increasing drag just to have more ...erm, radiation would possibly accumulate more heat due to air compression/friction.

This isn't a sciency plane, but i have no decent screens of that one. It has all sciency bits in the bay except Jrs and the gravioli detector. It gets hot enough eventually that i have to land just to cool off, or fly at night.

Edited June 9, 2015 by georgTF