Heat is a problem yes, for some surfaces/applications. That's why most spacecraft do a roll when in sunlight, to distribute the heat accordingly.icekatze wrote:hi hi
White dwarfs still put out a fair bit of radiation. Some have enough output to have a habitable zone, though it'd be closer to an orbit of 1 million miles (1,6 million km) than 93 million (150 million kilometer).Incinerator wrote:Heat is a major problem in Earth orbit due to our proximity to the Sun. In #129, it's mentioned that this is a white dwarf system, which is basically a dead star.
That being said, the shuttle is currently shooting beyond the jump point at break-neck speed. Without a rescue, I'd wager that the bigger problem with heating and cooling is for them to mimic the cooling profile of debris while maintaining a livable atmosphere inside. The exterior of the shuttle may have been flash-heated by the near miss, but in a couple of days, the Umiak that are camping the jump point might look at their sensors and say to themselves, "Huh, this chunk of debris is a different temperature than all the stuff around it, I wonder what it is."
And a slightly higher temperature might be put down to some automatics running, or even a reactor still running in automagic mode.
Even a trickle energy might explain a lot to the Umiak for a while. Sufficient for a month or so. Plastics can also smolder pretty long, if not extinguished properly (>2 weeks), so they might put some heat generation down to that too. (advantageous for this explanation is a lack of gravity that ensures the oxygen flows not good enough to keep a fire going, but good enough for smouldering cables or the like. Understandably, the ISS planning is not really interested in experiments to see how long a smoldering cable can keep going on smoldering in microgravity.)
If it persists for longer, they might send someone.
But seeing that their sensor abilities should be MUCH MUCH better than ours, they'll observe that hot spot, and might just send a missile to be sure that that runaway reactor will not endanger anyone.
No need to burn fuel to get there.
A couple of days seems short for me, especially since the Umiak are in the middle of a major offense, and likely will try to use the momentum to surprise as many Loroi worlds as possibly, before their defenses and forces are fully organized.