But forcing higher temperatures requires additional energy and it also sounds like a complete nightmare for maintenance.
But for optimal efficiency the droplet cloud should also be quite diffuse, which limits the total mass flow. It could be that the ship would be better off with traditional radiators.
I think much of the produced heat, ranging from onboard weapon systems to propulsion system cooling to fusion power waste heat, would be high-grade heat, in which case little if any forcing would be necessary. Sure, it sounds more maintenance intensive, but I'd portray that via having a higher technology level than conventional heat sinks.
I dunno, the sources (both hard sci-fi and actual analysis of practical and theoretical heat transfer devices) generally suggest that droplet radiators should have pretty high heat rejection power-to-weight. Plus if there's one thing Battletech ships have plenty of, it's space. They're pretty comically big for their weight.
Do you think that the vacumn area does have any material to transfer the heat? The only possible way to transfer heat in vacumn is by the radiation. I did not deny the fact that it does increases the area of radiation, though. Also, even without the mechanism to shoot the radiation energy you can simply shoot it from the surface of the ship, that does not needs for the additional control systems.
Also remember that the density of those debris is a factor, for some of the radiations are hits the other debris.
Indeed no if the only one single ship does, and also does not stays for the single system for several decades to centuries. But yes if most ships are frequently uses it all the times. For it is still the debris, with some vector and power. Usually ships in battletech can handle those tiny debris but if such a system is widely used and spread those debris through the galaxy(or at least within inner sphere) it could make far dense cloud of debris.
You claimed that tiny droplets (well, "debris") exposed to vacuum would not allow them to cool down. This is false, and in fact the tiny droplets are much more weight efficient at ejecting heat quickly compared to conventional heat sinks.
Lasers are heat sources, not sinks. That's... why we use heat sinks. To sink their waste heat.
Debris is a nonfactor. Space is way too big, and Battletech armor way too effective, for uncollected metal droplets to provide any meaningful navigational hazard.
tin droplet radiators are fun, so this is a cool idea. You dont necessarily need to spray in a vacuum either. You can make a transparent to infrared liquid material that is enclosed in a transparent to infrared bubble, and pump your metal fountain onto the bubble protruding out of your ship. The metal, so long as it stays mobile, will cool and flow back down with minimal pumping from the hot internal side to the space side. This lets you spray metal under some thrust without losing coolant mass, with the infrared heat radiating out into space. Taking damage to the bubble enclosure from weapon impacts means you start losing reaction mass, as its not being collected, but at the same time now you have open cycle cooling.
For gameplay though, this is tough to implement for space ships. The reason being that space ships have so much tonnage, cooling systems are a mere afterthought, and heat issues are easily solved. The fact that warships have heat at all is silly--the math is cumbersome to figure out how many bays your mckenna can shoot. 12650 heat sinks with 900, 135, 40, 255 heat bays is just a pain in the butt to actually add up on the table. Its the worst kind of gameplay loop IMHO. Unlike with mechs where riding the heat is a risk reward thing, with various penalties as you heat up leading to dramatic shutdown or ammo rolls, heat is aerospace has no gameplay pay off, and the numbers involved are WAY higher then the 30 scale we have for mechs to count. You just cant/arnt allowed to over heat in space. Thus, its just useless math homework, and for just .2% of the ships tonnage you can easily add more HS to a mckenna to avoid stupid busywork.
I bring that up because, while I think the 'metal fountain' idea is cool, the base system the idea is working with is totally pointless to begin with. HS tonnage isnt a limiting factor, nor is the heat gameplay loop interactive or fun at all. Just some of the flaws of the battlespace framework. So I dont see how this heat system will help dropships. The castrum has 1200 cooling and 1109 in weapon heat, and despite being one of the most well armed dropships that exist it still has enough tonnage left to add 16000 more heat dissipation without issue.
If the metal droplet let the castrum have triple HS, for example, instead of doubles, the castrum would save 200 tons, and the cooling system would go from 236 tons in heat sinks to 36 tons. 200 tons of weight saving is a .2% mass difference, on something with 8.8k unused tons as it is. HS are such a tiny unnecessary part of dropships that I dont know if these special rules are worth the trouble any possible rules for damage or G maneuvers would add sadly, which is true of a lot of the aerospace systems.
Yeah. Cooling is an irrelevant concern in the space game if the designer has a minimum level of competence... but the flavor is there so I don't mind tbh.
FWIW, that is exactly what I was thinking about, the moment I realized what the OP meant.
Interestingly enough, for all that BT is extremely "backwards" where things like maximum (or even just effective) weapons ranges are concerned, even the aliens in Terra Invicta would probably sell their favorite grandmother in order to get their hands on BT drive technology. I mean, sustained thrust at 1g or above even for million ton battleships, and 24.000-ish kps (assuming four weeks of thrust at 1g) delta-v - that is a wee bit better than the best I´ve seen their ships sport.
Honestly I don't think they're terribly far off? Max combat G's is 4G in that game which would be roughly equivalent to 5/8. I saw quite a few alien ships at or near that level (mostly on the smaller side).
Battletech definitely has the delta-V advantage but for its context the Alien ships still have plenty of delta-V available to navigate around the milky way, and more than plenty enough to dance around all but the latest game human ships in combat scenarios basically forever.
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