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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • You might want to have your ABS system repaired if it’s locking your brakes. It’s supposed to do the opposite and not allow them to lock. If the ABS is activating it’s because you’re not following your own advice and maintaining control. You’ve put yourself in a situation where the traction required to execute your stopping maneuver exceeds the traction available and it’s doing everything it can to save you from your poor decision. If you’re a professional performance driver, you might be able to beat ABS with threshold breaking, but that’s essentially what ABS is simulating. Get yourself some good snow tires and follow at a greater distance. No ABS needed.
















  • I didn’t say it was impossible, I said it was hard. Bigger radiators absorb more heat when exposed to the sun. One of the problems becomes keeping the solar panels exposed to sunlight while keeping the radiators out of it. Putting them behind the solar panels might work, but they have to be smaller than the solar panels and any energy the solar panels don’t convert to electricity will be re-radiated as heat and picked up by the radiators, requiring a larger size. You could put them on the 'back" side of the spacecraft, but that limits the size. As mentioned in another comment, you could position the spacecraft in geostationary orbit on the terminator, but then reaction mass requirements for station keeping and data signal latency go way up. It’s a problem that has been worked around by people much smarter than me, but a lot of work went into figuring it out.


  • Space isn’t cold, it’s nothing. It’s a vacuum and vacuum is terrible at heat transfer by convection. It’s why thermos bottles have a vacuum layer to prevent heat transfer. You can try to lose some heat by radiant cooling, but that’s slow and if you’re using solar for power then any radiators become heat sinks picking up more heat from the sun. Then there’s conduction, and again, there’s really nowhere to conduct any heat to, what with the large distance between objects and the vacuum and all. Thermal management in space is kind of a hard problem.