I believe canon (Disney and pre-Disney) has mostly kept quiet about this, but I believe that, since reactors and propulsion systems all produce waste heat, perhaps waste heat could be used to power stuff like life support, water heaters, shipboard kitchens, or even be used in an auxiliary reactor (they won't produce nearly as much power as the main reactors and engines, but still enough to power life support, computer mainframes, water heaters and shipboard kitchens). Perhaps the first and third Death Stars had thermal exhaust ports because they couldn't use all the waste heat from the main reactor... but to what extent would you expect waste recovery devices to be used on, say, starships?
This is a very technical question-I wouldn't be able to answer maybe ask Admiral Nick? Um yeah I'm sure there probably is an answer.
Doesn't basic thermodynamics say there is no way to use all the waste heat something generates? Even Star Wars pays lip service to physics, though not much more than that.
You can't use all the waste heat in a heat engine or a refrigerator to do mechanical work, true, but there's still some waste heat to be used in keeping the ship's interior at a "livable" temperature for its occupants (assuming organic occupants) or used in another system like an oven or a water heater that would account for the remainder of the energy. Violating the second law of thermodynamics requires the use of the Force, however.
Given the lack of radiators employed by starships in the GFFA (we're repeatedly told TIE Fighter fins are solar panels, not radiators, and most ships lack any analogous structures whatsoever), some superscience method of using or disposing of waste heat is mandatory.
I'd have a nice bread oven in my ship, and a baker droid baking bread and cakes for me to eat and also sell at the next spaceport. Waste heat would also go into my ships sauna.
Do you think it's very cold in hyperspace? Cold enough that even with all the waste heat from engines and reactors, Anakin couldn't find a warm place on Padme's ship? He could have done with a nice freshly baked danish pastry.
ARC-170s have heat-radiators, Eta-Actis-Interceptors have heat-radiators, Maul's Sith-Infiltrator has heat-radiators (and the last two are the ancestors of the TIE - the solar-energy-collector-panel idea has always been bantha-poodo ). Capital ships dispose of waste-heat by converting them into neutrinos. It stands all in the IncredibleCross-Section-books.
But has continued to remain canon. And the newest ICS book - the one for TFA - continues to have the panels on TIEs (First Order TIEs in this case) have a "solar collector" component to them. So does the Rebels visual guide, for ordinary TIEs.
Changes nothing, that it is bantha-poodo. For once the power of retcon could be used for something positive, but nooo ... . And people wonder, why I have such a low opinion of the storygroup and all those, who decide on "canon".
...Dude, seriously? Radiators would make more sense than solar panels, but this is such an incredibly tiny thing to get worked up about.
What it boils down to is that Saxton ideas are deemed "positive" and anyone who contradicts Saxton earns a low opinion.
Technicalities should not be created by writers with no understanding of technology. Anybody with a clue about solar panels can see at a glance that the "wings" of a TIE fighter are all wrong for solar panels. The "collectors" would be on opposite sides and even if the TIE was angled to collect maximum sunlight on one side, the far side would be shaded by the near side. The amount of solar radiation that could be collected by that size panel would not be nearly enough energy to be useful to a combat ship, and the power available would drop off according to the inverse square law as the distance to the nearest star increased. The only explanation I've ever read that makes sense from an engineering perspective is that the panels are radiators.
The big question is whether the "TIE solar panel" concept was invented by sources like West End Games - or whether it was there in the original movies - with the props designers calling them that.
On their own they are a tiny thing. In the grand scheme of things they are a sympton of a certain mindset I can't agree with. So in the one instant, where WEG would have been correct to overwrite the props designers they didn't. I'd be laughing, if it weren't so sad.
It isn't just WEG -David West Reynolds, when doing the first Star Wars: Incredible Cross Sections - had "solar energy collectors" on the TIE diagram - and when Complete Cross Sections was published, with West Reynolds and Saxton as the writers compiling the book from the previous 4 ICS books - neither of them took the opportunity to change the diagrams, regardless of Saxton's personal feelings on the subject. What mindset was that? A slightly less "scientific" one? In the context of Star Wars - pure science may take a backseat to what the writers think looks or sounds good.
This begs the question: do hyperdrives truly produce less waste heat than sublight engines? (Assuming reactors produce the same amount of waste heat for a given power setting) It would seem that the J-327 produces more waste heat in realspace than in hyperspace - presumably there is a smaller surface area for a WHRD to collect waste heat on a T-14 hyperdrive than on a sublight engine. I could understand that part of the process of how hypermatter is converted into energy would involve radiating neutrinos away,
Not necessarily "more" scientific". There is a lot of technology in SW, which we can't explain with today's knowledge. But I would wish for two things: 1) to think things through and consider, what they mean. Examples: Executor and 5 ISDs can't overcome the theatre-shield above Hoth in TESB (and that was an installation run by a small rebel-cell) - yet for years we are told, that ISDs are the all-end of warship-design and can cow whole worlds on their on while things like Executor are exaggerated showpieces of grandeur. Or take the DeathStar, which is worth millions of ISDs in resources and men to crew it (divide the volume in cubic-kilometres through the official number of crew to see what I mean), yet we are told, that the GE has "only" 25,000 of them. Or the year-long insistence, that SSDs are eight kilometres long, when one watching of TESB or ROTJ would have shown otherwise. 2) a commitment to things that were established before With that I am not necessarily talking about is a characters story-arc, but the background, the world he acts in should fit, what has come before. So if we have Ackbar needing two MC80 to defeat an ISD in one novel and in the next novel he is fighting an ISD with only a corvette the author better puts in a lot of effort to make Ackbar's survival (and perhaps even victory) credible. I don't want one source contradicting, what a previous source established only to need a third source containing a retcon to resolve the problem. Which brings me to the science. It doesn't look good when someone with even a modicum of education can understand why a claim is stupid (like the solar-paneels on TIEs, which can't collect the energy the TIE needs for what it does. Their output wouldn't even matter compared to the onboard reactor). Don't invent technobabble to explain things, that lay beyond our graps of understanding. And where we have understanding, don't claim something, that obviously is false.
That's the thing though - once the "solar collectors" thing is in, it can't be "obviously false". At worst, it's "obviously problematic". Resolvable with the notion that it's there to charge other things, like capacitors, up - it doesn't continuously generate enough power to keep the ship running at all times. Which was why the whole "One ISD-type ship can conduct a crust-melting Base Delta Zero" idea, that Saxton and others tended to propagate, was so problematic in the first place. They swallowed WEG's most "maximalist" ideas whole, and extrapolated them even further - and it's the newcanon that is slowly clearing up the mess.