Radiator

The radiators are special devices that can cool other parts of a craft, consuming a small amount of electric charge when operating.

They dissipate heat into space (radiative) and atmosphere (convective). To do this efficiently, they make themselves hotter by transferring heat in, but they self-limit to avoid overheating to destruction. Their efficiency can be limited by ambient conditions, but for many uses it is constrained more by arbitrary functional caps. They are essential for maintaining resource harvester and converter cores at their optimal thermal efficiencies.

Variants

Rigid, fixed Panels, only cool the part they are attached to and parts directly connected to that part.
Deployable Thermal Control Systems (TCS), take heat from every part of the vessel (as if plumbed in with a cooling fluid loop). Like the deployable Solar Panels, these automatically rotate depending on the relative direction of Kerbol, but turn edge-on to minimise their exposure to the sun's radiation. While deployed, they will break off under 2.5kPa of dynamic pressure - moving too fast through a fairly thick atmosphere (e.g. ~67m/s at sea level on Kerbin, edge toward motion).

Part	Radial size	Cost ()	Mass (t)	Max. Temp. (K)	Tolerance (m/s)	Tolerance (g)	Deployable	Electricity (⚡/s)
Radiator Panel (edge)	Radial mounted	450	0.03	2 500	12	50	No	0.025 (1.5 ⚡/min)
Radiator Panel (small)	Radial mounted	150	0.01	2 500	12	50	No	0.025 (1.5 ⚡/min)
Radiator Panel (large)	Radial mounted	450	0.05	2 500	12	50	No	0.025 (1.5 ⚡/min)
Thermal Control System (small)	Radial mounted	450	0.05	2 500	12	50	Yes	0.025 (1.5 ⚡/min)
Thermal Control System (medium)	Radial mounted	2 250	0.25	2 500	12	50	Yes	0.125 (0.1 ⚡/sec)
Thermal Control System (large)	Radial mounted	9 000	1.0	2 500	12	50	Yes	0.5 (0.5 ⚡/sec)

Operation

To begin functioning, "Activate Radiator" must be selected from a panel's right click interface, or "Extend/Retract Radiator" for the thermal control systems, which also deploys them. Alternatively these functions can be bound to action groups, with the "Toggle Panels" option allowing a single action group to start and stop many radiators simultaneously.

Function

Radiators only remove heat from the inside of parts (which constitute the vast majority of their thermal capacity), not their skin, which may be at a very different temperature. Heat may be accumulated from external sources (e.g. re-entry or sunlight from Kerbol) or be generated by reaction engines or the cores of resource harvester drills or converters, while they are active.

Core cooling (of drills and converters) is primarily limited by a radiator's "Core Heat xFer" (transfer) stat. This is always a small fraction of what the part can actually dissipate (under most circumstances), indicated by the "Max Cooling" figure.

In the special case of the Convert-O-Tron 125, its own stats are even more limiting, since its "Max cooling" cap of 50kW is below the cooling it would require (100kW) to avoid heating up beyond its optimal thermal efficiency. With the help of radiators, it will still reach equilibrium (albeit a little hotter than the optimal 1000k) since core heat production also scales down as the thermal efficiency drops off at higher temperatures.

Cooling Specifications

Part	Core heat xFer (kW)	Max Cooling (kW)
Radiator Panel (edge)	150	2 234
Radiator Panel (small)	50	1 048
Radiator Panel (large)	200	3 644
Thermal Control System (small)	50	3 139
Thermal Control System (medium)	250	19 494
Thermal Control System (large)	1 000	85 077