From: Billy Brown (bbrown@transcient.com)
Date: Tue Nov 16 1999 - 09:31:39 MST
Jay Dugger wrote:
> Having spent six years in the US Navy's surface fleet I can and do
> assure you the US Navy considers air conditioning _very_ important. Its
> first value is cooling high-powered electronics. Compartments containing
> radar sets and communications equipment are generally colder than any
> other place aboard except refrigerators. Air conditioning's second value
> is crew comfort. If you lived with fifty other people in a space little
> larger than a two bedroom apartment, the only way to combat odor is air
> conditioning. Finally, an all-metal ship absorbs a good deal of heat.
> Without air conditioning, the structure becomes dangerously warm and
> people inside it for extended periods risk heat exhuastion.
Of course the electronics have real A/C (overheating computers don't work
very well, after all), and naturally the rest of the ship has to have a good
enough forced circulation/heat management system to keep the crew alive and
functional. My point was simply that *comfort* is not a priority (except
maybe in the flag bridge...). The goal is to keep the temperature between
(roughly) 55F and 90F, not to maintain a 70F office-building environment.
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@transcient.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:47 MST