Ships Heating and Cooling
The atmosphere in the ship is held at 294° Kelvin (21°C). It can be lowered to 50°K (-223°C) and raised to 350°K (77°C).
The heating/cooling system can change the temperature at a rate of 10°K per second.
Note: Despite the fact that matter in space is generally quite cold, removing the atmosphere from a section will not drop the temperature massively as space by nature is a vacuum which is an insulator. However heat will still be lost through radiation. Assuming this is faster than convected heat from the rest of the ship, the temperature of the walls in the exposed section will drop 0.1° per minute. The section will not drop below 77°K. On that note, if the atmosphere drains out of the section, then the only heat that can be measured is from the walls of the section. This means that when air is re-introduced to a section, it will have to be heated back to normal temperatures if it has got too cold.
Even when a section hasn’t been breached to outer space, if the heating/cooling system for an outside section of the ship fails and it is unprotected by shields and the ship is within 100,000,000 km of a star, the side facing the star will see a rise in temperature at the following rate:
The temperature will never exceed StarTempInKelvin / 2.
Closing the bulk head doors (see atmosphere) will prevent the heat from spreading to adjoining sections. However if they are left open, then the heat in a section is averaged with the adjoining sections which might help to reduce the rate of rise.
Power Requirements
It takes 1MW of power to change the temperature by 1°K per second in a 100 square meter section. i.e. If the temperature is raised at from 21°C to 41°C, this will use 10MW per second for 2 seconds (given the maximum rate of change of 10°K per second).