radiators can be made as long as desirable within the shade of the solar panels, hence the designer can pracitically set arbitrarily low temperatures above the background temperature of the universe.
Yes, you can overcome this with enough radiator area. Which costs money, and adds weight and space, which costs more money.
Nobody is saying the idea of data centers in space is impossible. It's obviously very possible. But it doesn't make even the slightest bit of economic sense. Everything gets way, way harder and there's no upside.
I don't think dissipating heat would be an issue at all. The cost of launch I think is the main bottleneck, but cooling would just be a small overhead on the cost of energy. Not a fundamental problem.
Without eventually moving compute to space we are going to have compute infringe on the space, energy, heat dissipation rights of meatbags. Why welcome that?!?
Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?
I provided the calculation for the pyramidal shape: if the base of a pyramid were a square solar panel with side length L, then for a target temperature of 300K (a typical back of envelope substitute for "room temperature") the height of the pyramid would have to be about 3 times the side length of the square base. Quite reasonable.
> Sure, it occurs, but what does the Stefan–Boltzmann law tell us about GPU clusters in space?
The Stefan-Boltzmann law tells us that whatever prevents us from putting GPU clusters in space, it's not the difficulty in shedding heat by thermal radiation that is supposedly stopping us.
If the base were a solar panel aimed perpendicular to sun, then the tip is facing away and all side triangles faces of the pyramid are in the shade.
I voluntarily give up heat dissipation area on 2 of the 4 triangular sides (just to make calculations easier, if we make them thermally reflective -emissivity 0-, we can't shed heat, but also don't absorb heat coming from lukewarm Earth).
The remaining 2 triangular sides will be large enough that the temperature of the triangular panels is kept below 300 K.
The panels also serve as the cold heat baths, i.e. the thermal sinks for the compute on board.
Not sure what you mean with wings, I intentionally chose a convex shape like a pyramid so that no part of the surface of the pyramid can see another part of the surface, so no self-obstruction for shedding heat etc...
If this doesn't answer your question, feel free to ask a new question so I understand what your actual question is.
The electrical power available for compute will be approximately 20% (efficiency of solar panels) times the area of the square base L ^ 2 times 1360 W / m ^ 2 .
The electrical power thus scales quadratically with the chosen side length, and thus linearly with the area of the square base.
You can prove that the lower efficiency can be managed, and they will still say the only thing they know: "Thermal radiation is not efficient".
as an example my points almost instantly fell down 15 points, but over the last 11 hours it has recuperated back to just a 1 point drop.
it's not because they don't like to write an apology (which I don't ask for) that they aren't secretly happy they learnt something new in physics, and in the end thats what matters to me :)