Can crossbow work in space?

Space doesn't have a temperature. Objects IN space do.
If you're far from the Sun or in the shadow of a planet, you'll eventually cool down to 5 or 6 degrees absolute.

An object in space will decrease its temperature to zero due to the thermal emission. This user is right

You're not though, don't say things will cool down to zero. You should know that's a bad thing to say.

Yeah, whatever, "close to zero".

Close to zero and zero are two very different things it's not whatever. Especially when informing someone else.
Don't be a brainlet.

Like how pi is close to three?

Wouldn't it take a while for the object to radiate all of it's heat?

Yes. The cool down will be slow. And it will get slower the colder the object gets.
Consider an object on the surface of the Moon. A rock. It'll go from a few hundred above zero to a few hundred below during the two weeks it spends in the dark.
If you step out the airlock and fire within an hour or two, you shouldn't have a problem.

A spacecraft near Pluto will eventually reach a temperature similar to Pluto's if it doesn't have an internal heat source. Between stars, a ship will reach equilibrium with the cosmic microwave background, about 2.7 degrees Kelvin.

>Can crossbow work in space?
Nothing with the physics of it wouldn't work in space. Projectile probably wouldn't be as accurate since arrows and bolts have stabilizing vanes on them that keep it straight and even cause it to rifle a little. Without that they'd just tumble end over end.
Also the materials would matter, space is pretty hard on things. I don't know how well wood would hold up, it would probably outgas a lot and become brittle. Rubber and plastic dont't do super great either (think about a car that sits in the hot sun all the time, and what happens to all the non metal parts like door and window seals, and glue that holds things on). You've got to be careful with metal because little bits can cold weld together really easily.
But if I were going to have a space crossbow I'd go full wookie and get a bowcaster, which is pretty much an electromagnetic crossbow/rail gun

So the crossbow will actually get extremely warm due to oncoming radiation from the Sun unless it's far away and/or in shadow.

If you build it out of materials with BCC crystalline structure it will never reach Tg.

Cooling to zero is the same as cooling infinitesimally close to zero.

If you are near the Earth, the crossbow (and other objects) will reach approximately the same temperature as the Earth (which would be around zero centigrade if we didn't have a little greenhouse effect from our atmosphere. A LITTLE bit of greenhouse is a good thing.)
A shiny object will be somewhat warmer (not a lot) than Earth, but it'll take longer for the temperature to change.

As you move around the Solar System, radiation equilibrium temperature (the absolute temperature) will vary as the inverse square root of your distance from the Sun. It also depends a little on the shape of the object but you can usually ignore that unless you have a very odd shape.

>If you are near the Earth, the crossbow (and other objects) will reach approximately the same temperature as the Earth (which would be around zero centigrade if we didn't have a little greenhouse effect from our atmosphere.

This is simply not true. Rather it will be like says and it will be having a highly differentiating heat depending on if its in the sun or not

Ion drive fletching.

Interesting, considering I wrote BOTH and .
I said "near the Earth" in the latter post. I assumed readers were smart enough to interpret that as "about the same distance from the Sun as the Earth is, but not in the shadow of the planet."
Guess I was wrong. Never underestimate the intelligence of Veeky Forums readers

No, there is no air to push against, therefore the reaction chain is impossible.

That would be fucking dope.

nice autism, autist.
How many times do you fap to cartoons per day?

If you believe in global warming, why are you still emitting CO2?

who pulls the trigger?
also newton laws

Shooting stuff? sure,stabilising the arrow/bolt would be different, tho. You don't have air for the fins to work, but you also son't have air to cause turbulence

Ever spend a night in the desert?
It gets cold af really quickly. And that's with an atmosphere to retain the heat.
Yes, space is cold.
Ever been in the desert on a sunny day? Yes, being in sunlight is hot.
Space suits circulate coolant to even out the temperatures within them.

You're wrong though. Objects in Earth orbit get hella hot, like over 100C in the sun. 'S why everything's painted white ya dumdum. In the shade it'd eventually get to the background temp plus whatever it absorbs that Earth radiates out, if it were in the shade for long enough ie more than half an hour or whatever the ISS gets.

this
with no GHGs earth is 15 deg C cooler but with no atmosphere at all earth is hot as fuck (on the day side)

Not with normal arrows. The weight needs to be distributed like that of a rocket. Otherwise, it will flip end over end eventually.

no, there is no air for stabilized flight, so when you shoot the bolt will spin. So crossbow will not work in space.

It would either need to be spin stabilized or the whole set up would have to be machined to extreme precision, the bolt and the crossbow would both have to be this way. A regular bow and arrow would always be unstable

This, the material would need to be able to resist fatigue from thermal change, not just cold but the extremes of both

>see that as a crossbow spaceship in the thumbnail
>start imagining these things launching giant metal poles into planets like a targeted meteor strike
This was more epic in my head than what that actually was.

Guns work so I don't see why crossbows wouldn't.

White objects absorb sunlight poorly, but they also radiate heat away slowly. A white object will get hotter than a darker one but it will take longer. So you want white if you're going to be subject to alternating periods darkness and intense sunlight. It promotes stability.

Spacecraft are painted for temperature control. Explorer One (pictured) spun on its long axis and had stripes. When the launch date was pushed back a few days, the satellite had to be repainted to accommodate the revision in expected sunlight.

Worlds (without internal heating like Jupiter) come to thermal equilibrium. If you built a small model of the Earth with the same albedo and set it in orbit around the Sun at the same distance, but not near enough to the actual Earth to be shadowed, it would come to the same temperature as Earth.

Earth would, overall, be cooler without the greenhouse effect. Correct. Of course, the day side is hotter but things don't stay on the day side. The atmosphere also serves to ameliorate the variation. As noted, deserts cool down quickly at night. A shallow dish of water, if protected from the wind, will freeze solid even though the air temperature remains well above 0 centigrade. It's radiating heat into interstellar space!

A small, thin object like an arrow doesn't need to worry about fatigue. Conduction evens out its "day" and "night" sides.

The crossbow would work fine.
The arrow however would almost certainly tumble, because there's no atmosphere to act on the feathers to correct for a lacking and necessary perfectly axial force during release.

could you fix this by having a free sliding weight on the bolt that shifts its weight to the back after firing?

Why would that help?

It seems it would. The bolt would be traveling forward but the reverse traveling weight would act like some kind of gyroscope resisting the bolt rotating

Either I'm badly misunderstanding you, or you're confused about how physics works. Moving the centre of mass of the bolt backwards won't stop it from rotating.