Hot topics? Cool questions? thermal, thermal-control, heat, heat-flow, cooling, sub-cooled, liquid-cooled tags; is there room for some consolidation?

Question

• thermal: 96 questions

How heat affects spacecraft and space missions, or materials and methods to deal with heat.

• thermal-control: 67 questions

Questions about heat management in spacecraft

• heat: 61 questions:

Questions about issues related to heat and temperature, and situations where heat (too much or too little) is the primary issue. Examples include heat management in spacecraft and heat used for power generation using the flow of thermal energy from a source to a sink.

• heat-flow: 10 questions

...has no usage guidance, can you help us create it?

• cooling: 25 questions

...has no usage guidance, can you help us create it?

• sub-cooled: 15 questions

Cooling liquid propellants well below their boiling point - increases density and other benefits.

• liquid-cooled: 7 questions

...has no usage guidance, can you help us create it?

• Some of these need usage guidance

• Some of these may be too specific or overlap too much with other tags

Question: Is there room for some tag consolidation here?

Answer 1

Seems like thermal should be merged and synonymized with heat, and cooling should be merged and synonymized with thermal-control.

I'm less certain on the others. More than a few users found them useful, so they should probably stay as is.

Answer 2

Ugh, it's a mess.

Looks like there are a few basic topics covered by these:

• rocket engine cooling
• propellant densification via "sub-cooling"
• steady-state spacecraft and habitat thermal management
• atmospheric heating on ascent and reentry

I feel like thermal, thermal-control, heat, and heat-flow could all be merged into thermal-control, but the usage is pretty inconsistent across those topics.