'Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!'
There was one minor upside to running the molten sodium at above the rated temperature: Heat rejection through the heat sink wings was more efficient. Much more efficient. Heat flow via infrared radiation into the cold, black background of space went up with the fourth power of the temperature of the sodium . . . and yet, there was no such thing as a free lunch. If running the sodium loop hot had been without tradeoffs, then the Mackenzies who had designed the Gnon Does Battle would have just designed it to run its sodium loop at this higher temperature all of the time. But the "hot sodium" lunch was not free—it came with costs, extreme ones. At temperatures over 600°C even minute amounts of oxygen and carbon dissolved in the sodium—less than one part in a hundred thousand—would begin reacting with the pipe walls and dissolving the steel. This could have been worked around, of course, with extra purification of the working fluid, or with the use of esoteric (and very expensive) alloys in the pipes, or a dozen other approaches. But every dollar spent on optimizing for an unlikely edge case was a dollar not spent elsewhere, and Mackenzies were instinctually and continuously aware of opportunity costs in the same way that the Gnon Does Battle was aware of thermodynamics.
But don't fool yourself that just because you endorse one argument there's not a counterargument." "Well, I know there's a counterargument. 'We don't want to.' But it's stupid, and no one could honestly—" Jim turned to his son, suddenly serious. "Don't ever do that." "Do what?" "Assume that your enemies are stupid. They're not. People on the other side of political debates are, on net, as smart as you are, and there's always a good counterargument to your own position." He saw Will about to object, and pressed on. "I'm not saying you should do that to be charitable to your enemies; I'm saying it so that you don't handicap yourself." "Huh?" "If you say, 'There can't possibly be a good argument' and stop thinking, you're choosing to keep yourself ignorant—which can bite you in the ass later. Better to assume your enemies are smart, try to figure out their best possible stance. It's the intellectual equivalent of 'the more sweat on the training field, the less blood on the battlefield,' which I know you've heard from your sergeants."