Arnold Carns, on 07 March 2012 - 06:56 AM, said:
That isn't quite correct!!
In the Solaris VII 'Mech Duel Rules the Heat Sinks were just as effective as the TT ones. 1 Standard Heat Sink dissipated 1 Heat Point in a 2,5 second game turn, and a Double Heat Sink 2. That would make them four times as effective as the TT HS, but because the weapons generated four times the heat of the TT heat values it had been evened out to 1:1.
The only difference is that you could fire some weapons more often due to decay rules (which also included high risks of overheating and destroying a weapon due to not let it entirely cool down).
How did Solaris VII rules address overheating and shutdown/ammo explosion risks? I'd imagine the tables would need some adjustment...
Tilon, on 07 March 2012 - 10:05 AM, said:
Most people on this topic have completely missed the point.
Heat sinks are not merely heat pumps. They would also include a heat exchanger that absorbs and holds heat.
My solution is 100% true to the board game standards. That is not debatable. Take any mech from the board game and apply my rules to it, and it will work the same on the board as it does in real time.
What is NOT the standard are the people on this thread insisting that mechs overheat with one alpha strike even with a ton of heat sinks.
That. Is. Ridiculous.
I heard one person say "A clan mech couldn't fire 4 ER PPCs with 20 double heat sinks!"
4 ER PPCs is 60 heat. 20 DHS is 40 heat.
So yes, he would overheat to 20 heat.
If you don't like how heatsinks work, say so. But stating that heatsinks only increase the rate of cooling and do not increase the buffer of available excess heat, is quite simply wrong from both a rules and common sense standpoint.
I keep hearing this about 'spike heat': Are you saying an 80 ton, heavily armed, well built mech should not be able to fire the weaponry it is designed to handle? That putting 40+ heat worth of weaponry on a mech should NEVER be efficiently feasible, no matter how many heatsinks you use?
If your position is that a well built mech that intentionally builds itself to handle the heat it generates (sacrificing armor, speed, jumpjets to do so) should still not be able to fire its weapons except inefficiently, say so.
You are operating under the asumption that heat sinks instantaneously dissipate heat before it is absorbed into the cooling system of a 'mech. This is not true of how cooling systems work in the real world, and I think it's taking some liberties with the BT ruleset, as well.
Wraeththix Constantine, on 07 March 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:
Heat sinks in MW are like buckets with holes in the bottom. Taking the original example. when you fire 4 PPCs, and you have 40 heat sinks, your 40 heat sinks soak up 40 buckets of heat INSTANTLY. Then, over the progress of the round, heat leaks out the bottom of the bucket, and they're ready to go.
If you ran that round, then 2 buckets worth of heat are still sloshing around your chassis. At the start of the next round, two heat sinks "fill up" and you have space for another 38.
This is not actually all that astoundingly different than real life. If it wasn't like this, your CPU would die in a few seconds. If you have any doubts on this, pull off your heatsink while your computer while it's under load. You'd be surprised how fast it will cough up on you. It doesn't, "gently transfer" the heat from the core to the IHS to your heatsink/water-block. The heat is distributed almost instantly, assuming you have good TIM in place.
The MW series has always done heat wrong. The issue is, in the MW series, it assumes that the heat lives inside the mech, and that the heat sinks are "bailing" it out, like a sailor on a leaking ship. Instead, the heat "lives" in the heatsinks and the weapons. It isn't until the heat has to go somewehre ELSE that it starts effecting the rest of the mech.
Water cool your computer. You'll learn a lot about how heat disipation works.
You don't understand how cooling systems work. It takes time for heat to be absorbed from weapons/engine into a cooling medium, then that heat needs to exchanged to the heat sinks/exchangers in order to be removed from the system. Realistically, that cannot be an instantaneous process.
Now, it is true that heat sinks will continually be removing heat from the system (until it cools to an equilibrium point), but the way heat sinks are rated is by their capacity to dissipate a certain quantity of thermal energy over a certain period of time - however the hell much "1 point" is supposed to represent. Looking at old TT rules, everything is measured in 10s windows, wherein certain activities generate heat, and heat sinks dissipate heat. Everything in that window of time is sort of a "black box" - you input actions, results are generated at the end. The details in the middle are glossed over. In a real thermodynamic system, though, the fact that I may be able to dissipate, say, 6 kJ of heat every minute doesn't mean I should expect to dump all 6 kJ in at once and not overload the system.
Looking at your water-cooled computer analogy, the CPU is the weapon system, the heat sink is the heat exchanger between the weapon and the 'mech's coolant system, and the fluid in the water-coolant system is the 'mech's coolant system, and whatever external radiator/heat exchanger is hooked up to that coolant system would represent the 'mech's heat sinks. So cooling one CPU that produces heat at a fairly steady rate (some peaks and dips) shouldn't be an issue with a properly rated cooling system - it's like single-firing a weapon on a 'mech, no problem. But if you, say, hooked up multiple CPUs to that same cooling system, then craked them up as fast tas they'd go, they might overload the cooling system, and begin frying your system components - not instantly, but one the coolant medium got too high in temperature dissipate heat from each CPU at a fast enough rate.
Now, of course, on the flip side, the logic of saying that all the heat from the weapons enters the 'mechs coolant system instantaneously is also wrong. There has to be some rate of output from each weapon into the coolant system (so long as the coolant is cooler than the weapon), and some rate of at which heat is transferred by convection throughout the coolant medium, and a rate of output at which the 'mech's heat sinks dissipate that heat into the outside environment. If we simplify this by just looking at the inputs and outputs to the 'mech's cooling system, and take the example of aplha-striking with a Masakari prime, and assume that each heat sink is outputting .1 heat per second, and that each cERPPC is pumping 1.5 heat/s into the system, we see something like this:
Now, truthfully, unless the 'mech is submerged, the efficiency of the heat transfer from the cERPPCs into the liquid cooling medium should be more efficient than the transfer from the heat sinks into the surrounding atmospher through convection, perhaps acting at twice the rate of the heat sinks, as per how heat sinks work on a submerged 'mech. So the coolant system still loses heat at .1 points/s per heat sink, but now the cERPPC is introducing 3 points/s into the system, until the cERPPC cools.
Now, here's an additional thought: Thus far we've been assuming each cERPPC has a "heat pump" which lets it push heat into the 'mech's system. But what if it doesn't, and instead only exchanges heat when the coolant temp is lower than the weapon temp? Here we risk more damage to the weapon, while the 'mech is somewhat protected (more like your liquid cooled computer analogy).
Thus far, of course, we've assumed the PPC can only fire once every 10s. What if we assume a shorter interval, say 7.5s, but the same cooling rates?
And lastly, another look at case our 2nd case, but firing PPCs in pairs, compared against firing by alpha-strike:
Fecal, on 07 March 2012 - 12:33 PM, said:
Didn't Mechwarrior 2 take this into account? Hence the need to constantly flush coolant? (I haven't played it in 10 years) It seems much wonkier in MW4 (I don't remember how MW3 worked).
MW2 didn't have a "coolant flush". That was a poor addition used in MW3/MW4.
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