1
In TT, for those of you who aren't familiar with the system, a mech can tolerate 30 points of heat before it blows up. Your heat sinks form a "reserve" - if you have 10 heat sinks, you can fire 10 heat in weapons and not have your heat increase. If you fire 11 points of heat, you'd then have 1 point of heat on the heat scale. If you fired 40 points of heat you'd explode.
In MWO, we have a heat system that attempts to mimic this by increasing a mech's maximum heat capacity according to the number of heat sinks it carries. Mechs start out with 30, then get +1 for every single heat sink, +2 for every DHS in the engine and +1.4 for every DHS outside the engine. So a mech running a 250 engine with DHS would have a heat cap of 50.
My idea is to modify the MWO system with a hybrid TT system.
Basically, all mechs would have a max heat of 30 points, like TT. They also have a "reserve" that replenishes over 10 seconds (the current heat cycle in MWO - SHS dissipate 1 unit of heat over 10 seconds). For every SHS the mech has, the reserve is increase by 1 point - every engine DHS gives +2, every other DHS gives +1.4.
Mechs then have two heat bars: one, the overheating bar, is the same as the current bar - as you fire weapons, it increases. If it hits 100% you shut down. The other is the reserve bar, it starts out at 100% and decreases as you fire weapons. When it hits 0% your weapons generate heat.
For example: I fire 3 PPC in an AWS-8Q. Since I have 28 heat sinks, I have a reserve capacity of 28 heat. 3 PPCs generate 24 heat, so my reserve capacity is reduced to 14%. My heat bar is still at 0%.
The PPCs take 3 seconds to recharge. During this time, the reserve refills by 30% (3 seconds recharge / 10 second cycle) giving 8.4 points of heat reserve. Heat generated is still at 0%.
I fire my 3 PPCs again (another 24 heat points). My reserve absorbs 12.4 heat (4 left over from the first barrage, + 8.4 from the recharge). The remaining 11.6 heat transfers into my heat bar, causing my heat bar to rocket to 38%.
I fire my 3 PPCs a third time. During their recharge time:
- The reserve has regenerated 8.4 points
- My heat has decreased from 38% (11.6 points) to 11% (3.2 points) due to the action of my 28 single heat sinks.
In the current MWO system, the Awesome in this example would be at 95% heat.
The advantage of my suggested system is that is prevent boating of large energy weapons. For example, a 6 PPC stalker using the suggested heat system would shut down after the second barrage, having generated roughly 59 heat (or almost 200% the max heat of 30). This is compared to the 6 PPC stalker currently, which only generates 150% of the max.
If there was a recharge delay on the heat reserve (IE: if you make it hit 0%, it takes X seconds to start refilling) it would promote more careful heat management because as long as you have some reserve in your mech you basically have faster cooling, but you need to be careful not to exhaust the reserve. On the other hand, if you're willing to go through slower cooling you can fire more often. Having a recharge delay would further discourage high-heat alphas as well.
TL;DR: The proposed system is not vastly different from the existing system. It basically allows for mechs to cool faster, and discourages using builds that have high-heat alphas (such as 6 PPC or LL).
