Heat neutrality in tabletop, is being at 0 heat at the end of a turn even after you fired your weapons. That's fire once, and in 10 seconds you're at zero again.
Say you generate 10 heat. With ten heatsinks you'd be at 0 again in 10 seconds, losing heat at a rate of 1 heat per second. (10 heatsinks / 10 = 0.1 cooling per second per heatsink).
For MWO, to be heat neutral you'd have to be at zero when you fire again. Don't think we'll have a problem with regular tank designs being truly heat neutral, except with the AC/20 build (as you can only fire once every 4 seconds) so it'd be easy to be heat neutral.
An AC/20 generates 6 heat once every 4 seconds in MWO. To be heat neutral you'd have to sink 6 heat within 4 seconds. That'd be 1.5 heat per second. 15 SHS would keep you heat neutral with only an AC/20 in a period of 4 seconds. If you had 2 AC/20s, you'd need 30 SHS to be heat neutral within time to fire again.
A medium laser in MWO generates 4 heat over the span of 1 second with a wait time of 3 (so in reality, it has a slow heat build up over 1 second, but basically once every 4 seconds you fire so for simplicity we'll say 4 heat per shot). AC/20 + medium laser and every 4 seconds you'd need to have 20 SHS or 10 DHS to keep heat neutral.
Now if that medium laser fired 1 second faster... That's 4 heat every 3 seconds + 6 heat every 4 seconds. So at the smallest interval we could measure this is 6, 8, or 12..
At 6 seconds we'd have generated 14 heat.
At 8 seconds we'd have generated 20 heat (second AC/20 + 2 ML shots).
At 12, we've fired the AC/20 3 times and the ML 4 times. That's 18 in AC/20 heat and 12 in ML heat.
To sink that heat we'd need 30 heatsinks and then we'd need up until 14 seconds to make sure it's all sunken to 0 (which we'd need that time as in order to sink the heat, we must first make the heat. Even at a rate of 3 heat sunken per second [basically the ML heat would be almost completely dissipated the moment the beam stopped], an AC/20 spikes your heat by 6 instantly, requiring 2 seconds minimum after firing it to cool to zero). By then we'll be ready to fire another ML.
So heat neutrality is a difficult thing to accomplish, and in doing so you've made sacrifices in what you could have carried. Say more lasers, more PPCs, more missiles, etc. At least you'll have a decent engine.
Edited by Koniving, 12 August 2013 - 10:46 PM.
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Roosterfish, on 12 August 2013 - 08:25 PM, said:
