93 replies to this topic

[Vassago Rain]

What you know as heatsinks are actually heat pumps

This is what happens when a setting's 30 years old.

[Hellcat420]

stjobe, on 07 November 2013 - 08:04 AM, said:

You're talking about the heat scale; that's residual heat, i.e. heat that is left over when the heat sinks have done their job. You add up all heat generated, subtract your heat dissipation, and any left over heat is recorded on the heat scale. Next round you suffer any heat penalties your residual heat confer - and then the cycle continues.

Heat capacity of a TT 'mech is the number of single heat sink equivalents (SHSE) it has + 30 (the heat scale); this is how much heat it can generate in a turn without hitting the automatic shutdown limit of the heat scale.

Heat capacity of a MWO 'mech is the number of SHSE it has + 30 + pilot skills (another 20%); this is how much heat it can generate without risking shutdown.


How much heat can a stock AWS-8Q (22 SHS) generate in TT before a non-overridable shutdown?
22 + 30 = 52.

How much heat can the same stock AWS-8Q generate in MWO before an overridable shutdown?
22 + 30 = 52.

Same capacity, although the MWO one can go past the shutdown if the override is pressed (and it will take internal damage from doing so).

The problem in MWO isn't the heat capacity, it's the dissipation which does not match the increased heat generation from raising the rate of fire of all weapons, and the lack of any heat penalties before hitting the cap.


Remember that those numbers are for residual heat as explained above. Before getting to 1 on that scale you had the entirety of your heat sink capacity to cool you.

And I don't share your bleak outlook on how it would affect MWO; getting hit with modifiers to aiming would be quite devastating for poptarts (c.f. jumpjet reticule shake), getting hit with movement penalties would be worse for assaults than for lights, and either way managing your heat is such an integral part of the BattleTech Universe it should be something you get penalized heavily for not doing well.

no, heat capacity is how much residual heat the mech can handle, not how much a mech can dissipate + residual heat. the mech does not "store" dissipated heat, therefore needs no capacity for it. the mech needs heat capacity to handle residual heat.

Edited by Hellcat420, 07 November 2013 - 08:10 AM.

[stjobe]

Hellcat420, on 07 November 2013 - 08:09 AM, said:

no, heat capacity is how much residual heat the mech can handle, not how much a mech can dissipate + residual heat.

All right, I think we're just having a case of differing terminology.

Let's split the difference and call it Total Heat Capacity, which is in your terminology dissipation + residual heat max. THC for MWO and TT is the same, barring pilot skills.

What I call dissipation is perhaps easier understood by dissipation rate; the rate by which the heat sinks lower the current heat; that number is also the same for MWO and TT (at least when you translate them into single heat sink equivalents; MWO still has the abominable 1.4 DHS).

What's not the same in MWO and TT is the rate of heat generation; that's 2-3 times higher in MWO, which means MWO 'mechs run 2-3 times hotter than their TT counterparts.

Also missing is heat penalties below THC, as per TT.

Edited by stjobe, 07 November 2013 - 08:17 AM.

[MustrumRidcully]

The challenges of making real time games from a turn based game.

There is a Clan Mech that has 4 ER PPCs. That means it generates 60 heat per alpha. It also has 30 DHS. That means it is completely heat neutral (as long as it stand stills and no bad things happen to it).

In a real time game, the heat would be generated at some point - 60 heat - and would be slowly dissipated over 10 seconds (assuming we translate the table top turn length of 10 seconds 1:1 on our game). If DHS don't raise heat capacity, this mech would be shut down for about 5 seconds before it gets into the non-overheat zone. That is very far away from a mech that acts heat neutral.

You avoid this by letting heat sinks raise the threshold for shut down (and other heat penalties, if your game has any).

Of course, some would argue that the table top turn only describes a 10 second time span and the rule don't say when something happens inside that time span - so what looks like shooting all guns at once in a turn would also look in a real-time environment like firing all guns over a 10 second time span - this would allow the mech to only slowly gain heat.

Of course, that still leaves the problem of a small amount of heat penalties (if you had any) creeping in where there wouldn't be any in the table top, so you still need to deal with that.

[Bront]

Training Instructor, on 07 November 2013 - 06:24 AM, said:

I've always found this strange, but what's the logic in increasing a mech's heat capacity? Heat capacity is determined by the people who designed and engineered the components of the mech, cooling has no effect on the failure point of components. All heat dissipating devices, such as heat sinks, can do, is work hard to cool components fast enough to prevent them from reaching that failure point in the first place.

Example: The video cards in the computers of most gamers are fairly high end, heat generating monsters. You'll notice that on most of these cards there's a fan and metal fins attached, the metal fins of course are called heat sinks, indicating their prime purpose in the design. The harder load you put on your video card, the more heat it generates, and the more you hear the fan whirring. If the fan fails, or if the ambient operating temperature inside the computer case is too hot, because you're playing in Phoenix in July with no air-conditioning, your GPU will shut itself down once it reaches a heat threshold, at which point the failsafe kicks in and shuts down the card to prevent permanent damage.

If your GPU has a heat tolerance of say, 200 degrees Celsius before the failsafe kicks in to shut it down, adding four more fans and a liquid nitrogen cooling system is not going to do anything to prevent that shutdown if you take some action to send a heat spike to your card. Now, what all those extra fans and heatsinks will do is allow your GPU to cope with high heat over time by preventing it from ever getting near 200 degrees Celsius in the first place. This is dissipation rate, not heat capacity. These devices do not allow the card to operate at 201 degrees Celsius, they only help prevent it from ever reaching the temperature.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I think heat sinks increasing the heat cap is a ridiculous idea.

p.s. Yes, I know giant stompy robots is also a ridiculous idea.

I get your arguement, but I've got a counter arguement for you.

Think of Heatsinks not simply as a computer fan, but also a water cooling system with tank. SO, adding a heatsink adds not only an extra fan and radiator, but also increases the reservoir of water available to store heat to be cooled. Since 20 gallons of water can hold more heat than 10 gallons, heat capacity was increased. And, since 2 radiators can disperse heat faster than 1, cooling was also increased.

So, think of heat capacity as a % till the mech is at heat tolerances, and adding a heat sink is like adding a cooling radiator and additional coolant reservoir to the mech.

Note: This post in no means says that I agree with how the heat system is constructed. It is simply a way to show how it could logically work this way.

[Hellcat420]

Heat sinks, which sharing names with real world passive radiators found in computers, are actually complete heat pumps, not "true" heat sinks in the engineering sense ^[1][2]. They serve as a BattleMech's means of protecting itself from internal damage caused by heat, as most 'Mechs' weapons easily cause enough heat to fry the machine's own electronics or melt its metallic muscles, the myomers that make 'Mechs possible.
Heat sinks operate by collecting heat with coolant distributed to heat sources (weapons, engines, myomers, electronics, etc.) and delivering that to a radiator. Because a BattleMech may operate in environments considerably hotter than the interior of the 'Mech, the system includes a heat pump to "force" the heat out of the 'Mech by elevating the temperature of the coolant in some reversible fashion. (The vapor-compression heat pump of home air conditioners is a typical example, but 31st Century BattleMechs may make use of more exotic heat pumps.)
Note that if the heat sinks were true heat sinks or simple combustion engine radiators, a BattleMech operating in a hot environment would find the exterior heat being driven into the BattleMech rather than having internal heat rejected.
BattleMechs generally have two types of heat sinks: those mounted in the fusion engine and those mounted elsewhere on the chassis. The chassis-mounted heat sinks perform as described above, while the engine-mounted heat sinks constitute a "regenerative cooling" system that scavenges excess heat for power.

[Color Blotch]

Training Instructor, on 07 November 2013 - 06:24 AM, said:

Example: The video cards in the computers of most gamers are fairly high end, heat generating monsters. You'll notice that on most of these cards there's a fan and metal fins attached, the metal fins of course are called heat sinks, indicating their prime purpose in the design. The harder load you put on your video card, the more heat it generates, and the more you hear the fan whirring. If the fan fails, or if the ambient operating temperature inside the computer case is too hot, because you're playing in Phoenix in July with no air-conditioning, your GPU will shut itself down once it reaches a heat threshold, at which point the failsafe kicks in and shuts down the card to prevent permanent damage.

If your GPU has a heat tolerance of say, 200 degrees Celsius before the failsafe kicks in to shut it down, adding four more fans and a liquid nitrogen cooling system is not going to do anything to prevent that shutdown if you take some action to send a heat spike to your card. Now, what all those extra fans and heatsinks will do is allow your GPU to cope with high heat over time by preventing it from ever getting near 200 degrees Celsius in the first place. This is dissipation rate, not heat capacity. These devices do not allow the card to operate at 201 degrees Celsius, they only help prevent it from ever reaching the temperature.

Heat capacity isn't the same thing as temperature tolerance. Heat capacity is how much heat you need to transfer to a body to raise its temperature by given value in degrees. Different bodies require different amounts of heat to get to the same temperature.


For example if you take an empty electric kettle and turn it on it will heat up to 100 degrees Celsius in a matter of seconds. On the other hand heating the same kettle to 100 degrees when it's filled with water will take several minutes. Heat generated in both cases is exactly the same. The difference is that water adds a lot of heat capacity to the system as whole, so that it takes a lot more heat (energy) to get to the same temperature point.


It works the same way in case of mechs and heat sinks. Heat sinks have some heat capacity of their own. When connected to the rest of the mech, heat capacity of additional heat sinks is added to the overall heat capacity of that mech. It takes more heat to raise mech's temperature to the critical point with more heat sinks on board. The only arbitrary thing about BT's (and MWO's) handling of heat sinks is that raise in heat capacity and heat dissipation are perfectly symmetrical, which shouldn't necessarily be the case (although isn't impossible either).

[Vodrin Thales]

Hellcat420, on 07 November 2013 - 07:29 AM, said:

no, mwo heat capacity is not even close to tabletop. tabletop heatcapacity is 30. it never increases or drops, because in tt heatsinks only increase heat dissipation. heatsinks dissipate 1 heat(or 2 in the case of double heatsinks) every 10 seconds(which is equal to each turn).some people just cant get their head around the fact that this is not an increase of heat capacity, its translating realtime heat dissipation into turnbased system.

TT heat capacity is not 30. Because heat dissipation and heat generation both occur before calculating heat penalties, heat capacity in TT is actually 30 + the number of single heat sinks, or 30+ twice the number of double heat sinks. This is what MWO is trying to emulate.

[Captain Stiffy]

CapperDeluxe, on 07 November 2013 - 06:30 AM, said:

I would definitely encourage the devs to consider some changes to the current heat system. First and foremost is getting rid of the ghost heat penalties, it was a bandaid not a long term solution.

After that they can play around with having heat sinks not increase capacity and only dissipate, maybe even make it so weapons build up a certain small % less heat as you increase heat sink quantity. I'm sure there's plenty of things they could play around with to make it more interesting.

Oh please. Please give me back my 6 PPC stalker. Please oh please oh please....

[Hellcat420]

Vodrin Thales, on 07 November 2013 - 08:34 AM, said:

TT heat capacity is not 30. Because heat dissipation and heat generation both occur before calculating heat penalties, heat capacity in TT is actually 30 + the number of single heat sinks, or 30+ twice the number of double heat sinks. This is what MWO is trying to emulate.

dude the reason heat dissipation is calculated before heat penalties is because mechs do not store dissipated heat, the heatsinks pump the dissipated heat out of the mech. only the residual heat builds up in the mech.

[Vodrin Thales]

Hellcat420, on 07 November 2013 - 08:40 AM, said:

dude the reason heat dissipation is calculated before heat penalties is because mechs do not store dissipated heat, the heatsinks pump the dissipated heat out of the mech. only the residual heat builds up in the mech.

Right, but since that does not happen in MWO, we need to have increased heat capacity to simulate that effect.

[Taemien]

Short answer, it makes the Clan players whine less when their ER weapons generate tons of heat. If they set it to 30 heat max before shutdown, even without ghost heat, you'd only be able to fire 2-3 of their weapons in a short amount of time, never mind at the same time.

You all have to remember something. They are correlating the heatscale from the TT, not emulating it. Need a source? Look at weapon cooldowns. None of the weapons simulate the TT versions in DPS or HPS.

There needed to be a max heat threshold and they decided on 30 because TT did it. Not because they wanted to emulate the heatscale from TT. Its why we don't have those OTHER heat effects on that table.

Think about it this way. You're piloting a CPLT and fire 4 medium lasers. Do you seriously want to go down to 20kph for 4-5 seconds every time you fire those weapons? That makes no sense. That doesn't happen in Lore, and it doesn't happen in TT. Why should it happen here?

Should it happen if you do it 4 times in a row? Absolutely, and they've said they would add such effects.

Why do we have ghost heat? To prevent heat neutral energy boats. PGI decided that if non-energy weapons have to manage ammo (there's more to managing ammo than simply dumping criticals and tonnage to it, unlike heatsinks), then energy weapons should have to manage heat. This community is utterly incapable of thinking outside the box with mixed loadouts and managing heat it seems. But they'll cling to something for months and have nothing to show for it.

Seriously guys, if PGI doesn't revert or change something in a month, they won't ever change it. Look at ECM. Yeah.. they moved it to its own hardpoint just to appease you all. But it was going to be done anyway (read the early early posts before it was introduced), they just made it sound like you all had a part. And in the desire to get any sort of dev attention, you all ate it up. Sneaky move on their part? Maybe, but I'd have done the same thing.

I don't put alot of weight into what the community says or claims. Mainly because they drone on and on about how this or that is game breaking. And I don't see the game breaking effects when I play the game. I also see these same people threatening to quit months ago, still here.. and now with Overlord tags.

So either you all have some major battered wives' syndrome, are trolling, or just want attention.

Some of you have some interesting ideas, some of you even have real concerns. We all know this game isn't perfect. But to insult the devs yet still pay them money and play their game makes very little sense. You want to stick it to the man, don't pay them. Don't become a statistic that shows how successful the game you hate so much is. And don't come at me with this dramatic BS about hanging around for the franchise. If it fails, let it fail, someone else will pick it up.

There's a couple of options here. Man up and adapt like real gamers used to a decade ago or take your money elsewhere (if you honestly think its that gamebreaking, there's nothing wrong with that, I personally wouldn't think any less of you for it, not that you should care, but who knows). Cluttering up these forums with topic after topic isn't getting you all anywhere. You KNOW this, so why keep at it?

[stjobe]

ASCII-art time!

Here's the TT and MWO heat capacities (or Total Heat Capacity, i.e. the heat a 'mech can generate before overheating) for 10 single heat sinks and 20 single heat sinks:

TT:

            0         10         20          30
----------------------------------------------
|Heat Sinks |       Residual Heat Scale       |
----------------------------------------------

                      0         10         20          30
--------------------------------------------------------
|     Heat Sinks      |       Residual Heat Scale       |
--------------------------------------------------------

MWO:

0           10        20         30          40
----------------------------------------------
|Heat Sinks |              +30                |
----------------------------------------------
0%          25%       50%        75%         100%

0         10         20          30         40         50
--------------------------------------------------------
|     Heat Sinks      |                +30              |
--------------------------------------------------------
0%            25%          50%           75%           100%

See how they're the same? The only difference is that MWO numbers the bar 0-100 from left to right, whereas TT puts 30 on the right and lets 0 be at the intersection where your # of heat sinks meets the residual heat scale.

Edited by stjobe, 07 November 2013 - 08:47 AM.

[Khobai]

Quote

I've always found this strange, but what's the logic in increasing a mech's heat capacity? Heat capacity is determined by the people who designed and engineered the components of the mech, cooling has no effect on the failure point of components. All heat dissipating devices, such as heat sinks, can do, is work hard to cool components fast enough to prevent them from reaching that failure point in the first place.

Makes perfect sense to me. More volume means more heat can be absorbed and more surface area means more heat can be dissipated.

The real question is why doesnt an Atlas have higher capacity and dissipation than a Jenner? The Atlas has more volume for heat absorption and more surface area for more efficient cooling. Oh right because its a game and everything doesnt always have to make sense.

Im not saying the heat system isnt flawed, just that your reasoning for why its flawed is silly. Its a very poorly implemented translation of battletech's heatscale, you dont have to try that hard to find the faults in it.

Edited by Khobai, 07 November 2013 - 09:16 AM.

[Taemien]

stjobe, on 07 November 2013 - 08:42 AM, said:

See how they're the same? The only difference is that MWO numbers the bar 0-100 from left to right, whereas TT puts 30 on the right and lets 0 be at the intersection where your # of heat sinks meets the residual heat scale.

Interesting, I almost wonder how many complaints would have been ceased if they simply showed how much heat you generated in game rather than a percentage. I think many players don't seem to make the correlation.


Also one thing I wanted to point out earlier to those making realism arguments. Lets forget about what heatsinks are in the lore. In game terms they make your heat go down. Period. It doesn't matter how they do it, they just do it.

In a computer game it works like this: Heat Level is 30 - 30 heat = no heat. Doesn't care if its a radiator, a pump, or magic. 30-30=0

Edited by Taemien, 07 November 2013 - 09:08 AM.

[Almond Brown]

WarWrecker, on 07 November 2013 - 08:03 AM, said:

PGI please remove ghost heat and put this in instead

Agreed. Oh and can I get my set of 2D6's in Candy Apple Green... please.

[Almond Brown]

stjobe, on 07 November 2013 - 08:04 AM, said:

stuff

And I don't share your bleak outlook on how it would affect MWO; getting hit with modifiers to aiming would be quite devastating for poptarts (c.f. jumpjet reticule shake), getting hit with movement penalties would be worse for assaults than for lights, and either way managing your heat is such an integral part of the BattleTech Universe it should be something you get penalized heavily for not doing well.

Agreed. That is the case in MWO now and why everyone apparently hates Ghost Heat. It punishes reckless firing practices, same as that scale does in TT.

Major difference. Between turns you got time to calculate, to the exact point, the residual heat penalty you would face when your turn ended. In MWO and its much faster pace, most pilots have no idea, even after having overheated 9 times in a row, what pulling the trigger will do, other than make it SD #10.

That is not a problem with the game, nor its Heat System. It is the Players fault and they will never take true responsibility to actually Pilot their Mechs within the confines of their Builds. Unless of course they run mostly Ballistics, which then relieves them from most of that burden. Oh wait...

And so the Mulberry Bush is rounded yet again. Can we switch to Musical Chairs please, I need to sit the **** down.

Edited by Almond Brown, 07 November 2013 - 09:57 AM.

[Joseph Mallan]

Almond Brown, on 07 November 2013 - 09:36 AM, said:

Agreed. Oh and can I get my set of 2D6's in Candy Apple Green... please.

Dude, I want my Clan Wolf 2d6 back!

Edited by Joseph Mallan, 07 November 2013 - 09:49 AM.

[Almond Brown]

Hellcat420, on 07 November 2013 - 08:04 AM, said:

yes it would be fun, and it would make piloting mechs actually feel more like piloting a mech, and less like playing call of robots.

Surely you jest. So at 50% heat you move at -30% of max? LOL! Sounds great on paper, or the Kitchen Table but you may be surprised when your crossing open turf.

P.S. If your plan was to add a -.05% penalty increments then please don't bother. That is simply BS make-no busy work at its worse. The Dev have much more important **** to do.

[Khobai]

Quote

managing your heat is such an integral part of the BattleTech Universe it should be something you get penalized heavily for not doing well.

The heat system in battletech isnt penalization in a strict sense though. Its designed to be more of a tradeoff. Your mech can choose to suffer penalties in exchange for pushing the heat threshold. If it was just penalization, you wouldnt be getting anything in return, but youre getting the ability to fire weapons past the normal limit.

MWO doesnt make heat a tradeoff. Exceeding your heat threshold has no penalties whatsoever until you get to 100%. That's one of the major flaws in MWO's heat system. The other major flaw is that the ratio of heat generation and heat dissipation are way off. For some reason, PGI has the warped notion that heat neutrality is the devil, but somehow convergence is perfectly okay?!

This is how they should fix the heat scale:

1) eliminate/reduce convergence so heat no longer needs to be strangled as an artificial means of limiting damage.
2) increase heat dissipation rate significantly.
3) implement negative status effects when certain heat % are reached (including movement penalties and RNG cone of fire penalties on aiming).

Edited by Khobai, 07 November 2013 - 10:07 AM.