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Then I had a thought.
Remove all ghost heat and other odd restrictive mechanics like the gauss limitations, etc. Then, give all equipment in this game a power rating (along with all the normal stats). Your engine only generates x amount of wattage.
You can only group-fire an amount of weapons (plus add in all equipment that draws power, like TC, Active probe, ECM, etc) that are equal to or less than your engine's power rating.
If you try to fire more than what your engine can handle you could do one or more of the following:
Not all the weapons you attempted to fire will actually fire ... let's say the weapons with the largest power-draw don't actually fire. If the 2nd largest weapon in the group would still put you over your limit then that one also doesn't fire, and so on until the remaining weapons in the group can fire with the given power draw.
example: You have an engine with rating of 300. Your non-weapon equipment draws 50. You attempt to fire 4 gauss which have a draw of 100 each which would mean you would require 450 to fire everything (4x 100 + 50). Your engine can only handle firing 2 of the gauss plus power your equipment so out of the group of 4 you attempt to fire only 2 actually fire.
On top of that, other downsides could be that maybe your internals take damage.
Or maybe your mech essentially shorts out and briefly shuts down.
This ends up being much more straight forward. You can see from the weapon stats and your engine stats just what combinations of weapons you can fire and you don't have to worry about wonky ghost heat mechanics. This also allows the devs to easily and quickly adjust weapons and/or combinations of weapons by just adjusting individual item power consumption values.
Whether all engines have the same power rating, or the larger the engine the more power ... I'm not sure. Obviously if they vary, you can't give huge engines a very large power-rating boost because then you would have assaults that are still able to lob off 3 or more gauss at a time, etc etc. So the differences would have to be relatively small.
Anyway .. it gets rid of ghost heat (which makes no sense) and at least this method seems somewhat plausible. If you put a jet-ski engine in an aircraft carrier, it can neither move the vessel ... nor power all it's equipment. Same thing here.
Edited by topgun505, 07 August 2014 - 08:58 PM.
