Does This Heat Mechanic Sound More Fun?

Nightbird, on 13 December 2018 - 01:40 PM, said:

No more overheat shutdown when over 100% heat. When >100% heat, your mech gets a -2% to agility/top speed for every 1% over 100 heat. Basically, at 110% heat, you'll get -20% to agility and top speed. At >=150% heat, your agility and speed drop to 0 and all weapons are frozen, you're basically a smoldering statue. Scale the damage from overheating down by 90%, linearly scaled to the heat over 100% again, so overheat death is much rarer.

Normally, the trigger becomes blocked when over 100% heat, but override gets rid of that.

Shutting down does not mitigate overheat damage anymore.

I think this system is more casual friendly and lore accurate. If you consider all the affected scenarios, the penalties for accidentally overheating is greatly decreased compared to today, and the ways to abuse going over 100% today are also reduced (free big alpha and shutdown to avoid damage, or overriding to 250% and beyond to suicide)

Penny for your thoughts

Honest opinion? I like it better than what we have. Though most people pushing the overheat limit are not really concerned with being able to move quickly in the first place, so it would be exploited more than you think.

Honest fact: It will never happen and has no chance of even being considered unless we also have "slow down" in water and with it, actual variable gravity instead of the current somewhere between 3 and 4 times earth gravity. (Big things going up in the air do not suddenly drop, in fact after the upward momentum comes to an end, depending on the rate of climb, it may take more than 5 seconds for such weight to neutralize its ascent enough to even begin to drop. The heavier the weight thrown into the air, the longer it would take. I recall one of the devs specifically stating that they had to raise the gravity because it didn't feel right when mechs "floated in the air". Was also told that my idea of less screen shake for light mechs and more for assault mechs during jumps would actually be the opposite of how physics worked in that assault mechs would have the least amount of cockpit shake. Which is true. It'd take more force to cause said shaking and as such some machines would barely even notice it.

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But so much discussion makes me wonder if I should bring my lore-and-loosely-thermal-dynamics-based three stage heat system here.

Currently we have a two stage system, this is true of the BT and MW games. That is we generate heat and it cools, addition and subtraction. MWO also adds multiplication because ghost heat, but lets ignore that.

That is to say if we have a number line, there's movement left and right.
-5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

But like in math, there's also up and down. Math calls them non-real numbers. In terms of heat, we can call it transference. Your average heat sink of BT lore must first transfer the heat from the heat source into itself, absorbing it before then trying to expel it through a vent of some sort. (Note this one depicted is similar to one at my work, however my attempt to take a picture of it failed it seems possibly due to moving immediately after clicking the camera so I'll have to try again tomorrow night, when it is actively running on a cold night this thing pumps out a lot of mist due to how hot the air can be as it is expelled.)

This is perhaps why players are complaining about the latest heat change, like in tabletop, heat is two dimensional and treated as part of the engine no matter what, so losing heatsinks both in tabletop and in MWO after PGI's latest change to heat keeps the heat in the engine and just diminishes the cool down.

Before the percentage of heat you had before the loss of the side torso became the percentage of the new value that you had after the loss of the torso. Now the actual amount of heat you had is kept, while the maximum heat is reduced, thus allowing you to instantly overheat as your new 100% is lower than the heat you were previously okay with.

Back to what I was talking about now. In a three dimensional system, or simplified a three stage heat system...
You have the heat sources: Weapons and certain equipment as well as external sources. We'll refer to them as "External Sources" and despite grouping them into one term they are independent sources. They produce the heat. You will note I have excluded the engine, you'll see why in a minute.
You have the Cooling System, aka the heatsinks. So far, so 2D, right? At the moment they are connected to both max heat and cooling power. So we split it...sort of. We separate max heat from the heatsinks and instead give each heatsink its own capacity. Lets say we're using double heatsinks and thus the capacity for any given second is 2 for one double heatsink and pumping is at 0.2 per second for one DHS. But heat doesn't magically disappear once the heatsink has pumped the heat into itself, after all the heat pumps generally use a coolant which must then exhaust the heat into the heatsink where it is then expelled, and from turning a real life heat sink/heat pump on to the actual expulsion of heat there's time involved with this and while the heat is reduced at the source of heat as the coolant absorbs it, the heatsink itself must then remove the heat from the coolant and in this transfer there's time involved. So removal of heat from the sources and removal of heat from the heatsink do not happen at the same time. It is worth noting that despite heat sinks in BT being powered heat pumps, they are unaffected by whether or not the reactor performs an emergency shutdown and are in fact powered independently.

Only starting to break ground.

Now lets factor in the Internal Source, aka the engine. Assuming the base 30 that Hammer appears to want, the engine has a maximum yield of 30 heat at which case it will shut down. Hitting 30 heat in the reactor will cause the machine to cut off completely. (We're not gonna factor the fact that override in fluff has nothing to do with avoiding shutdown; it is in fact unavoidable, the override in all fluff refers to IS mostly, and is specifically in regards to a weapons fire control lockout at 80% heat aka 24 heat unsinked. Remember that phrase "unsinked" it'll come up again).

So technically we separated heatsink max heat from engine max heat... why? First, lets go a step further and look back at the source. BT fluff often talks about issues such as weapons overheating, including specific examples of machine guns that overheat....
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Lets see that again. Machine guns... overheating. "But they don't make heat." They don't make heat remarkable enough for heatsinks! This doesn't mean that they magically don't produce heat, in fact the burst fire machine gun mechanic in tabletop explicitly gives machine guns the ability to produce up to 3 yields of 2-ish damage (depending on if also using partial hit and direct hit mechanics too) for up to 6 (or closer to 10 in some cases) from a single machine gun, as well as up to 2 heat (that's more than an AC/5 produces for a single volley of fire). Any weapon with a poor cooling jacket also produces additional heat, meaning that the weapons themselves do indeed produce a volume of heat separate from the engine heat. Weapons thusly must have a threshold or limit of heat that the weapon itself can handle. In fact under PPC fluff, most of the 7 tons in an IS PPC is dedicated to on board heatsinks and that without these, the weapon would be significantly lighter.

Speaking of PPCs and weapon-specific heat capacity, we have this from the Panther.
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If the weapon overheats it shuts down and ceases to function (at least until the weapon is cooled, assuming it can be cooled.)

Should these weapons overheat, as we can also see above, consequences occur. Said machine gun can jam. When using the burst fire mechanic in tabletop, there is also a jam chance.. though when that rule was made is over 15 years after this fluff was written. Energy weapons shut down (or worse, I don't have an example to throw off the top of my head, but I do recall EM Intereference as one of the effects, as well as the laser version of a jam, the crystal / lens breaks and the weapon becomes inoperable (like other jams this was permanent in BT, in MWO we'd likely see a weapon lockdown to prevent damage..aka a jam).

So now we have established:
1) that weapons and some equipment generates heat and that they would have a maximum heat capacity of their own.
2) Heatsinks can absorb heat and should have a limit to how much they can absorb at once, and that there is time involved in transferring heat from the source to the coolant to the heat pump and again from the heat pump to be expelled into the atmosphere.
3) The reactor not only generates heat but also has a set limit of heat that will trigger a full on shutdown.

Spoiler

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So consider this: a look at weapons
Instead of a "Cooldown" for a weapon being X time before you can fire again... weapons such as lasers (would say ACs but we don't have lore friendly ACs so won't even bother) have a bar that fills up similar to RACs in MWO.

Spoiler

You can fire until the cooldown reaches the maximum in which case the weapon overheats and cannot be used for a little bit of time (as opposed to you fire the laser and it runs the full beam until its done, then you can't use it).
As you fire the weapon, both the weapon and your reactor simultaneously produce heat. For simplicity lets say if you produce 3 heat, 1.5 came from the weapon and 1.5 came from the engine, though more likely more would come from the reactor for some weapons.
Heat is pumped away from the engine immediately, but from the weapon once it is done firing. Proximity of the heatsink to the source can have an effect on this (fluff of the Panther again).
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(In this case, the heatsinks in the arm would priortize cooling of the weapons in the arm above anything else). In tabletop to dedicate the heatsink would prevent it from being used for anything else as well as reduce the overall heat 'felt' from the weapon by one, as if giving it an improved cooling jacket.

Because of an issue I ran into a bit later, I was reminded of something and this is the place to put it.
From here on, it is assumed that heatsinks will pump heat continuously at a rate of 0.2/second per double heatsink. However, one thing you will notice if you ever touch a heatsink in real life, chemical or otherwise, you'll feel it increasing in temperature immediately even if the dissiapation into the air isn't immediate. There's a maximum rate in which any heatsink can absorb (pump) heat and a maximum rate at which it can expel heat and these are never quite equal according to thermal dynamics. Taking a page from it, for anything past this point you are to assume that if a heatsink has zero heat absorbed, it can absorb half of the heat generated from the reactor immediately to begin dispelling and the rest is pumped in from the weapons and the engine at its cooling rate per second. Dispelling can be the amount of its capacity per second, one second after it has arrived. If it sounds like heat can be pumped away faster, it isn't intended. (There's too much written to correct it all. So this supercedes anything said later.)
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Anywho...
We're going to focus on the heatsinks now.

Since heatsinks first have heat pumped in (I'll say suck a number of times, but the BT term is 'sinking'/sunk), and then expel, please keep this in mind as two separate steps, where sinking is constant but expelling has a delay (though this too is also constant so long as there's an ability to expel).

Lets again keep it simple and assume that half is generated by the weapon and half by the reactor. Continuing to keep it simple for explanation's sake lets also say the heatsink sucks from both equally (we'll ignore the time difference for this example). If we assume the weapon fired is a medium laser (at BT's 3 heat), no movement, and a single double heatsink has sucked (or as BT calls it "sunk") from both, the total heat in the heatsink is now 2, with 0.5 in the weapon and 0.5 in the engine, which will remain until a heatsink is able to remove it. It is also worth noting that the heatsink took time to withdraw it (we'll say one second) and needs time to expell it (we'll also say another second though yes I know what that means, but to count in half seconds is hard for some). This means that until the heatsinks are able to suck heat again, if you made more heat right away it'd have nowhere to go.

What if this had some tactical use, such as keeping the expulsion of heat from happening to avoid showing up on heat vision? The fluff for armor does indeed state that the armor is capable of quickly dispersing heat. If this runs to the length of being neutral with the environment, then so long as you're not expelling heat, you would in theory have very little heat signature. This could also have an effect in space where expelling heat is much harder where there is no atmosphere (tabletop handles this by increasing the heat you produce or reducing the cooling power of all heatsinks at the game master's discretion). Keep in mind if the heat outside of your machine is higher than what you're trying to expel, heatsinks actually have an issue where the heat would come in if not for the fact that it is pushed, though pushing against a superior force is strenuous.

Returning focus to the heat pumping action, what if it doesn't stop just because the heatsink is at capacity? In the real world heatsinks of all kinds do have a limit of how fast they can dissipate heat into the air but even so their absorbtion of heat cannot and does not suddenly stop when they reach their limit of dissipation, they keep going until they melt if it gets that bad.

Tabletop handles this concept in what my friend Lordred calls the "Heatsink taxing rule," which is basically that if you generate 5 more heat than your overall heatsink capacity (as this rule does give the heatsinks their own separate capacity by taking how much could be cooled and if your overall heat is 5 units above, for each five units above, a save roll is made to determine if and how many heatsinks are melting because of it).

As such, heat will continue to be pumped into the heatsinks until they melt unless you stop them from functioning which MWO and all MW / BT games do though instead of melting they apply damage to the mech. Assuming you don't stop them from pumping or there's no ability to do so, by pushing your heatsinks you will melt them instead of dealing damage. Megamek specifically refers to this as "losing coolant" but it is effectively the same thing as melting them (except you can replenish them with the use of a coolant truck). MWO had something like this back in closed beta where a heatsink at random would take damage if you had more than 80% heat, for every second you remained there.
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Eventually you'd lose some and the heatsink display would reflect destroyed heatsinks as red. For each heatsink destroyed, your maximum tolerable heat would reduce. The same would apply here, for each heatsink you lose, the easier it would be to lose more, and the harder it would be to keep cool enough to avoid shutdown.

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On the engine front.
Its true that an even increase of heat from the weapon/equipment source and the reactor would basically mean you have double the heat thresold to shut down, given that it'd take 60 heat accumulated and unsunk (30 weapon 30 engine) to get to 30 engine heat and thus shutdown. So whatever the distribution of heat from the sources is, once the engine reaches 30 you shut down.
However it'd only take your heatsink's capacity (lets say you have 10 doubles, so 20 heat) to begin feeling the effects of overheating by having more heat to pump into them than they can expel.
But once your engines did overheat, you'd shut down. And given how much harder it is to reach this point, there really makes no sense to have an override to exploit it. Instead akin to the canon, there is no overriding shutdown just the weapons lockout when reaching 80% of the engine's maximum unsunk heat. That weapon lockout can be overridden.

If the game engine were capable of it without causing issues with PGI's HSR lag compensation system, MWO could see a variety of heat penalties for movement due to engine heat, and accuracy penalties could occur in the weapons for weapons overheating. But the biggest penalty of all would be engine shutdown, being unable to function in the middle of the action, and if a soft startup took as long as it does in Battletech, there's no greater punishment for poor heat management.

Alpha strikes while very possible, would really become a last ditch resort in many of the higher heat cases. The concept of separating weapons into groups may become more valuable, since overheated weapons would stop firing but nothing says your reserve array of lasers have to, this could even create a minigame of managing the weapon heat to keep weapons ready to use at an instant. A form of ghost heat could even exist that actually makes sense (the more weapons you fire at once, the more energy draw you make from the engine, and the higher the engine's heat output is).
One could fire two ER PPCs (60 heat) without having to worry about shutting down immediately if you had enough heatsinks, Though the heatsinks would would suck up half of it (30) and unless you had enough heatsinks to handle 30 heat at once you're gonna have some melt down as the heatsinks struggle to clear both your weapon heat (which would be guaranteed to be maxed out) and your reactor heat at whatever distribution of heat is set at for the remaining 30 between the weapons and the reactor itself.

Though chain firing four ER PPCs from a Warhawk could be done within 10 seconds, safely and without melting down heatsinks given its sheer amount of heatsinks and ability to cool by absorbing 7.5 heat into the heatsinks immediately and starting to dissipate that while the remaining 7.5 is gradually absorbed at a rate of 4 heat / second. Actually in this specific case, one could fire all four ER PPCs at once, though the overall weapon heat would ensure it'd be a substantial amount of time before the weapons could be used again. Lets calculate it really quick.

Half heat fired is immediate pushed into heatsinks. Heat is expelled from heatsinks (provided all 20 DHS are functional) at a rate of 4 heat/second, and additional heat is pumped into the heatsinks from the other two sources at 4 heat per second.
4 ER PPCs generate 60 heat (with whatever distribution may be between what came from the weapons and what came from the engine).
As such 30 heat is immediately plugged into the 20 DHS eating up 3/4th capacity. No meltdowns gonna happen here. The weapons are overheated and unable to function for a while (where if fired one at a time, heat could be pulled much faster from the one that was fired and thus it could be reused much sooner. Here, since they were all four fired at once, and heat is pulled from them equally, they're out of commission until the heat is gone). The engine though hit half of its maximum heat, and with it comes all the penalties of 15 heat on the heat gauge.
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First off I must point out that shutdown and ammo explosions have an avoidance roll because in a 10 second time slice to have that much unsunk, there's a chance that depending on how you space out the shots across 10 seconds, you actually can hit 30 heat generated at one instant and cool from it. In fact the harder that roll is, the more difficult it is to mathmatically avoid hitting 100% (30 heat) when calculating how you space your shots against the cooling. As such, unless you actually hit 93.3%, you won't see damage to ammo/equipment, and unless you hit 100%, you won't see a shutdown. But what you will see upon hitting 15 engine heat is a loss of 90 meters movement in 10 seconds from your speed (so in the case of the Warhawk you'd lose 50% of your agility and gradually regain it about 7 and a half seconds later [as well as the ability to use the ER PPCs, assuming that heat coming from the weapons and the engine are equal. Otherwise it may take longer to get back mobility but the ability to use the ER PPCs again would come back sooner).

This has another interesting effect, the fewer weapons you have (or have fired at once), the sooner they come back online ready to use again. This would be less of a disadvantage for machines with fewer weapons (and fitting with something interesting from the Gray Death trilogy, Grayson's single ML Shadow Hawk could fire it far more frequently than his enemies could fire their multiple lasers. There's a lot of ways to interperet this, but an interesting way is that heatsinks only having to cool one laser would be a lot quicker to finish the task than the same number of heatsinks having to cool 4 lasers at once, thus allowing the single laser to be ready much sooner.

I'm reminded though by the Warhawk scenario, that in my original writing of this system, weapon heat was tracked and exclusive to its on board cooling setup, while all heat generated and noted by the heatsinks was that of the reactor itself. I can see problems and benefits to either direction.

But I think that's enough for coverage on this concept. You''re welcome to tell me what you think of course.

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What was all that? TL;DR

Spoiler

Does This Heat Mechanic Sound More Fun?

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