6 replies to this topic

[ScrapValue]

What happens when you take a cup of water at 50 °C and spill half of it on the ground? According to MWO logic, the remaining water in the cup starts to boil. In reality, the water in the cup is still 50 °C and so is the water that gets poured out. Why, then, when my mech is ~100% heat and I lose a side-torso, does my heat seem to shoot up to the point that I overheat and die? Half of my upper body is now lying on the ground. Why does it not take the heat with it? Why does the heat magically transfer from the heat sinks in the lost portion of the mech to the remaining portion of the mech? Please fix this.

[Saved By The Bell]

We need to talk about dark matter.

[Meep Meep]

Afaik its a code thing and code things are untouchable now. They could fix it but it would take dev time and there is no longer any dev time.

[bwila]

theres heatsinks in that engine. the heat spike represents the internal engine heatsinks being destroyed. its just poorly communicated.

[1453 R]

ScrapValue, on 30 November 2025 - 11:17 AM, said:

What happens when you take a cup of water at 50 °C and spill half of it on the ground? According to MWO logic, the remaining water in the cup starts to boil. In reality, the water in the cup is still 50 °C and so is the water that gets poured out. Why, then, when my mech is ~100% heat and I lose a side-torso, does my heat seem to shoot up to the point that I overheat and die? Half of my upper body is now lying on the ground. Why does it not take the heat with it? Why does the heat magically transfer from the heat sinks in the lost portion of the mech to the remaining portion of the mech? Please fix this.

Answer, In-Universe: losing a side torso isn't a neat, tidy severing of a piece of your chest that falls off. It's the destruction of all the equipment in that area as well as the mangling of its internal structure. If you just had a portion of your active fusion engine sheared off and dropped next to you, the rest of the reactor would immediately go all kinds of critical. Instead, that damage is considered to be damaging the heavy external shielding keeping the reaction bottled up, which allows waste heat out and spikes the unit's internal heat.

Answer, Above The Table: the Clan XL engine is utter ******** and the most broken and overtuned piece of tech in the game, but Piranha was stuck with it and couldn't do anything about it due to Omni construction rules. So they implemented the heat spike as a way of partially offsetting the sheer bustedness of the cXL, which gave you all of the benefits of an IS XL engine but without any of the practical drawbacks. This code was inherited for the LFE, which also gives a significant portion of the XL benefit with none of the real drawbacks.

Answer, Technical: losing a shoulder with a cXL or an LFE equipped lowers your maximum heat capacity, and since your heat is only ever shown to you as a percentage of your total heat capacity, losing capacity looks exactly the same as suddenly generating a lot more heat. If you're sitting at 30 heat and your capacity is 50, your heat bar shows a bit between half and two-thirds heat. If you lose a shoulder and suddenly your heat capacity drops down to 40, your bar shoots up to represent that you're now at three quarters of your heat capacity. You can test this in a private game - bring a cERPPC, fire it once, and see what percentage of heat it generates. Then have a friend shoot off one shoulder, wait for your heat to zero out, and fire the cERPPC again. You should see that it generates "more" heat - a higher percentage of your bar - despite the cERPPC's stats not changing at all.

[GreyNovember]

By this logic if you lose an arm you should lose heat.

It doesn't, because you're probably not keeping sinks in your arms, and all the thermal regulation is happening in your chest.

When you reactor gets hit, it starts to bleed heat. 3 hits, and it stops working, but we don't have that mechanic in MWO exactly.

A CXL / LFE being side torso crippled is the equivalent of 2 hits, making things much hotter, which is a fair trade considering you're not dead.

[Ttly]

That's why you just suck it up and put on an XL instead of playing IS medium or heavies like stunted heavy/assaults with how underquirked some of them are on LE.