51 replies to this topic

[wolf74]

ice trey, on 07 March 2012 - 06:35 AM, said:

This was also addressed in the Solaris 7 boxed set from the very early 90s, which reduced the scale of the maps and the time of the turns - making the heat-sinks only half as effective.

I would kindly disagree with this line. I did the numbers on it and they are just as effective. It just in Solaris VII you give a Few more chances to fire some of the smaller weapons if the fighting calls for it. Due to the fact some of the weapon did have Recycle time that would have let them fire them more than once in a CBT Turn if the target stayed in range that is.

Edited by wolf74, 07 March 2012 - 06:44 AM.

[Arnold Carns]

ice trey, on 07 March 2012 - 06:35 AM, said:

This was also addressed in the Solaris 7 boxed set from the very early 90s, which reduced the scale of the maps and the time of the turns - making the heat-sinks only half as effective.

That isn't quite correct!!
In the Solaris VII 'Mech Duel Rules the Heat Sinks were just as effective as the TT ones. 1 Standard Heat Sink dissipated 1 Heat Point in a 2,5 second game turn, and a Double Heat Sink 2. That would make them four times as effective as the TT HS, but because the weapons generated four times the heat of the TT heat values it had been evened out to 1:1.
The only difference is that you could fire some weapons more often due to decay rules (which also included high risks of overheating and destroying a weapon due to not let it entirely cool down).

[MaddMaxx]

The Heat generated is caused by any system that requires energy. Walking, running, firing weapons. Like any Engine, it gets requests for energy, and doing what it does generates it. (By product is HEAT)

The Heat is generated instantly and the system then absorbs the excess (that which is not directly used by request - Energy weapons) and dissipates it based on how much SINK ability is available.

Sturm show the method by rule, the Engine has a separate system built in (equal to 10 HS's) We can assume that is done to offset the basic power/heat generated by a Mech to simply move.

The rest of the HS needs are directly related to additional systems. Weapons, in almost all cases, as far as the Player is concerned. Since there is empirical game data about what weapons/systems generates what Heat all that need be done is devise a sensible method to translate that to the MWO Battlemechs, such that wanton overheating, without proper on-board SINK ability, seriously retards the Mechs ability to perform at peak efficiency.

I really don't see that a game play draw back at all and is not to much to ask the Dev to implement. Obviously, Beta can Tweak any implemented system but I would urge that they start out with vigorous Heat issues implemented and dial it back if required and not the other way around.

Decreasing Heat issues is far better than having to Dial them up after the fact, as far as ensuing Peanut Gallery noise will be concerned.

Edited by MaddMaxx, 07 March 2012 - 07:09 AM.

[Hayashi]

The approach that most of the Mechwarrior games to date took was an underrepresentation of heat, leading to the majority of mech designs using an overload of medium lasers, large lasers or PPCs. Energy weapons need to produce more heat to give them a greater drawback similar to the ammunition issues other weapon types face. Missiles need to be increased in power with a greater randomisation in the areas where its damage is distributed, LBX ACs need to be decreased in power, and standard/ultra ACs need to be increased in power.

[Kiyoshi Amaya]

First, thanks to Strum for the explanation.

I found this article on plasma weapons and seeing as they don't exist in any true and tested form, the heat generated is probably going to be a best guess. As a suggestion, it might be beneficial to keep PPC's mounted on arms. I'm not saying you shouldn't be allowed to mount them anywhere you want. I think it's going to depend on how the cooling system is going work in-game

[TheRulesLawyer]

Any spike heat from alpha striking should be at extreme risk of your mech shutting down. Effects from heat (Mech slowing, harder to aim, etc) should be pretty much instant. This gives you a real reason to chain fire your weapons instead of always alpha striking to increase clumping.

[Tilon]

Most people on this topic have completely missed the point.

Heat sinks are not merely heat pumps. They would also include a heat exchanger that absorbs and holds heat.

My solution is 100% true to the board game standards. That is not debatable. Take any mech from the board game and apply my rules to it, and it will work the same on the board as it does in real time.

What is NOT the standard are the people on this thread insisting that mechs overheat with one alpha strike even with a ton of heat sinks.

That. Is. Ridiculous.

I heard one person say "A clan mech couldn't fire 4 ER PPCs with 20 double heat sinks!"
4 ER PPCs is 60 heat. 20 DHS is 40 heat.

So yes, he would overheat to 20 heat.

If you don't like how heatsinks work, say so. But stating that heatsinks only increase the rate of cooling and do not increase the buffer of available excess heat, is quite simply wrong from both a rules and common sense standpoint.

I keep hearing this about 'spike heat': Are you saying an 80 ton, heavily armed, well built mech should not be able to fire the weaponry it is designed to handle? That putting 40+ heat worth of weaponry on a mech should NEVER be efficiently feasible, no matter how many heatsinks you use?

If your position is that a well built mech that intentionally builds itself to handle the heat it generates (sacrificing armor, speed, jumpjets to do so) should still not be able to fire its weapons except inefficiently, say so.

Edited by Tilon, 07 March 2012 - 10:14 AM.

[TheRulesLawyer]

Tilon, on 07 March 2012 - 10:05 AM, said:

Most people on this topic have completely missed the point.

Heat sinks are not merely heat pumps. They would also include a heat exchanger that absorbs and holds heat.

My solution is 100% true to the board game standards. That is not debatable. Take any mech from the board game and apply my rules to it, and it will work the same on the board as it does in real time.

What is NOT the standard are the people on this thread insisting that mechs overheat with one alpha strike even with a ton of heat sinks.

That. Is. Ridiculous.

I heard one person say "A clan mech couldn't fire 4 ER PPCs with 20 double heat sinks!"
4 ER PPCs is 60 heat. 20 DHS is 40 heat.

So yes, he would overheat to 20 heat.

If you don't like how heatsinks work, say so. But stating that heatsinks only increase the rate of cooling and do not increase the buffer of available excess heat, is quite simply wrong from both a rules and common sense standpoint.

Yah. Show me the real time rules for alpha strikes in TT. Oh that's right, they don't exist. Its been noted than alpha striking is not normal in the fiction and many mechs are unable to do it (simply don't have enough power) or it causes big heat problems. Alpha striking should be causing some severe heat issues. Firing you rated heat capacity in an alpha strike shouldn't automatically shut you down, but it should put you damn close.

[IceSerpent]

2bad, on 07 March 2012 - 05:57 AM, said:

I would like to quote sarda net for that one: specificaly the Warhawk:

http://www.sarna.net..._%28Masakari%29
"To dissipate the waste heat produced in its various configurations, it carried an awesome twenty double heat sinks"
"While unable to fire all of the ER PPCs at once it could use a volley fire strategy to manage its heat."

(emphasis mine)

So basically: a clan mech, with 40 heat sinks, could not alpha strike 4 ER PPC at once without shuting down.

There's an important difference between TT and real-time simulation. In TT Warhawk (and some other mechs, like Nova for example) are unable to fire an alpha strike into the forward arc w/o risking shutdown, but by virtue of having most weapons mounted in the arms they can cover their flanks with lots of firepower. This is a balanced trade-off - do I want to replace one of the ERPPCs with something else (like extra heat sinks) for better alpha or do I want to be able to bring twin ERPPCs to bear on a flanking target. In simulation sideways shots are awkward and difficult to line up, so most people don't even try to use those, so this whole setup becomes a very inefficient I-carry-a-spare-ERPPC kind of a deal.
I think in MWO mechs should be able to fire their "standard" alpha, possibly driving heat all the way into red zone, but without shutting down. The heat management itself should be instant buildup with dissipation overtime though. I kind of like the idea of a buffer, but then it can be balanced simply by tweaking the heat values (i.e. Warhawk having a 60 point heat scale), so I am not sure if that buffer is necessary.

Just my $0.02

[Mechteric]

As I recall Mechwarrior 4 was the only one in the series that allowed heat sinks to instantly act against heat building up, and it was also terrible for doing so because alpha striking 6 ER Large Lasers or 4 ERPPCs with craptons of heatsinks was something you could do regularly without much consequence. Just not acceptable from a mutiplayer gameplay balance perspective.

The best references to date are Mechwarrior 3, followed by Mechwarrior Living Legends on how to balance these kinds of weapons against their ammo dependent cousins.

[Project_Mercy]

Heat sinks in MW are like buckets with holes in the bottom. Taking the original example. when you fire 4 PPCs, and you have 40 heat sinks, your 40 heat sinks soak up 40 buckets of heat INSTANTLY. Then, over the progress of the round, heat leaks out the bottom of the bucket, and they're ready to go.

If you ran that round, then 2 buckets worth of heat are still sloshing around your chassis. At the start of the next round, two heat sinks "fill up" and you have space for another 38.

This is not actually all that astoundingly different than real life. If it wasn't like this, your CPU would die in a few seconds. If you have any doubts on this, pull off your heatsink while your computer while it's under load. You'd be surprised how fast it will cough up on you. It doesn't, "gently transfer" the heat from the core to the IHS to your heatsink/water-block. The heat is distributed almost instantly, assuming you have good TIM in place.

The MW series has always done heat wrong. The issue is, in the MW series, it assumes that the heat lives inside the mech, and that the heat sinks are "bailing" it out, like a sailor on a leaking ship. Instead, the heat "lives" in the heatsinks and the weapons. It isn't until the heat has to go somewehre ELSE that it starts effecting the rest of the mech.

Water cool your computer. You'll learn a lot about how heat disipation works.

Edited by Wraeththix Constantine, 07 March 2012 - 12:13 PM.

[Fecal]

Wraeththix Constantine, on 07 March 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:

The MW series has always done heat wrong. The issue is, in the MW series, it assumes that the heat lives inside the mech, and that the heat sinks are "bailing" it out, like a sailor on a leaking ship. Instead, the heat "lives" in the heatsinks and the weapons. It isn't until the heat has to go somewehre ELSE that it starts effecting the rest of the mech.

Didn't Mechwarrior 2 take this into account? Hence the need to constantly flush coolant? (I haven't played it in 10 years) It seems much wonkier in MW4 (I don't remember how MW3 worked).

Edited by Fecal, 07 March 2012 - 12:38 PM.

[Project_Mercy]

Fecal, on 07 March 2012 - 12:33 PM, said:

Didn't Mechwarrior 2 take this into account? Hence the need to constantly flush coolant? (I haven't played it in 10 years) It seems much wonkier in MW4 (I don't remember how MW3 worked).

Not that I remember. He's a youtube video of the first non-training mission for MW2. skip to about 4 minutes in, he's blasting some containers with chainfire of some MLs. The guy has 15 double heatsinks on it, so, 30 heat dissipation. He's walking (1 heat) and chain firing 3 medium lasers (3x3) so, at most, he's generating 10 heat. Yet, his heat bar is going up. It should be at 0. If he ran and alphaed, he'd be at 2+3x3+2x8+2x6 so he'd generate 39, so his heat should go up 9 in that case, and continue to go up 9 every round thereafter until something bad happened. Even at +9 though, he'd take a movement and aim hit (in TT at least).

In MW2 though, he'd generate 39 heat, and the game would threaten him with a shutdown, which is incorrect.

Edited by Wraeththix Constantine, 07 March 2012 - 12:48 PM.

[TheRulesLawyer]

Wraeththix Constantine, on 07 March 2012 - 12:11 PM, said:

Heat sinks in MW are like buckets with holes in the bottom. Taking the original example. when you fire 4 PPCs, and you have 40 heat sinks, your 40 heat sinks soak up 40 buckets of heat INSTANTLY. Then, over the progress of the round, heat leaks out the bottom of the bucket, and they're ready to go.

If you ran that round, then 2 buckets worth of heat are still sloshing around your chassis. At the start of the next round, two heat sinks "fill up" and you have space for another 38.

This is not actually all that astoundingly different than real life. If it wasn't like this, your CPU would die in a few seconds. If you have any doubts on this, pull off your heatsink while your computer while it's under load. You'd be surprised how fast it will cough up on you. It doesn't, "gently transfer" the heat from the core to the IHS to your heatsink/water-block. The heat is distributed almost instantly, assuming you have good TIM in place.

The MW series has always done heat wrong. The issue is, in the MW series, it assumes that the heat lives inside the mech, and that the heat sinks are "bailing" it out, like a sailor on a leaking ship. Instead, the heat "lives" in the heatsinks and the weapons. It isn't until the heat has to go somewehre ELSE that it starts effecting the rest of the mech.

Water cool your computer. You'll learn a lot about how heat disipation works.

A computer is a really poor example. Its a low constant load matched to a cooling system that disappates a low constant low. There is no spike load like weapons fire. Something like an engine or a firearm would be a much closer example. Start throwing in nitrous oxide and you'll have something closer to real world example.

Sure heatsinks will absorb some heat on their own, however they'll quickly be saturated under use. Your concept of heat only works if the heatsinks have a huge thermal mass compared to what they're getting rid of. That's the case for sure in PC cooling. Especially water cool. Its not the case in battletech.

[Mechteric]

Wraeththix Constantine, on 07 March 2012 - 12:47 PM, said:

Not that I remember. He's a youtube video of the first non-training mission for MW2. skip to about 4 minutes in, he's blasting some containers with chainfire of some MLs. The guy has 15 double heatsinks on it, so, 30 heat dissipation. He's walking (1 heat) and chain firing 3 medium lasers (3x3) so, at most, he's generating 10 heat. Yet, his heat bar is going up. It should be at 0. If he ran and alphaed, he'd be at 2+3x3+2x8+2x6 so he'd generate 39, so his heat should go up 9 in that case, and continue to go up 9 every round thereafter until something bad happened. Even at +9 though, he'd take a movement and aim hit (in TT at least).

In MW2 though, he'd generate 39 heat, and the game would threaten him with a shutdown, which is incorrect.

its incredible folly to think that MW2 (or any other Mechwarrior game) uses a 1 to 1 heat or damage relationship from shots fired compared to the board game. It just doesn't ever work that way.

[Project_Mercy]

TheRulesLawyer, on 07 March 2012 - 01:33 PM, said:

That's the case for sure in PC cooling. Especially water cool. Its not the case in battletech.

That's how heatsinks work. The fact that the Battletech heatsinks apparently are made of some unobtanium metal is irrelivent. Wizards did it. The point is, in battletech, the heat is transfered from weapons to the sinks, and the sinks are able to disipate the heat to the atmosophere through the duration of a round, without any heat being transfered to the chassis.

Who knows, maybe the heat sinks are active? Like a magical version of Peltiers? Arguing tech is semantics. That's how they work in TT, and not how they work in the MW-pc games.

That said, my water blocks take heat spikes plenty fine. Turn on Furmark at 2560x1600 at 32-bit with occlusion and such and run it for 10 seconds, then turn it off. With a stock cooler, you can watch it spike up a good 50-60C in seconds. With my loop, it goes up maybe 15-20c. and returns quickly enough. Again, it depends a lot on ambient, but then again Tabletop takes ambient into consideration too, with heat planets or standing in water. No, it's not the best example, but it was meant to be an analogy people would understand.

CapperDeluxe, on 07 March 2012 - 01:40 PM, said:

its incredible folly to think that MW2 (or any other Mechwarrior game) uses a 1 to 1 heat or damage relationship from shots fired compared to the board game. It just doesn't ever work that way.

Uh, why wouldn't you? Why reinvent the wheel? We've played and argued about TT for 10-15 years before Mechwarrior 2 came out. The system is balanced and works perfectly fine. A weapon cycles every N seconds. That weapons generates N heat when it fires. The heat sinks SOAK UP y heat and disipate it over N seconds. There's no reason it doesn't work in real time any differently than it should on P&P.


Edit:

To Reiterate the problem:

In Battletech, heatsinks STORE the thermal energy. Their purpose is not just to exhaust heat to the atmosophere. it's to STORE the heat and exhaust it (much like a computer's heat sink). The "heat index" that is used to determine things like shutdown is the heat inside the rest of the mech. It's the thermal energy NOT currently sequestored in the heat sinks. In MW2-4 as a weapon fires, heat is introduced to the core of the mech. As time goes on, the heat sinks dissipate the heat from the mech. This is wrong.

Edited by Wraeththix Constantine, 07 March 2012 - 02:00 PM.

[Fecal]

I'm not an engineer, but the MW2 method seems to make more sense to me intuitively.

You have a coolant tank (or multiple) which cycle coolant to the various heat-producing devices. The actively cycled coolant will become gradually less effective if the entire coolant tank is eventually heated more quickly than it can dissipate into the atmosphere.

But there's no such thing as 'instant heat transfer' unless somehow every hot part of a weapon is submerged in cooling fluid, and stacking heat sinks would not allow you to somehow speed that process up (past a realistic maximum of points of contact).

So shouldn't you have the following affect heat?

1) Time to disperse from weapon to cooling system
2) Time for cooling system to cycle / absorb / average heat into main coolant pool
3) Time for coolant pool to disperse or be actively cooled

Shut-down warnings should happen if you suddenly spike temperature due to cooling choke points in any of those steps or if your overall coolant temperature reaches a certain level. No?

Also, unless the heat gauge is based on an 'acceptable average' rather than ambient atmospheric temperature you'd imagine that over time you'd be running hot almost constantly unless you give yourself time for active/passive systems to disperse the coolant's heat.

I'd be curious if what I'm thinking is wrong, feel free to correct any of it.

[TheRulesLawyer]

Wraeththix Constantine, on 07 March 2012 - 01:42 PM, said:

That's how heatsinks work. The fact that the Battletech heatsinks apparently are made of some unobtanium metal is irrelivent. Wizards did it. The point is, in battletech, the heat is transfered from weapons to the sinks, and the sinks are able to disipate the heat to the atmosophere through the duration of a round, without any heat being transfered to the chassis.

Who knows, maybe the heat sinks are active? Like a magical version of Peltiers? Arguing tech is semantics. That's how they work in TT, and not how they work in the MW-pc games.

That said, my water blocks take heat spikes plenty fine. Turn on Furmark at 2560x1600 at 32-bit with occlusion and such and run it for 10 seconds, then turn it off. With a stock cooler, you can watch it spike up a good 50-60C in seconds. With my loop, it goes up maybe 15-20c. and returns quickly enough. Again, it depends a lot on ambient, but then again Tabletop takes ambient into consideration too, with heat planets or standing in water. No, it's not the best example, but it was meant to be an analogy people would understand.

Missing the point entirely. The thermal mass in your computer is much much much much greater compared to the load than in battletech. In your example, they have 50 gallon drums for buckets while dribble in and out ounces every 10s. Computers also don't have spike loads to speak of relative to the sinks. To get it to battle tech levels It's be more like putting stick on ram sinks on your CPU. It probably would be okay at idle with most of the core power gated. It might be okay if you ran fur mark on a single core at a time. However if you fired up the cores on max turbo mode you might burn something even if the total run time was the same. You're just talking about drastically different cooling systems in terms of relatively capacity.

[Project_Mercy]

Fecal, on 07 March 2012 - 02:02 PM, said:

I'm not an engineer, but the MW2 method seems to make more sense to me intuitively.

You're confusing heat sink with radiator.

Yes, a radiator can only transfer heat based on the delta between the temperature of the coolant, and the temperature of whatever medium it contacts. The greater that delta, the more heat that can be transfered given a fixed period of time.

A heat sink is a device for sequestoring thermal energy. The larger it is, the better. As previously pointed out, we don't currently have materials that would be a.) able to react quickly enough to be able to absorb the massive spike in thermal energy required to do this and b.) would be small enough to fit on a mech. c.) can exist in a leg while the heat comes from an arm weapon.

That's irrelivent. Like I said, wizards did it. It's up there with "why does the mech only way 30 tons when I can't even get a MBT at 1/10th it's size to be under 45 tons IRL?".

The point is, that's how it works in the Battletech world. There is a device, that weighs 1 ton, that can sequestor 1 (or 2 in a double heatsink) points of heat, from a device which chooses to generate heat, such as the mech's reactor, or a mech's weapons. How it does it, we don't know. It does.

TheRulesLawyer, on 07 March 2012 - 02:07 PM, said:

Missing the point entirely. The thermal mass in your computer is much much much much greater compared to the load than in battletech.

It's the exact same thing. A CPU, left to its own devices, with just it's IHS, would burn up in seconds without the thermal mass of a heatsink on it, even if the sink is designed to disipate its heat through water contact instead of air. The thermal energy exhausted from the heat sink, when placed against the mass of the CPU, is enough to spike it into the 150-200C in seconds. With a Heat sink in place, that's not the case.

Yes, we currently only have materials like copper to act as a thermal load. I think it's fair to say that the Mech heat sinks are NOT 1 ton of copper, and likely include some active component to force transfer from the heat source to the sink. Again, wizards. How it does it, I don't care. What I'm saying (and keep saying) is that how MW2-4 did it was NOT how Battletech TT works.

Now, you can argue that you LIKE It better that way. Clearly I can't disagree with your opinion. What I'm saying is, that's how it works in Battletech. MW2-4 is wrong, and I personally would rather see it 'fixed' or returned to the Battletech method.

Edited by Wraeththix Constantine, 07 March 2012 - 02:24 PM.

[Demi-Precentor Konev]

I really hope they get rid of coolant flushing.

Edited by lahyenne, 07 March 2012 - 02:19 PM.