36 replies to this topic

[Johannes Falkner]

In addition standing still and not firing does not generate heat that is tracked in game. So your ten heatsinks are over and above hot standby heat dissipation levels.

[Der Kommissar]

boogle, on 08 April 2012 - 04:17 PM, said:

Your post brings nothing to the table and does not address the issue of inherent heatsinks not being tied to engine size/power. Perhaps der kommissar should read the above post(s) again.

Perhaps boogle should learn to balance his heat instead of inventing an imaginary problem to make it easier.

Edited by Der Kommissar, 09 April 2012 - 12:09 PM.

[UncleKulikov]

The larger engines probably do have more heat sinks, but because they are larger and generate more waste heat just for operating, you still only see the 10 surplus sinks regardless of size.

And in terms of balance, do you need to ask?

[boogle]

Der Kommissar, on 09 April 2012 - 12:08 PM, said:

Perhaps boogle should learn to balance his heat instead of inventing an imaginary problem to make it easier.

Not only did I not qualify the relationship between engine size and inherent heatsinks a problem; but addressing it in no way makes managing heat easier. Heat management would be changed slightly, with some chassis becoming easier and others becoming more difficult based primarily upon powerplant size.

As you are still sticking with the same ad hominum diatribe, I'm forced to conclude that you have a learning or comprehension deficit of some kind.

[Insidious Johnson]

boogle, on 09 April 2012 - 02:09 PM, said:

Not only did I not qualify the relationship between engine size and inherent heatsinks a problem; but addressing it in no way makes managing heat easier. Heat management would be changed slightly, with some chassis becoming easier and others becoming more difficult based primarily upon powerplant size.

As you are still sticking with the same ad hominum diatribe, I'm forced to conclude that you have a learning or comprehension deficit of some kind.

Bingo. Der Kommisar, does a Mac Truck radiator FIT in a honda civic? No! Same friggin principle here. Is the CRITICAL slot size the SAME for a flea as an atlas? No. Are the heat sinks gonna be the same size? No! This is a debate over smashing square objects into round holes, while the mech is OFF and not running. Heat management is an altogether seperate issue. Either Der Kommisar is intentionally trolling or unintentionally obtuse. Either way, the effect is the same and entirely undesirable. The bottom line is not much headway in this discussion can be made while having to remedially backtrack for the purpose of hand holding someone through a discussion that is painfully self evident from its start.

Some amusement park rides require you to be a certain height before setting foot on the ride. Perhaps the OP should have used the same standards, in a sense, requiring that knuckles do not drag the floor.

[Vexgrave Lars]

To make heat-sinks relevant to engine size only would unbalance the mechanic. To do this and remain weighted properly, you would need to account for engine size, then account a variant number of crit spaces per mech weight, then account for the mass of each weapon being cooled relevant location to the nearest heat-sink... etc etc etc.

YES.. you could do it.. Yes it may even be more realistic...

But is it an efficient idea to over-complicate the architecture of a game mechanic (and its various supporting and supported mechanics) for little gain..

IMAHO.. not really.

[Felix Dante]

I think the idea was to simplify things = You buy an engine, you get 10 heatsinks of choice to begin with at no extra cost.

Since an engine is fairly expensive and heat sinks aren't...it balances out.

No fuss, no muss... try not to overthink it.

[Insidious Johnson]

Was more a topic of suspended disbelief, but Vex is on the right track! Just wondering why BT didn't take more of an auto parts store approach to it just by throwing model numbers at heatsinks of various sizes just to avoid this in the first place.

[boogle]

@ Vexgrave

I agree with you that it may be too complicated a mechanic for the pencil/paper nature of the table top game, but the beauty of a video game is that we can have the computer do any necessary calculations for us. I really see no reason why (in a computer game) inherent heatsink number shouldn't be tied to power plant size.

[Nakuru]

Keep in mind that you may be given 10 "free" heat sinks, but the engine size DOES, in fact, make a difference. If I remember correctly, you get the 10 for free, but depending on the size of the engine, only some may be allocated as part of the engine. In other words, you may be given 10 heat sinks for free, but if the engine rating isn't high enough, some may need to be assigned to critical points. Larger engines can have more than 10 installed, though more weight is taken up by the extras. So larger engines can contain more and smaller ones can't hold as many. You can think of it as: you get the engine and the 10 heat sinks come with it, but they may not all fit on the smaller engine, so some need to be mounted externally to be used. On the other hand, more than 10 can fit on the larger engines, so you can add more before they need to be mounted externally. It's not perfect, but it makes enough sense to me to not have any concerns.

[Vexgrave Lars]

boogle, on 09 April 2012 - 02:52 PM, said:

@ Vexgrave

I agree with you that it may be too complicated a mechanic for the pencil/paper nature of the table top game, but the beauty of a video game is that we can have the computer do any necessary calculations for us. I really see no reason why (in a computer game) inherent heatsink number shouldn't be tied to power plant size.

2 words and a statment...

"Launch Date"

Development timetable in hindsight may have allowed the opportunity to construct the additional content required to deliver such an overture of accuracy, depending on the cost to PGI, of a theoretical physicist/thermodynamics engineer to create new, more plausible, realistic lore. Of course the cannon adherents, would have placed said physicist against a wall and promptly, verbally, napalmed him for touching their canon materials and breaking the rule about leaving fingerprints on their lore. Which would have split the boards and likely created a troll feeding frenzy the likes of which even the worms of Arakis couldn't out-swallow.

Edited by Vexgrave Lars, 09 April 2012 - 03:03 PM.

[Ogre Magi]

its the old mech building formula as stated, you get soem free heat sinks that you dont have to place in the mechs internal structure and you get a cap of 10 heat sinks that dont account for total weight. hence the 10 free heat sinks are free in mass as they are part of the mass of the engine.

mechs with smaller engines have to place some of them in critical slots thus taking up room for equipment.

so they are mass free but not space/critial slot free.

all of this goes back to the single heat sinks the orginal mech used, think or an awesome with 22 + single heat sinks it could barely mount weapons because of space/critical slots were taken up by heat sinks. it balanced energy weapons/high heat vs ballistic/low heat/ammo slots.

Most long time players have said the biggest change in in BT was teh intoduction of the double heat sink thus making a pure energy weapon mech more capable and smaller mechs ( under 50 tons) the ability to carry more weapons.

[LackofCertainty]

boogle, on 09 April 2012 - 02:52 PM, said:

@ Vexgrave

I agree with you that it may be too complicated a mechanic for the pencil/paper nature of the table top game, but the beauty of a video game is that we can have the computer do any necessary calculations for us. I really see no reason why (in a computer game) inherent heatsink number shouldn't be tied to power plant size.

My reasoning for why it shouldn't be changed is twofold.

1. While the computer can handle the complex mathematics behind it, the more you complicate the system the harder it becomes for the noob to design a functioning mech. It's a lot easier to say, "mechs come with 10 free heatsinks and you can mount extra if you need more cooling," than it is to say, "The rate at which your mech cools is a factor of how large it's engine is in relation to its mass. Each engine comes with a varying amount of base heat sinks and how much effect additional heat sinks have is adjusted by engine size compared to the number of heat sinks."

KISS is a good rule here. Every engine comes with 10 heatsinks that get rid of 10 heat.

2. I'm not a battletech guru, so I can't comment on whether it's true or not, but Johannes seems to have said that it's already covered in TT rules.

Johannes Falkner, on 08 April 2012 - 03:50 PM, said:

The TT construction rules include 10 heatsinks with the engine weight.
The engine can incorporate more or fewer heatsinks according to its rating. For each full multiple of 25 in the engine rating you include the crits of the (single or double) heatsinks in the engine. This is part of the reason why some mechs like the Timber Wolf (mad cat to spheroids) are so powerful as energy weapon platforms. The TW has a 375 rated engine (75 tons at 5/8) and therefore can (and does) include 15 (double) heatsinks in the engine. Ten heatsinks were "free" with the engine and 5 more were added in the base configuration. The Flashman is a prime IS example. The Trashcan, R2-D2, BattleDroid, er *UrbanMech* is a counter example. It has a 60 rated engine and 11 heatsinks and must allocate 9 of them.

There is room to argue about the number of "free" heatsinks by engine size, but the TT rules already account for varying the number of incorporated heatsinks.

I would note a little bit of thermodynamics that you have probably not considered as well. You dissipate heat by surface area and smaller cylinders (treat mech torsos/legs/heads/arms as cylinder for simplicity) have a higher relative surface area than larger cylinders. This gives lighter mechs a proportionally higher dissipation rate by convection/radiation than heavier mechs.

Mech heat generation would also scale with size (weight, specifically). Heavier mechs would require more/stronger myomers with more power to drive them. By the time you say that a heavier mech would generate more heat just to move and be worse at radiating it away without aid, it becomes relatively fair, thermodynamically, to give lighter mechs "undeserved" free heatsinks.

If his post was too long for you, it boils down to: An engine has a number of crit spots = rating/25.

So, your light mech with a 100 rating engine will have to sacrifice 6 slots on its body to mount the "10 default heatsinks" because the engine itself can only hold 4. On the other hand, a 500 rating engine has 20 crit slots, so you can mount the "10 default heatsinks" and even add 10 more heatsinks before you need to start losing slots in your body.

Bigger engines come with more space devoted to/available for heatsinks and more power at the cost of being heavier and larger themselves, so I feel like that gets rid of the issues you have with it, without adding more complexities to mech building.

Edited by LackofCertainty, 09 April 2012 - 03:48 PM.

[Black Sunder]

Others explained what I was going to

Edited by Black Sunder, 09 April 2012 - 03:52 PM.

[Yeach]

Do the TT rules make sense?
If you have a smaller engine shouldn't it be much easier to have the room to have heatsinks all over and hence heatsinks do not need to be allocated.
Whereas in a larger engine; there is "more" engine space and where do the heatsinks be found? (where do you hide them if the engine should be taking more space?)

This is on the assumption that "smaller engines" should take "less" space than larger output engines.

[CCC Dober]

OP: This was probably meant to reduce exploitation of 'free' heatsinks. That said, 10 is better than none at all. Alternatively the game designers could have flatly stated that internal heatsinks are meant to keep the reactor stable under all conditions and as such are not meant to bleed weapon induced heat. They didn't, which was nice of them, because it allowed to field a minimum of weapons without bothering too much about heat management.

[Pht]

boogle, on 08 April 2012 - 07:28 PM, said:

In addition, upgrading the heatsinks of a mech to double heatsinks doubles the 'value' of the inherent heatsinks as well.

The heat reclamation systems benefit from the same materials upgrades that the normal heatsinks in a 'mech benefit from. Upgrade one, you upgrade the others.

Quote

In summary all evidence points to a fusion engine granting a mech 10 heatsinks regardless of power plant size.

No, it does not. The smaller fusions can not mount a heat reclamation system with enough thermal ability/mass to absorb the 10 points of heat the engine generates.

This can even be confirmed straight from the horses's mouth that maintains exactly this technical section of the lore for the people holding the battletech IP.

Edited by Pht, 10 April 2012 - 04:41 PM.