NamesAreStupid, on 02 November 2012 - 02:53 PM, said:
It will hurt everyone or do nothing. Eh, depends on the build, for example a 300ST, 4PPC Atlas with DHS (can achieve better efficiency than with single HS) will stay exactly the same.
Actually, consider this:
Assuming the Atlas has 50 tons free with the 300ST, full armor, no weapons and heatsinks. 4 (ER) PPCs are 28 tons together, leaving 22 tons over. There's enough room to fill those 22 tons with SHS's giving you a total of 32 SHS's. Now if I wanted to break even with that using DHS cooling at 1.4, you need 32/1.4=22.857 -> 23 DHS, meaning 13 DHS. However with 2x (ER) PPC in both arms you only have room in your side torsos and the 2 extra engine sink slots, giving 12/3=4 per side torso, a total of 10 extra DHS or in other words, a maximum of the equivalent of 28 SHS while you have 12 tons left to spare.
Builds with large laser weapons as primary have a hard time getting the required efficiency anyway due to the heat system currently in place. A primary ballistics with lasers as backup works quite well, especially when using the Gauss Rifle or UAC/5 (perhaps dual UAC/5). They don't have any need for huge numbers of heat sinks, just enough to cool them a bit. DHS would've let them fill up the unused arms/torsos with DHS for a low tonnage cost which allowed them to install more ammo.
Example: Atlas, 2x UAC/5, 6 tons of ammo, ER PPC, 2x med laser as zombie weapons, AMS with 1 ton of ammo, 8 DHS (2 in engine) and still 4 tons left to spare. What does that give me? 18 DHS total -> equivalent of 25 SHS, for the tonnage of just 8 DHS instead of 15. So yeah, such a build is going to outdamage a primarily laser weapons boat, since UAC/5 has on average 1 heat per second, so I generate 2H/s for which I require 20HS to generate the -2H/s and I have the equivalent of 25HS... So I can cool down an additional 0.5H/s. An ER PPC generates 13H, meaning I can fire it once every 26 seconds to run heat neutral. Or if I ran out of ammo, once every 5 seconds to run almost heat neutral. Oh and it can brawl quite decently as well as snipe. Sorry, I think all this did was lowering the efficiency of lasers as backup weapons, which weren't that essential, while simultaneously just making a decent laser based mech uncompetitive in any way.