Nope it was about units that don't mount DHS. Industrials and LowTech Mechs don't mount DHS. A Mech with a FCE or ICE is going to have to mount enough single heat sinks to deal with the heat. So that 5 ton ERLL is going to weigh 17.5 tons vs the LAC/2 at 7 tons.
Trace the quote chain again. You'll find you said:
The LAC-2 is good for units that can't mount a larger AC and still want to reach out to 18 hexes.
You're just meandering into crazy places where industrialmechs are important enough combat units to design weapons that are garbage on everything else including ICE powered vehicles.
Also while the XXL with 10 DHS and ERLL will generate a total of 18 heat there's not much else it can do without overheating. It's also more vulnerable to Flame Weapons and an XL or SFE.
Again, this is your response to my response to your response to my claim that LAC-2s stand out as bad among other autocannons. The only justification you or anyone else provided for LAC-2s was that something doesn't have the tonnage for an AC-5 but wants to fire out to 18 hexes. This thus assumes a mech that can't do *anything* other than run and fire its ERLL because the 5 tons for the ERLL or the LAC-2 and ammo are all it has to spare. You're trying to move the goalposts without providing any reason why anyone should ever mount the gun in question if there's enough tonnage to mount anything else.
How are the heat sinks wasted when they allow you to keep operating even under full heat? That's like saying a Mech with just a PPC and DHS would be wasting heat sinks. When really those extra heat sinks allow the PPC to continue firing long after heat would have shut the mech down.
Yes. If a mech has DHS and only mounts a PPC as its sole weapon it is wasting heatsinks. Unless it's also mounting a PPC capacitor and 5 or more jumpjets or the PPC is a heavy or ER model or it's mounting stealth armor or otherwise making use of all of its heatsinks. If it doesn't jump it's leaving heat dissipation worth 4 tons on the table. I don't see how this is even under contention. If you buy a year subscription to a streaming service and only use it for one week of binge watching that is also waste.
Some mechs have more heat sinks than other though. It's a lot easier to remain under 9 heat with a Fussion engine and DHS than it is with a ICE and singles.
You keep coming back to ICE. The only real combat units that use ICE are vehicles that can never overheat at all by definition. It is not hard to remain under 9 heat with single heatsinks. You just have to do some simple arithmetic instead of blindly smashing the big red Alpha Strike button.
Every hit matters. Some just matter more.
Hardly. Impaired functionality matters. A hit that doesn't contribute to impairing functionality because the target is too evasive for you to hit again may as well not have happened. If you're tracking C-bills repairing armor has some cost, but because of the weight multiplier 5 points of armor cost less on a 20 ton mech than on an 80 ton mech.
Prototype Endo takes more crits. Depending on the year DHS aren't available so that could mean more singles being installed.
No one uses prototype endo. Theoretically the Hegemony must have built a prototype, but it was never a deployed unit, doesn't have stats, and likely wasn't armed with anything but load simulating weights because its job was to test a skeleton not to fight. And it's rare to run out of crits on just endo without either ferro or the really hot running ER energy weapons, which are not required to make medium autocannons look bad.
That's true but your're also not using all of your weapons a neutral unit can.
Again using heat sinks like that means you're not using your mech's full weaponry.
Because you spend less on heatsinks you can only use where the ranges intersect you have more weaponry. For every 1 ton of ML you aren't firing with your LRMs at 7-9 hexes with your LRMs you're saving 1.5 tons of DHS that you weren't going to use either past 9 hexes or within LRM minimum range. That's not waste. That's trading at an advantage. Because of those savings you wind up with more guns. The heatsinks you don't need if you stop firing your low efficiency long range weapons like ERPPCs or ERLLs leave the mass to mount far more higher efficiency short range weapons like MLs or, if working with clantech, cERMLs. Such designs do the same long range damage and more short range damage than designs that attempt to sink the alpha strike.
And yet overheating makes delivering damage more difficult.
That's why you exercise some expletive trigger discipline.
And the point would be?
That a gun that does 10 damage is better than a gun that does 5 damage. If you don't like the example blame theagent. He's the one that proposed example mechs with a PPC and a single AC-5. While trying to defend the AC-5 no less.
I have done math and DHS do have an effect. A Mech with 11 DHS and 2 PPCs can run and fire and not worry about overheating and take only 15 tons. The same Mech though may not be able to mount 2 AC/5s with 2 tons of ammo would as it'd weigh 18 tons. If the Heat Sinks were singles though the 2 PPCs and 22 heat sinks would weigh 26 tons. The 2 AC/5s still weigh 18 tons. So yes, DHS do give a big advantage to Energy Weapons.
This is irrelevant to heat bracketing weapons. For weapon bracket heat management what matters is that heatsinks have some mass (and when relevant crits) which can be used for other things if you contrive to need fewer of them. Yes, DHS make high heat weapons better, but that was a response to you disputing the existence of bracket heat management in the DHS era.
The issue goes back even further though. It used to be all heat sinks required critical slots. So even if a mech had the tonnage for energy weapons and heat sinks it may not have the critical space to mount all of them. That gave the lower heat Autocannons an advantage over Energy Weapons. Placing HS in the engine gave the advantage to Energy Weapons. Essentially they got free crits.
The stated premises are true. The unstated premise that this made a difference is not. The conclusion is thus false.
If a Shadow Hawk trades its AC-5 and ammo for a PPC and two heatsinks it winds up with 33 open crits. 11 heatsinks are hidden in the engine. That's 22 crits open even under Battledroids.
If a Rifleman trades its two AC-5s and ammo for a PPC and 10 heatsinks it winds up with 31 open crits. Only 9 heatsinks are hiding in the engine. Again, 22 crits open under Battledroids.
If a Wolverine trades its AC-5 and ammo for a PPC and two heatsinks it winds up with 32 open crits. 11 heatsinks are hidden in the engine so it "only" has 21 crits upen under Battledroids.
If a Marauder has its AC-5 and ammo removed for the 4 desperately needed heatsinks to fire both of the PPCs it already has and say a gratuitous large laser (ie. the MAD-3D) it has 31 open crits. A whopping 12 heatsinks are hidden in the engine which under battledroids leaves it with *drumroll* 29 open crits.
That's it. Those are the mechs from Battledroids that have the only autocannon in the Battledroids rules. None of them are constrained to use it by a lack of critical slots for heatsinks. The change makes ammo bin crits more likely, but ammo bin crits are the tiebreaker that makes the PPC better than the AC-10 on mechs. The AC-5 is worse without needing to go to a tiebreaker.
Personally, I'd love for their to be Improved Autocannons. In fact we do have Improved Autocannons. What would be nice is if they were more available and a more improved MK II model was available.
Improved autocannons, unless introduced in 2370 and retconned to replace the autocannons we have, don't fix the problem because the problem for the AC-5 starts once both LRMs and SRMs exist. The problem is worst in the SHS era because for most of the DHS era the AC-5 and AC-10 are
supposed to be eclipsed by the LB-10X so it doesn't much matter if they're also eclipsed by other weapons or weapon combinations. If you see anything with a standard autocannon (other than class 20s on aerospace units purely because they're disallowed from using slug ammo for no rational reason) with a design date when LBX autocannons are available you know you're looking at an intentionally bad design like the joke units with tank rifles. It's okay for weapons to be obsolete. The problem is when the setting pretends they aren't even though they obviously are.