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« Last post by DevianID on Today at 20:49:10 »
tin droplet radiators are fun, so this is a cool idea. You dont necessarily need to spray in a vacuum either. You can make a transparent to infrared liquid material that is enclosed in a transparent to infrared bubble, and pump your metal fountain onto the bubble protruding out of your ship. The metal, so long as it stays mobile, will cool and flow back down with minimal pumping from the hot internal side to the space side. This lets you spray metal under some thrust without losing coolant mass, with the infrared heat radiating out into space. Taking damage to the bubble enclosure from weapon impacts means you start losing reaction mass, as its not being collected, but at the same time now you have open cycle cooling.
For gameplay though, this is tough to implement for space ships. The reason being that space ships have so much tonnage, cooling systems are a mere afterthought, and heat issues are easily solved. The fact that warships have heat at all is silly--the math is cumbersome to figure out how many bays your mckenna can shoot. 12650 heat sinks with 900, 135, 40, 255 heat bays is just a pain in the butt to actually add up on the table. Its the worst kind of gameplay loop IMHO. Unlike with mechs where riding the heat is a risk reward thing, with various penalties as you heat up leading to dramatic shutdown or ammo rolls, heat is aerospace has no gameplay pay off, and the numbers involved are WAY higher then the 30 scale we have for mechs to count. You just cant/arnt allowed to over heat in space. Thus, its just useless math homework, and for just .2% of the ships tonnage you can easily add more HS to a mckenna to avoid stupid busywork.
I bring that up because, while I think the 'metal fountain' idea is cool, the base system the idea is working with is totally pointless to begin with. HS tonnage isnt a limiting factor, nor is the heat gameplay loop interactive or fun at all. Just some of the flaws of the battlespace framework. So I dont see how this heat system will help dropships. The castrum has 1200 cooling and 1109 in weapon heat, and despite being one of the most well armed dropships that exist it still has enough tonnage left to add 16000 more heat dissipation without issue.
If the metal droplet let the castrum have triple HS, for example, instead of doubles, the castrum would save 200 tons, and the cooling system would go from 236 tons in heat sinks to 36 tons. 200 tons of weight saving is a .2% mass difference, on something with 8.8k unused tons as it is. HS are such a tiny unnecessary part of dropships that I dont know if these special rules are worth the trouble any possible rules for damage or G maneuvers would add sadly, which is true of a lot of the aerospace systems.
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