Temperature Control Effect, Heat Shielding/Armor

[Lecic]

Temperature Control, Heat Shields, and Heat Armor are three new systems.

Temperature Control

Passive
Reduces damage from sources of heat, such as the sun, heat inducing weapons (more on that later), and lava, which now deals heat damage while in contact with ships. Max at 75% efficiency, meaning you can only block 75% of incoming heat damage.

Active
Converts weapon damage into heat damage. Max at 100% efficiency.

Now, since passive Temperature Control can only block 75% of heat damage, you'll need something else to protect you from the rest of the heat damage you can take.

Heat Shields and Heat Armor

Heat shields and armor are two new systems that can protect you from the rest of incoming heat damage.

Heat Shields
Heat shields comprise of two blocks, like normal shields. They are called Cooling Units (CU) and Heat Sinks (HS). CU work like Shield Rechargers, except they remove heat instead of adding shields. HS work as shield capacitors, except you'd prefer these things to be empty.

When a ship is taking heat damage, HS start filling up. A ship, by default, has zero heat. When you are hit by heat damage, if you have heat sinks, they will absorb it, and the heat levels on the ship will increase by the amount of damage you took. If you took 100 damage with a 50% Temp Control system active, your heat sinks would fill up by 50. CU remove heat, like a reverse shield recharger. They are effected by combat regen, just like shield rechargers. We'll call this "combat cooling".

HS gain slight bonuses for each side touching a CU. This would make the most effective (both space and bonus wise) HS units to be alternating lines of HS and CU, then having more CU sandwiching the layer of HS/CU.

Heat Armor
Heat armor is a hull block for avoiding heat damage. Versus sun-induced heat damage, it blocks all of it, if it is facing the sun, much like how hiding behind other entities blocks sun damage. Versus heat weapons and lava, it works like normal hull does for normal damage. However, it does not has very little integrity against standard weapon fire.
Stats- 125 HP, 50% Heat Protection, 5% Amor

Heat Shielding idea courtesy of petlahk, with some alterations.

 

[petlahk]

Lol, lecic, you took a kind of silly idea, and made it 1,000 times better xD

 

[jayman38]

I'm always eager to see heat mechanics in a space game. How will the per-block heat level be stored? Certain folks have an aneurism if we suggest adding to the existing three-bytes-per-block data storage. If you try to store it by-entity, you won't have proper heat shielding.

 

[ltmauve]

How will the per-block heat level be stored? Certain folks have an aneurism if we suggest adding to the existing three-bytes-per-block data storage. If you try to store it by-entity, you won't have proper heat shielding.

Assuming it's by entity, we can have a working system by only having heat damage do actual damage when the HS are full.

 

[Lecic]

I'm always eager to see heat mechanics in a space game. How will the per-block heat level be stored? Certain folks have an aneurism if we suggest adding to the existing three-bytes-per-block data storage. If you try to store it by-entity, you won't have proper heat shielding.

It's per-entity, like sun damage currently is.

Also, you can still have shielding with it. Not sure why you think it wouldn't work if it was per-entity? If a block of heat armor gets hit, it reduces the total heat damage that the ship takes.

 

[Viridis00]

I like this idea. Though, there are consequences to this, specifically around stars. Correct me if I'm wrong, but with a strong enough cooling system, couldn't a player indefinitely hide in or make a base inside of a sun?

I really like the idea of heat armor though, having a base close to a star shielded by a giant sun-shield would look magnificent, or ships with a top or bottom layer of emergency heat shields would make for fun builds. Maybe call the heat armor something like Ceramic Armor since ceramics are commonly used in real life for roles like that.

 

[ltmauve]

Also, if re-entry heating was done using this system (and with it being fairly widespread) I wouldn't mind it.

 

[Lecic]

I like this idea. Though, there are consequences to this, specifically around stars. Correct me if I'm wrong, but with a strong enough cooling system, couldn't a player indefinitely hide in or make a base inside of a sun?

I really like the idea of heat armor though, having a base close to a star shielded by a giant sun-shield would look magnificent, or ships with a top or bottom layer of emergency heat shields would make for fun builds. Maybe call the heat armor something like Ceramic Armor since ceramics are commonly used in real life for roles like that.

Yes, you could, theoretically, build a base inside of a star.

To counter that, let's say that stars deal heat damage based on the mass of the thing they are hitting, so regardless of ship size, you'd need about the same percent of the ship to be heat sinks and cooling units to survive indefinitely in the sun. To permanently avoid sun damage, you'd need a respectable percent (10? 20?) of your ship to be dedicated to cooling systems.

 

[jayman38]

It's per-entity, like sun damage currently is.

Also, you can still have shielding with it. Not sure why you think it wouldn't work if it was per-entity? If a block of heat armor gets hit, it reduces the total heat damage that the ship takes.

The thing with per-entity values, such as sun-damage, is that there isn't a hierarchy of what gets hit first. In real physics, you hide behind a heat shield. However, in a per-entity shielding situation, couldn't you just put the heat armor anywhere and have it work the same? (Stick 'em along the ceiling in the cargo bay, out of the way, for instance?) So it's not that it wouldn't work. It's just that it wouldn't work in the obvious way.

 

[ltmauve]

Having sun damaged based on mass doesn't make sense. The sun should work by doing damage only to whatever it can, dependant on the range. That way, the position of the armor does matter. As for how heat damage translates into actual damage, once your heat sinks are full, any heat damage you take will be dealt as HP damage

 

[Lecic]

Maybe I should rephrase how the heat resistant armor blocks work- they function as a shadow entity slightly in front, that, while completely invisible, blocks sunlight like how you can hide behind an asteroid to stop sun damage.

Having sun damaged based on mass doesn't make sense. The sun should work by doing damage only to whatever it can, dependant on the range.

I know it doesn't make much IRL sense, but it's a balancing factor to make it hard to just slap the minimum required for eternal sun shield and just relax in the sun's core.

Think of it THIS way- it's not increasing based on mass, but rather surface area, which DOES effect how much energy (heat) an object absorbs. Calculating surface area would be more resource intensive, though, so it uses mass.

 

[Byamarro]

I would add whole temperature system, some planets would be cold for example.
But it would be dangerous for characters not ships.

 

[Lecic]

I would add whole temperature system, some planets would be cold for example.
But it would be dangerous for characters not ships.

That could exist separately from this, while this still exists.

 

[ltmauve]

Think of it THIS way- it's not increasing based on mass, but rather surface area, which DOES effect how much energy (heat) an object absorbs. Calculating surface area would be more resource intensive, though, so it uses mass.

Yes, but you have to calculate which blocks are visible to the sun anyway, in order to determine the effectiveness of heat armor. You just count up each block and how much armor it is that is visible to the sun, and then determine the distance that the center of the ship is from the sun. We already calculate shadows from the sun.