Energy and Heat? Ship Setups

[❆ColdShou❆]

I don't fully understand the Energy and heat thing, from just looking though i'm assuming just about everything produces heat and requires energy on the ship.
What I don't understand is the Moving,Idle,Firing,Max listings for both energy and heat.
Also could someone give me some setup suggestions for Bactrician and the shield beetle?

[Azmarov]

Moving means that's how much energy is required per second to move your ship. Firing is how much energy is used per second while firing. Idle means how much energy is generated while doing nothing. The maximum is your energy reserves. If you use more energy than you generate, it will deplete your reserves. When you run out of energy, your ship stops.

Heat is slightly different. Idle is how quickly it cools down while doing nothing. If this is a positive number, then your heat levels will never go below this. Moving and Firing is how much heat is generated while doing those actions. The maximum is how hot your ship can get before it overheats and shuts down.

Ideally, you want your Idle energy generation to be higher than the Moving and Firing combined. If you are using projectile weapons, you'll want the bottom number to be more than the Firing.

Same for Idle heat. You want the ship to cool down faster than it heats up so it doesn't shut down. Being attacked with plasma weapons, will still heat your ship up, so that maximum is how many shots you can take before your ship overheats.

[❆ColdShou❆]

I really appreciate this information thanks

[Happyscientist]

I believe having a negative idle heat helps things cool faster when idle but I'm not sure of that.

[13ĻÄĐË13ÄŖÖŅ]

Can someone please explain the idle heat value for me in more detail?

For Energy, the idle value, as explained above, is " how much energy is generated while doing nothing." Cool.

But for heat, you can have a positive idle value, yet still lose heat while idling. Right?
So how do you know how much heat is dissapated per second?

And would I be correct in saying that it's not necessary to have a negative idle heat value, as long as you're sure that your heat accumulates so slowly that your can last a battle without overheating?

Thanks!

[Albreo]

Alright let's assume that your ship has
idle -1300
moving 2000 (thrust + steer)
firing 3000
repairing 0
max 4500
While moving around the space your ship will never heat over 700 and with firing while moving your ship will never heat over 3700. I don't know if having negative value will help heat dissipate faster or not but the ideal value for your ship should be all of them combine and still below the maximum value (you don't need to do this for early game).

If your ship has idle value of positive 1000 while you're doing nothing your ship heat will never go below 1000 and also not increasing. After moving and firing your ship will slowly cool down to 1000.

[Griffinhart]

So what determines the rate at which your spacecraft cools off?

[Amazinite]

Cooling units.
i.e. Air ducts, water coolants, etc.

[Griffinhart]

No, I mean which metric. The explanation given makes it sound like the Heat numbers are upper limits on Heat, but none of them determine how quickly a given spacecraft will bleed off heat.

(Thanks for the explanation by the way, Albreo; I'd been running all my ships with negative Idle Heat, under the assumption I needed a negative value to actually cool them off. Now that I know I don't need to, this significantly relaxes my fitting requirements...)

[13ĻÄĐË13ÄŖÖŅ]

Thanks Albreo for that explanation. However as Griffinhart says, the question still stands: "The explanation given makes it sound like the Heat numbers are upper limits on Heat, but none of them determine how quickly a given spacecraft will bleed off heat. "
Anyone know this?

[local god]

Originally posted by Griffinhart:

So what determines the rate at which your spacecraft cools off?

ships have a "heat dissipation" attribute that is not really published within the game.

generally, smaller ships have a higher stat than larger ships - how this attribute specifically affects a hull's "heat performance" is quite dependent on the ship's current heat, and therefore final mass (total heat capacity).

so, if you have a very high mass (and max heat in the thousands), a hull with heat dissipation 0.5 still sheds way more bulk heat (while heated) than one with a lower mass (and heat in the hundreds) and heat dissipation 0.9. (which, btw, are the recommended limits for vanilla ships).

[Griffinhart]

Originally posted by local god:

Originally posted by Griffinhart:

So what determines the rate at which your spacecraft cools off?

ships have a "heat dissipation" attribute that is not really published within the game.

Well, that's vaguely annoying. At least now I know my ships don't strictly need negative Idle Heat to be functional...

[13ĻÄĐË13ÄŖÖŅ]

"Well, that's vaguely annoying."

Yup. Also not good UI, imho. As someone who'd played every version of EV, I didn't have much of a learning curve when getting started with ES. But for new players it's bad enough all the new things they have to learn, without throwing in game mechanics they have to figure out all by themselves or by coming to the forums.

In making ship stats neater by fitting the heating stats into the same categories as the energy stats, the heat stats miss out on crucial information.

[local god]

Originally posted by 13ĻÄĐË13ÄŖÖŅ:

"Well, that's vaguely annoying."

Yup. Also not good UI, imho. As someone who'd played every version of EV, I didn't have much of a learning curve when getting started with ES. But for new players it's bad enough all the new things they have to learn, without throwing in game mechanics they have to figure out all by themselves or by coming to the forums.

In making ship stats neater by fitting the heating stats into the same categories as the energy stats, the heat stats miss out on crucial information.

by all rights, the heat dissipation for any given hull is generally correlated to its engine/weapons capacity - that if you've got the biggest ion engines that will fit, some beam weapons in the slots and a fuel cell to power them, you will not need supplementary cooling to fly and engage in light combat.

it's similar to the ramscoop ability of all ships - really only there so that you can get out of korath space (and salvage your save without text editing) after jumping deep and landing on a barren world.

in the 0.9.0 update, the fuel cells were adjusted to run even cooler, so ships using cool-running builds will benefit even more from this, especially as IR missile tracking gets refined (i've already noticed those meteors going dumb when my heat hits 0 in my compiled fork).

[13ĻÄĐË13ÄŖÖŅ]

"generally correlated" there's the rub - I want to know exact numbers! Energy gets it, why not cooling?

[local god]

because the "heat dissipation" attribute, by nature, doesn't offer a steady-state level of cooling - it changes as the heat level on the ship does (which can be quite a margin).

edit; i think that what you're actually asking for would be at least as, if not more confusing than the current system.