Ship Vents are, basically, a Cooler (vanilla air-con) except there's no 'hot' side to it. You install it and it cools a room down to what temperature you set it to.

The difference is that instead of how a Cooler does things (takes temperature FROM the blue /cool side and adds it TO the red/hot side), the Ship Vent takes the temperature FROM the blue/cool side (inside your ship where you install it) and adds it TO the coolant network (yellow lines in your ship).

The coolant network then tries to get rid of that temperature you just took out of the room by sending it to Radiators or shoving it into Heat Sinks (which then passively heat up the room the heat sinks are in while the radiators try to get rid of it for good).

You can cool a heatsink ROOM with vents, but all that does is put the heat back into the heatsinks, which heat the room back up again, so you're just wasting power and generating extra heat, so it's not a great idea. You CAN use them in heatsink rooms, but it's best to use radiators until you're sure you wont just make things worse.

Thank you!