Vehicular Supercooling

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This article is about a fanmade technology by NimoStar.
It should not be confused with official sources.

Vehicular Supercooling is, as its name would imply, a technique to increase heat dissipation applied in vehicles. It's application is divided in Internal and External supercooling modules.

Stats[edit]

  • Rules Level: Advanced
  • Introduction Date:
    • 2981 (Clan Hell's Horses)
    • 2989 (Clan Coyote)
    • 2993 (rest of Clans)
    • 3052 (IS, Capellan Confederation)
    • 3053 (IS, rest)
    • 3054 (Periphery)

Rules[edit]

Modifications appliable to: Units that use slots (not criticals)

Both modifications are independent. None is used by default; they can be used individually, or combined. However, combining them would probably be somewhat hard due to the slot requirements.

Reasoning[edit]

Mechs have Double Heatsinks, however, nothing of the sort has ever been added to Vehicles, making them sitting ducks on the matter of energy weapons - and their already disadvantageous relationship to them doesn't help, as they have to mount one single heatsink per one *potential* point of heat. This seeks to alleviate this problem to allow vehicles a little more flexibility in this point. However, the options still compare disfavorably to the (OP) 'Mech Double Heatsinks as the canon tournament rules allow. The disadvantages for vehicles are much more steep even when building them with these options. To see why or how this would also not be unbalanced, apply the fanmade rules at Laser review and rebalance, for example, that nerf the worst offenders amongst energy weapons. This nerf, of course, is more necessary with heat-tracking units such as BattleMechs, that do not need to be designed with constant dissipation.

External supercooling[edit]

External Supercooling doesn't apply to the base engine dissipation of vehicles (such as 10 for Fusion engines), only to additional mounted Heat Sinks which weight 1 ton each.
Vehicular Supercooling doubles the amount of heat that installed vehicle heatsinks "dissipate", much as Double Heatsinks for vehicles.
The penalty is that for each heatsink, Vehicular Supercooling occupies one vehicle slot.
The C-Bill cost and BV of each mounted Heatsink doubles.

Since the slot usage here will tend to be pretty extreme, this is only a good option if your build uses just a few components and most of the slot space is unused. There is also a sort of compromise needed between the extra weapons this would let you mount, and the space it takes to do so, since the limit is easily reached.

Internal supercooling[edit]

Internal Supercooling applies only to the inside of the engine.
It doubles the dissipation from default engine heatsinks,
Yet, it adds an amount of weight equal to 0.5 for each added dissipation point.
In addition to the extra weight, internal supercooling also occupies slots. Divide the dissipation provided by 5, .5 rounded up, to get the number of slots used (2 or less occupies nothing, 3 already occupies 1); for example, a default Fusion Engine would dissipate a base 20 heat (10+10 internal supercooling), at the cost of 5 extra tons of weight and 2 slots occupied.
If the Engine receives a critical hit of any kind, even if it isn't destroyed, the vehicle can no longer use weapons that would require heat capacity in its design phase, for the remainder of the match or until a 5 minute repair is done.
Internal Supercooling adds C-Bill cost and BV equivalent to the number of extra dissipation if it was additional single heatsinks.

This only saves 50% of the weight that more heatsinks would use, compared to 100% of the first option, yet is much less slot intensive, using only 1/5 of a slot per dissipation compared to 1 entire one. Also notable is that you don't have the ability to fine-tune it much - with default fusion it's either 10, or 20 and the penalties; making the External option probably superior if you want, say, 14 dissipation. The added fragility of the system needs extra consideration.

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