HEAT.
Mass Effect lore is pretty great. One of the things they brought up that I had never really considered before is heat during ship combat.
Basically, Beam Weapons of the kinds of power we're talking about would generate significant amounts of heat. Additionally, shields could also generate heat during use. Engines and Powerplants could be additional (albiet, much lower) sources of heat.
Here's a telling quote from Mass Effect's Codex
This could be used to balance shields. If heat can't be dumped while shields are up, and taking shield damage generates heat as shields get used, then ships with large, quickly recharging shields with tanker support can no longer tank indefinitely. As heat builds up, components could fail, crew could die, etc.
This is a great idea. Shields take damage, the damage is turned into waste heat.
This would be a very neat energy tech line to have. Heat Sink Batteries, Heat Loss, and Heat Pump. The tech should be a simple linear efficiency. And these would be components you add to ships. No design would be needed.
All weapon systems when engage should produce excess heat, active sensors should produce excess heat, and shields while running should produce excess heat. Or if a simpler binary 'in combat' can be detected, then the ship produces heat as a function of its tonnage. And the components that produce heat would be a function of its hull space. I would keep this rate pretty flat. More advance components would more then likely need more joules of energy and it would get hotter, but active and passive cooling would probably keep it about the same.
The only problem with this, is that Fighters, and FACs would probably be pretty dampen in combat time by heat. This may not be a bad thing.
Heat Sink Batteries, would be components that just absorb heat. The maximum amount of heat it would sink, is how many hull spaces it was given multiplied by its current technology level. I would also say as soon as it 90 percent capacity, that it starts to have a failure chance, adjusted by the ships overall failure chance. And I would probably start with letting then have a max heat sink of 150 to 200 percent over capacity before it is destroyed.
I dont know if internally the game recognizes the difference between equipment failure and being damage in combat, but I would say that if it was destroyed in combat then the heat it contained would disappear. If it failed because it melted the heat would radiate to the rest of the ship.
As the ship gets hotter, it affects morale. Or it affects crew efficiency. The goal would be that everyone does their job on the ship worse because their being baked. Once the ship overall has taken heat to its tonnage or hull space, it'll start to cause system failures else wear. It would trigger maintenance failure checks with the heat exceeding the ship hs or tonnage, as a multiplier to this chance with it being multiplied by the ship overall failure chance.
Depending how you view things Lore wise, this can then cause fuel to ignite and missile to detonate.
As this is happening, every pulse that the ship is over its hs or tonnage, its killing crew. I would probably make this an exponential curve. The goal being that the ship crew can be literally baked but the ship itself can be recovered and repaired then restock with new ingri... crew.
Heat Loss components, would disperse stored heat from the sinks over time. They cant be used while shields are up. Lore wise, this would be miles and miles of tubing that the ship would push into space to increase the ship surface area. The tubes would be filled with some TN medium for pushing the heat.
Heat Pumps would be a support ship component. This component would let Support Ship pump the heat from the Combat ship, into the Support Ships own Heat Sinks, and use its own Heat Loss system. The transfer would be at the same rate, and rule as Heat Loss.
Hangar Components are assumed to come with Heat Pumps. Docked Ships would pump their heat into its Mothership, unless told otherwise. Docked Ships cannot disperse heat while docked, unless its pumping it into the Mothership.
And for spoiler races. They can ignore these rules. Star Swarms would defiantly need to for their well, swarms.
I am also curious if this is taken on, if just hitting ships with IR lasers or resonate frequency microwaves or something would you let you cook ships.
PDCs would assume to have infinite cooling and infinite heat absorption. Since their build on planets. This would also be true for PDC with hangars.
