Looking ahead

[JensAyton]

...and heat will probably be proportional to DPS modified by range

Will this be hard coded?

By “heat will probably be proportional to DPS modified by range” I mean “there will probably be little or no room for laser cooling boosters.”

[Zireael]

Another idea - different colored lasers depending on their type, as in ArcElite.

Funnily enough, I wrote a note on this yesterday. The basic idea is that NPC laser types should be equipment types, and the colour of the laser (as well as its power) should be specified in equipment rather than per-ship overrides. If you want a ship to have a custom laser colour, you can add a new equipment type. (For instance, police ships might have a tweaked beam laser in a fetching shade of violet.)

Limiting lasers to exactly five combinations of range and rate of fire while allowing a wide range of power levels is, when you get right down to it, rather silly. You’ll probably be able to set these independently, within limits. There will probably be a cap on total DPS, and heat will probably be proportional to DPS modified by range.

Yay, cool!

[Smivs]

“there will probably be little or no room for laser cooling boosters.”

Phew!

[CheeseRedux]

heat will probably be proportional to DPS modified by range.

Just to make sure my addled brain is processing this correctly:

We're talking specialized lasers here, right? Not our current no-reason-to-use-anything-but-military-if-you-can-afford-it, but proper sniper tools (great range and damage, but you better not miss because you'll have an overheated laser an an angry mark bearing down on you), close combat cannons (range sucks, but damage is good and you can keep firing forever) and anything in between the extremes, yes? That makes choosing the right weapon for the right mounting (and your playing style) a much more interesting prospect.
Me like.

[Griff]

“there will probably be little or no room for laser cooling boosters.”

That's fair enough i suppose, OK, so then how about this - if lasers get implemented as equipment will their damage & heat settings etc be visible as an entry in an equipment.plist so that we can easily customise their settings without having to dig about in the source code and re-compile and all that
edit: oops, just noticed that we're talking about NPC lasers

[Zireael]

“there will probably be little or no room for laser cooling boosters.”

That's fair enough i suppose, OK, so then how about this - if lasers get implemented as equipment will their damage & heat settings etc be visible as an entry in an equipment.plist so that we can easily customise their settings without having to dig about in the source code and re-compile and all that
edit: oops, just noticed that we're talking about NPC lasers

What about applying the same rule to player lasers?

[Smivs]

We're talking specialized lasers here, right? Not our current no-reason-to-use-anything-but-military-if-you-can-afford-it, but proper sniper tools (great range and damage, but you better not miss because you'll have an overheated laser an an angry mark bearing down on you), close combat cannons (range sucks, but damage is good and you can keep firing forever) and anything in between the extremes, yes? That makes choosing the right weapon for the right mounting (and your playing style) a much more interesting prospect.
Me like.

Oh No! We can't do that. It goes against all the laws of Physics!

[Ganelon]

There are a few fundamental problems with laser cooling in space in the first place. For one thing, there's really noplace for that heat to go. Vacuum is a rather good insulator, so if something gets hot, it will take quite a while to cool down. Unless one uses some exotic method to bleed off the heat, like in bursts of steam or something (wouldn't that be an interesting sight?), it doesn't "just go away". Any cooler has to work pretty much by moving heat away from the laser and into the structure of the ship.

Which brings me to my .02 CR for this post. Ships should not all cool equally well as they do in the current game. Bigger ships have more mass for heat to go into the structure. I would think that the lasers would cool slower each time they're heated up in a given battle. For the first few bursts the difference would be negligible, but in a longer fight the laser temp cool-off would eventually drop to a near crawl since whatever sort of heat exchanger is moving heat from the weapons to the structure of the ship will be taxed more heavily and the structure will already be somewhat heated up, so there is less of a temp differential for the system to work with.

On smaller ships, the effect would be noticed quicker, since they have less mass/structure to dump that heat into in the first place. They're maybe more nimble or accelerate faster, since they are small, but I think their lasers should heat up a bit quicker and cool slower. It's the tradeoff for being a smaller target with good acceleration and turn.

Bigger ships, especially actual warship,s might have more of a ship to dump heat into and possibly special gear to dump heat faster, but still it's not an infinite capacity as it is now.

Other than not being able to fire the laser, overheating should have other consequences. As heat is dumped into the structure of the ship, cabin temps would rise. At some point, other equipment would also start to fail as ambient temps go up and the efficiency of things like processors and memory storage are hampered or possibly they heat up to the point of a fail and simply blow out. It might ruin some delicate types of cargo as well, in extreme cases.

Yeah, I know, "don't let reality interfere with gameplay". But consequences of heat could be used to increase the pressure on the player in longer battles that more advanced players might get into, making the player have to fight smarter and be more careful to make sure laser shots pay off enough to take them. For a beginning player in the typically short fights against one or two opponents, the difference would be negligible. It would be something one gradually learns to take into account as one gets involved in bigger/longer fights.

As far as different colours of lasers.. Different colours of laser can affect different hull materials to a greater or lesser extent. Consider for a moment common laser "pointers" of our time. If you get hit in the eye by a red laser pointer, chance of damage is less than for a green laser of the same power. Why? Your retina is full of capillaries that are full of blood. Blood is red, which can be more accurately stated as "it reflects mostly red light". If it is hit with green laser, it absorbs more of it and heats up more. More damage.

If hulls are made of different materials, or adding something like IronHide changes properties of the hull, then different colour lasers might be a bit more or less effective against different materials. And even if the difference is actually negligible, you won't be able to tell a combateer that! They'll have their personal beliefs, and marketing will be taking advantage of that by making desired colours available, at least at a price.

[Fatleaf]

Any cooler has to work pretty much by moving heat away from the laser and into the structure of the ship.

In the Caduceus that happens already. Go to an external view and fire your laser and you will see the ship start to get red as if it is next to a star. But the cabin temperature doesn't rise though, the effect is purely visual. Don't know if other ships do the same.

[Ganelon]

That is highly cool! I've never flown a Caduceus yet, since they're still outside of my comfort budget. I've only ever seen one in the game, and that was via the Personalities.OXP I didn't even know *what* it was at first, since it came into my field of view from alongside. That was Commander Wyveryn's ship, and seeing it slide by from behind me and off to the side was very much a "Wow!!!" moment.

[lohwengk]

There are a few fundamental problems with laser cooling in space in the first place. For one thing, there's really noplace for that heat to go. Vacuum is a rather good insulator, so if something gets hot, it will take quite a while to cool down. Unless one uses some exotic method to bleed off the heat, like in bursts of steam or something (wouldn't that be an interesting sight?), it doesn't "just go away". Any cooler has to work pretty much by moving heat away from the laser and into the structure of the ship.

Actually, that's not quite right. There are three ways to remove heat from an object (in normal physics): convection, conduction and radiation. Convection requires a fluid, so it won't work in a vacuum. Conduction requires the source of heat to touch something else (preferably solid), so again, it doesn't work in a vacuum. But radiation, especially as light in the infrared wavelength, still works. And remember that heat is energy, and can be used to do work, e.g. make electricity.

[Zireael]

Let's drop this vein of thinking... my head hurts from the scientific debate...

[JensAyton]

And remember that heat is energy, and can be used to do work, e.g. make electricity.

Er, no. The flow of heat between places at different temperatures can be used to do work, but more heat is inevitably produced in doing so. There is no known way to “upgrade” heat into other forms of energy, and if you’ve found one a heck of a lot of thermodynamics textbooks will need to be updated.

[The Black Albatross]

And remember that heat is energy, and can be used to do work, e.g. make electricity.

Er, no. The flow of heat between places at different temperatures can be used to do work, but more heat is inevitably produced in doing so. There is no known way to “upgrade” heat into other forms of energy, and if you’ve found one a heck of a lot of thermodynamics textbooks will need to be updated.

But don't forget to grab the patent before that happens, though…

[Thargoid]

And remember that heat is energy, and can be used to do work, e.g. make electricity.

Er, no. The flow of heat between places at different temperatures can be used to do work, but more heat is inevitably produced in doing so. There is no known way to “upgrade” heat into other forms of energy, and if you’ve found one a heck of a lot of thermodynamics textbooks will need to be updated.

Heat is a manifestation of kinetic energy (it's the movement and/or vibration of atoms and molecules). But the conversion of that energy into work is never going to be 100% efficient - usually much less so - and lots will be lost to the surroundings and atmosphere.