Battletech concepts that don't work in MWLL

[Kadreal]

I think a cool feature would be 'heat shock'. Ever had a really hot pan crack when you run it through water? The same can happen if a relatively cool object is suddenly heated to extreme levels.

An implementation of this would be that if a mech suddenly has a burst of heat, via alpha striking from several energy weapons. He would have a chance based on the amount of heat generated to have subsystems become damaged or lose weapons, perhaps even serious structural damage from fracturing.

This effect can be even deeper, such as having it based on location of the weapons, or current temperature of the mech. Surprisingly the hotter the mech is already running, the less chance it would have of heat shock damage since there would be less of a heat difference between the weapons generating the heat and the mech. This could allow for tactics such as 'warming up' the mech with some chain fire before opening up with an alpha strike once you have a bit of heat.

This could also help prevent heavy energy boating when/if the mech lab makes its debut.

[Frostiken]

I picture an ideal heat system doing something like the following:



In thiis case, this is a Madcat who is walking (negligable heat from leg actuators) and fired his LRM20s. The heat 'rings' spread out from heat sources to represent spreading heat. High heat can affect certain areas (a small laser sandwiched next to two large pulse lasers will have degraded performance from the hot weapons regardless if it were fired. Or in the case of the madcat, the machine guns are kind of warm, but not enough to be impacted at all. Furthermore, if the Cat fires its CERLBLs, the CERMBLs will be pretty hot as well.

Heat spreads. Heatsinks are good at rapidly cooling specific hotspots but less good at overall cooling. So the orange LRMs could be cooled but the gradual heat level (the lighter colors) will not cool as rapidly - cooling after all is faster the larger the temp. difference.

So a sprinting Novacat could fire all its weapons and cool the weapons down, but the heat will spread all over the body VERY rapidly (basically rippling like a rock in a pond) and will cripple the mech before long.

I could better represent this if I had more time and, more importantly, .gif animating software... but I don't You'll have to use your imagination.

Anywys, just a thought.

[Brainwright]

Heat spreads. Heatsinks are good at rapidly cooling specific hotspots but less good at overall cooling. So the orange LRMs could be cooled but the gradual heat level (the lighter colors) will not cool as rapidly - cooling after all is faster the larger the temp. difference.

This was the idea behind the two heat spike and accrued heat variables mentioned earlier.  Simply reducing cooling efficiency for lower heat ranges would simulate this as well and reducing cooling efficiency for long times spent in high heat would also better represent heat building up inside the core of the mech.