#Radiators And Heat Management

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

chilly heart
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I dislike how rare radiators are in science fiction, considering how important they are in space (at least with our current tech, anyways), and how cool they are. For this game, they would also add a whole additional layer to building space-craft. I would love if things like thrusters would generate a lot of heat which would need to be dissipated by connecting radiators to them and some sort of coolant piping system when out of the atmosphere. I would suggest that builds slowly lose some heat automatically, whether that be just an estimate from the mass of the build, or something more complex like calculating the exterior surface area of the craft and the materials used... however in most cases when using thrusters that wouldn't be enough, and some sort of radiator block would be required.

This suggestion would also meld into survival very nicely, as your spacecraft might heat up beyond tolerable levels if the heat is not dissipated.

For non-survival modes, I would suggest that components either start shutting down or losing efficiency past a certain temperature, or even take damage once damage is implemented into the game.

I understand that features like this involve a lot of work to implement, pushing back optimizations, bug fixes, and other new features, so I don't really expect this to be implemented... but I saw that nobody had suggested this yet, so I thought I should put this out there, just in case. :)

silk cosmos
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There is another side to heat management. I have another game that has exactly that and people tend to do it wrongly. Because the shutdown behavior in that game exists for so called fuel chambers and other components. It can be pretty subtle.
I am personally not against that but it definitely requires a lot of details being displayed and accessible or it is utterly hard to manage. Besides it can make smaller vehicles hard to design. Radiators take up a lot of space. Hence why even satellites use foldable solar panels and radiators. In space we only have heat dissipation based on heat radiation. No conductive coupling like in atmosphere.

chilly heart
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There's a space game with radiators? What's it called? I didn't know there was one.

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And yeah absolutely there should be heat sensors in sensitive components that can be accessed via a data channel, and also a heat sensor for a build.

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And foldable radiators in-game would be cool, or even better, if the radiators are just very scalable so you can make foldable ones yourself!

fringe mica
chilly heart
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I really like the idea of having to leave space in my designs for folded-in radiators during take-off, and then deploying them in space. That's actually where the initial idea came from. There was a lot of left-over space in my design in weird places that can't really fit a fuel tank unless I have a ton of small ones which I don't want to do, and would really brake up that part of the design from just being a giant tube if I had deployable radiators there.

chilly heart
fringe mica
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Well

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They have them but you rlly don’t need em lol

chilly heart
chilly heart