Heat As A Gameplay Addition to Survival in SE2
I personally think that cooling (i.e fluid, air, radiators for space) would be an interesting concept to see in SE2. I liked the cooling mod for SE1 where you had to place vents if you used a reactor and such since it gives you an extra excuse to have more pipes and engineering to do when building a base or ship.
How I'd implement this is for certain things like assemblers, refiners, hydrogen engines, reactors, and all other things that produce heat which needs to be dissipated, there would be different solutions for different environments. Water cooling (to go with the gameplay loop of water) and air cooling will be for planets with an atmosphere and with water, and radiators + coolant can be used on ships for things like ion thrusters and other devices that produce heat.
This would also give another incentive to strategically design ships and bases to have necessary weak points for cooling, because if equipment overheats, it will shut down.
Other reddit users on my post pointed out that this can also benefit stealth strategies, either to as an offensive strategy as you are colonizing the Almagest system and finding enemy factions or as a defensive strategy when protecting your own installations from adversaries.
In all, I'd love this to be an addition to SE2, as it would not only introduce new engineering challenges, but also introduce more depth into the survival experience. With the focus on an exponential reveal of depth in terms of production logistics gameplay, this could be laid out in the same way with more basic cooling systems being available to use early game, then as you progress you can develop more robust ways of dissipating heat through more advanced options.
I like this feedback
Related thread with more ideas in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/s/OjXsOVByCm
Related thread with more ideas in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceengineers/s/OjXsOVByCm
Heat mechanics can have a lot of very interesting ramifications (heat saturation, habitability, stealth and detection, steam turbines for power, etc.), all of which feed into very interesting engineering challenges. If nothing else, I would love if all of this was at least possible via modding without having to run massive scripts.
Heat mechanics can have a lot of very interesting ramifications (heat saturation, habitability, stealth and detection, steam turbines for power, etc.), all of which feed into very interesting engineering challenges. If nothing else, I would love if all of this was at least possible via modding without having to run massive scripts.
Heat / temperature management has massive potential to really liven up the survival experience. It's definitely worth consideration.
The reasons it would work well in SE2 are almost too many to count, but the main draw would be the fact that in and of itself, the necessity of managing temperatures ties into almost all of the existing systems in the game in interesting ways and introduces meaningful constraints to engineer around.
And not only that, it creates meaningful and sensible progression paths in the sense that it mandates actual logistics between ships and stations.
One example would be water cooled drills. Say you're trying to mine resources on a planet with a hot, dense atmosphere. Your drills would overheat, until you ship in the water to keep them running. You would now have to design, build and run interplanetary transport ships to conquer new environments, along with vehicles and stations tailored to those environments. And suddenly also, the water system that is being implemented in SE2 has a whole other dimension to it, where the presence of water becomes a major factor in how you build and progress.
Tiered progressions would be a third example, where you start off with standard thrusters but then progress to more powerful versions of those same thrusters as you gain access to improved coolants like liquid hydrogen or methane.
It would be awesome to have to mine and refine ice on europa to create coolants you need to survive the scorching hot atmospheres of a venus like planet... and then use the abundance of carbon dioxide from that planet to produce stuff like improved MIG/MAG enabled welders or synthetic fuels.
Heat / temperature management has massive potential to really liven up the survival experience. It's definitely worth consideration.
The reasons it would work well in SE2 are almost too many to count, but the main draw would be the fact that in and of itself, the necessity of managing temperatures ties into almost all of the existing systems in the game in interesting ways and introduces meaningful constraints to engineer around.
And not only that, it creates meaningful and sensible progression paths in the sense that it mandates actual logistics between ships and stations.
One example would be water cooled drills. Say you're trying to mine resources on a planet with a hot, dense atmosphere. Your drills would overheat, until you ship in the water to keep them running. You would now have to design, build and run interplanetary transport ships to conquer new environments, along with vehicles and stations tailored to those environments. And suddenly also, the water system that is being implemented in SE2 has a whole other dimension to it, where the presence of water becomes a major factor in how you build and progress.
Tiered progressions would be a third example, where you start off with standard thrusters but then progress to more powerful versions of those same thrusters as you gain access to improved coolants like liquid hydrogen or methane.
It would be awesome to have to mine and refine ice on europa to create coolants you need to survive the scorching hot atmospheres of a venus like planet... and then use the abundance of carbon dioxide from that planet to produce stuff like improved MIG/MAG enabled welders or synthetic fuels.
Lots of people want heat because it would be both an engineering challenge and a balance mechanic, and lots of people don't want heat because they are worried about having to handle an extra mechanic that could spontaneously disable their ship when they try to ignore it or because it could scare off new players that don't know and just see their stuff spontaneously crash every time a minute or two after takeoff.
I'm in the former group, though I believe there needs to be some manner of warning-system to help new players learn the ropes and warn everyone else when they 've lost too many radiators.
Lots of people want heat because it would be both an engineering challenge and a balance mechanic, and lots of people don't want heat because they are worried about having to handle an extra mechanic that could spontaneously disable their ship when they try to ignore it or because it could scare off new players that don't know and just see their stuff spontaneously crash every time a minute or two after takeoff.
I'm in the former group, though I believe there needs to be some manner of warning-system to help new players learn the ropes and warn everyone else when they 've lost too many radiators.
For heat management to work in a meaningful way, the energetics would have to work realistically.
For heat management to work in a meaningful way, the energetics would have to work realistically.
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