Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Since a long time, empty highslots or offlined modules between your weapons have been called heat sinks, although that was always more of a workaround of the heat mechanics than anything else.

Personally I've been always a person who hates to see empty slots on ships, but I see their purpose, especially in high slots.
Low slots have other options for when you ran out of fitting the best possible primary priority mods to your ship, like Co-Processors, RCUs, PDS, passive armor mods, nanos, etc; although mid- and especially highslots have been lacking this for a long time.
The only real option to fill those up with something senseful nowadays when your fitting resources ran out is maybe an Automatic Targeting System I or trying to squeeze a small Neut or Nos in there somehow, as sadly the prototype highslot target painters never actually got released to fill this niche.


What about introducing proper heat sinks for highslots, possibly even mid and low slots, so that you can focus on fitting the best possible modules on your ships, without having to worry too much about having spare fitting left for that empty slot?
That empty slot could be still filled up with a useful mod that will do nothing by itself, but boosts the capabilities of the other fitted slots, by reducing their heat absorption in the same way that the (currently heavily underused) Supplemental Coolant Injector T3 Subsystems do.

This could be even tied into current lore, with the recent sleeper emergence in known space somehow adding this in as a possible loot BPC item similar to the other recent exploration-only items available in various meta variants.

As heat sinks are usually very simple objects (although improved by possible sleeper tech to be more efficient), they could be possibly even just one single item that is compatible with all 3 fitting slot types (no idea if that is even possible without heavily changing fitting mechanics) to widen their use and make them a very flexible item and cheap enough to make it worth to find a place everywhere, even on basic T1 frigates.

To expand their usefulness among ship types that may overheat a lot (think carriers that burn modules till the breaking point, then refit new ones), adding in some increased structure HP might also be a good idea, so that these heat sinks will be very hard to break (but not impossible like siege / triage modules) via overheating.


So, TL;DR:

Limited Supplemental Cooling Radiator
25% Reduction in the amount of heat damage absorbed by other modules in the same rack
Structure Hitpoints: 50 HP
0 TF / 1 PWG

Experimental Supplemental Cooling Radiator
33% Reduction in the amount of heat damage absorbed by other modules in the same rack
Structure Hitpoints: 60 HP
0 TF / 1 PWG

Prototype Supplemental Cooling Radiator
50% Reduction in the amount of heat damage absorbed by other modules in the same rack
Structure Hitpoints: 70 HP
0 TF / 1 PWG


OR if you want them to become much more widespread like I imagined how they would be most useful where they are really needed... (stuff like frigate 1v1, small scale primarily)

T1: Supplemental Cooling Radiator I
25% Reduction in the amount of heat damage absorbed by other modules in the same rack
Structure Hitpoints: 50 HP
0 TF / 1 PWG

Meta: Experimental Supplemental Cooling Radiator
33% Reduction in the amount of heat damage absorbed by other modules in the same rack
Structure Hitpoints: 60 HP
0 TF / 1 PWG

T2: Supplemental Cooling Radiator II
50% Reduction in the amount of heat damage absorbed by other modules in the same rack
Structure Hitpoints: 70 HP
0 TF / 1 PWG

Sleeper Faction!? Sleeper Supplemental Cooling Radiator
66% Reduction in the amount of heat damage absorbed by other modules in the same rack
Structure Hitpoints: 80 HP
0 TF / 1 PWG


Of course you could also add a small penalty to them to compensate the increased advantage they would give, though I couldn't think of a particulary good one that would make them worthwhile using, but not hurting the ship too much. It couldn't be a penalty to fitting as that would be the primary reason why they would be used in the first place and many other penalties make little sense as it is a passive module, just like a little bit of extra armor.

Perhaps a slight velocity penalty could be realistic and viable, although I will leave that part of thinking to the devs who may choose to implement this.

Thanks for reading and please give me feedback!

In the current form, no.


But if you changed it to say..



"Absorbs 10/25/50% of the heat generated by other modules in the same rack" I would be cool with it.

Problem with flat % reduction is that fairly minor reduction in % values result in significantly longer overheat times.

If it were changed to an absorption factor, the heat sink would briefly leech away a large portion of the heat generated by the other modules, before it burnt itself out.


This would give you a fairly short, frontloaded extension to your overheating, without risking issues with excessively long overheats.

You're a born genius.

The amounts are ridiculous and would obviously bias heavily towards ships with utility highs because DPS. If the concept it decided worthwhile it'd be better implemented through boosters/implants, surely?

Would make utility highs HELLA more useful... Especially in a PVE context...

Was thinking the same thing xD

and force many ships with the utility highs to be re balanced and with a good chance many would lose them

Although I am not a big fan of the gameplay based around fitting, and especially the associated sp grind and the strange backwards progression of most meta items, I would like to see "underfit" ships have some advantages as relates to overheating. A ship with spare CPU or PG should derive some benefits from them, and overheat mitigation could be one of those benefits.

In this context, ships that fit one function superlatively could overheat that one function for much longer. If you fit the biggest rack of guns or the biggest EHP possible, your overheat options would be more limited that a ship which took a more middle of the road path. A more lightly armed or lightly tanked ship might be able to burn around the battlefield for longer than other fits.

My understanding is that empty slots function just the same as offline or passive modules as regards to heat damage adjacency. I don't actually know if there is a wrap function for each row, but I assume it would have been mentioned somewhere if it existed.

While I am not opposed to non-laser related heatsinks as a specialized module per se, I am not thrilled by the idea of having to train yet another skill for them. However, at least it would be a specialized skill, and not yet another of the excessively generalist skills that currently plague the new player experience, and make this game such a hard sell.