Hello,
(I'm returning to Evochron Legacy after playing EM a few years ago. Thanks for this relaxing paced game!)
I was messing around in the weapons lab, and I was wondering: Is there ever a reason to not put the heatsink slider bar all the way to 100% for a particle cannon? I was specifically designing a Rail weapon to have the best yield/energy at a range of about 1700 + yield/energy at the expense of rate of fire. (Really nice for the emergency asteroid shooting contracts, and seems to outrange Vonari.)
With that in mind, only the heatsink slider bar was all the way at 100%, because maxing out the other items for a 1700 range weapon made it take up more energy than the yield increase. However, the heatsink bar seemed to not have this characteristic. If the heatsink is very low, it seems like you make a weapon that generates about as much heat as a maneuvering thruster with poor yield or rate of fire. As I raise the heatsink bar, all of the stats just get better, and there's no spot on the curve where it started to make some other weapon characteristic unfavourable.
Does a deliberately lower heatsink affect any "unseen" stat, other than the case where heatsink is so low that all the other stats suffer? As for the heat generated stat itself, I can't think of why you'd want a weapon to run deliberately hot. Also, I didn't even notice pricing because the cost of a weapons lab weapon is so low compared to say... the C5 Jump Drive needed to obtain all the parts in reasonable time.
Has anyone found something good from not maxing out the heatsink on a weapon?
EL - Weapon Lab Heat Sink not at 100?
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frontier204
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Vice
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Re: EL - Weapon Lab Heat Sink not at 100?
The short answer would be 'it depends' 
To quote from a now very old discussion/inquiry on the subject:
This [heatsinks] option merely exists to let you manually select and adjust the firing rate of the particle cannon you are designing. More heatsinks provide a faster firing rate because the weapon doesn't have to cool off as much between shots. If you want your cannon to fire slower so as to use less energy, lower the heatsinks. If you want it to fire faster, which will use more energy, add heatsinks.
Some people want to put as much damage on target in as short amount of time as possible. They can often keep their cannon on target [even] during kinetic impact effects from incoming gunfire.
Others may want to fire slower so as to use less energy, particularly if they are thrown off-target... their missed shots will be fewer, resulting in less wasted energy. This also gives more energy to their beam cannon, allowing it to have more for dropping shields down on a target when used simultaneously. Particle cannons are energy eaters (especially high yield designs), so it's a way to taper that and balance it with other weapons/systems.
Most players will probably indeed always want the fastest firing particle cannon possible. But the option to slow it down is at least available for players (however few they may be) who want to slow their weapon down for energy conservation and yield balancing between their beam and particle cannons, depending on their play style and preferences.
Glad you're having fun with the game.
To quote from a now very old discussion/inquiry on the subject:This [heatsinks] option merely exists to let you manually select and adjust the firing rate of the particle cannon you are designing. More heatsinks provide a faster firing rate because the weapon doesn't have to cool off as much between shots. If you want your cannon to fire slower so as to use less energy, lower the heatsinks. If you want it to fire faster, which will use more energy, add heatsinks.
Some people want to put as much damage on target in as short amount of time as possible. They can often keep their cannon on target [even] during kinetic impact effects from incoming gunfire.
Others may want to fire slower so as to use less energy, particularly if they are thrown off-target... their missed shots will be fewer, resulting in less wasted energy. This also gives more energy to their beam cannon, allowing it to have more for dropping shields down on a target when used simultaneously. Particle cannons are energy eaters (especially high yield designs), so it's a way to taper that and balance it with other weapons/systems.
Most players will probably indeed always want the fastest firing particle cannon possible. But the option to slow it down is at least available for players (however few they may be) who want to slow their weapon down for energy conservation and yield balancing between their beam and particle cannons, depending on their play style and preferences.
Glad you're having fun with the game.