Heat and Coolant

[alexanderson1993]

I've discussed heat in several places, including #369 and #521

As I was working on tweaking heat to make it work correctly, I realized it's incredibly opaque — it's easy to see how much heat a system has from the system monitor, but it is difficult to tell how to cool it down. Transferring cargo to manage heat is really tedious, so a more direct system needs to be developed.

Also, I think I will do a single coolant loop that looks something like this:

Systems are shown on the left, with their current temperature visible. Likewise, a coolant tank and a radiator with their temperature. A pump at the bottom is what moves the coolant and can be set to different speeds. Coolant moves through the loop from reservoir to systems to pump to radiator to reservoir, collecting or depositing heat as it goes.

Systems aren't always connected to the loop, but when they are they quickly dump their heat into the coolant. This is a momentary procedure, very similar to the "Flush Coolant" button in Thorium Classic. As long as the button is held down, coolant moves through and draws heat from the system. This provides a clear way to cool down systems when they get hot.

A few notes:

• The system will be tuned such that when operating normally, the radiator can reject all the heat produced by all the systems. However, running systems hotter than usual will cause coolant temperature to continuously increase, making flushing the coolant less effective.
• I haven't simulated this enough to know if changing the pump speed will have any impact. Ideally, pumping the coolant faster would cool systems faster, but would require more power to be applied to the pump, so it's a tradeoff.
• Coolant can leak and will need to be fixed by Damage Control. Leaked coolant will need to be replaced using cargo.
• Coolant can also be ejected into space. When replaced by new coolant via cargo, this allows the coolant temperature to drop very quickly.
• It is possible to bypass the radiator entirely, or turn the radiator effectiveness down, which would cause heat to build up, but would also decrease the thermal radiation making the ship less detectable.
• This basically eliminates the need for inventory to have temperatures, so I'll be removing that.
• I'll also likely hard-code some constants, like the system coolant pipe surface area, the coolant and system's material (which determines specific heat and thermal conductivity — I'd probably do ammonia for coolant and titanium for systems, but I might tune it), and the base pump speed.