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FaerieKnight79 said:
The biggest issue with the disposable heat sinks in ME2 and 3 is that the guns are all still rail guns that use a sliver ammunition source. By that I mean they use a solid block of matter as their ammunition, and insanely small slivers are shaved off the block for each shot fired. It's not an unlimited ammunition source, but for all practical purposes it is due to it supplying enough ammo for months of constant fighting. So, why are the disposable heat sinks stupid? Because they are universally all in the gun's handle. In every case you eject it from the bottom of where you are holding on, and shove a new one in. But you're using a rail gun. It's not the handle that would be overheating. It's the barrel, which the heat sink is not affecting in the slightest. The reason why guns in ME1 had to cool down (with stronger guns having fewer shots before overheating) is because too high of a rate of fire would warp and destroy the barrel. Thus why weapon mods that improve damage cause the gun to overheat faster, while mods that improve rate of fire lower damage. It's a give and take, you can either do more damage at the cost of more heat or less damage but build up less heat per shot.

The disposable heat sinks do nothing to help with this issue since they are just pulling heat away from the ammunition pool, which is also in the handle. Oh, and you must have cut down the size of the ammunition block too. Yet they are somehow cooling the barrel enough that you can fire as fast as you can slap in new heat sinks.

... What?! Physics doesn't work that way!
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Yep. We know. EA fucked up when they passed on that particular piece of BS. Sure there were late game builds that allowed for functionally infinite shots from an assault rifle in ME1, but that's just it, they were late game and also not nearly as high damage as you could get. The heat sinks were just a way to force an ammo system into the game, even when it didn't make sense at all.
Because Guess what, it gets even worse.
These heat sinks had no passive cooling, even in atmosphere! Sure in a vacuum or high temp environment I could understand it... somewhat... But this is a series of games that let you literally walk next to an open pyroclastic flow without taking damage. So realism wasn't their priority.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
The disposable heat sinks do nothing to help with this issue since they are just pulling heat away from the ammunition pool, which is also in the handle. Oh, and you must have cut down the size of the ammunition block too. Yet they are somehow cooling the barrel enough that you can fire as fast as you can slap in new heat sinks.

... What?! Physics doesn't work that way!
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You could have a bunch of heat pipes and heat pumps to transfer heat from the barrel to the sink.

...But that doesn't seem like good design, no.
 
Aineko said:
You could have a bunch of heat pipes and heat pumps to transfer heat from the barrel to the sink.

...But that doesn't seem like good design, no.
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And since the guns look identical in design to ME1, wouldn't work either. They all collapse and fold out to be roughly the same size when stored regardless of their actual length/size in use. Pistols are, of course, smaller. So, where are those heat pipes? They can't be in the under barrel because most of the 2 handed weapons have you holding onto it with one hand. Which means the majority of the barrel was already designed to not transmit heat down towards the hand. It already had ways to vent heat, it just took a second or two to do so if you kept up too high of a rate of fire. Which is, by the way, the same length of time it takes to put in a new heat sink. So, where is the design improvement with this limited ammunition source? :)

I could believe manufacturers pushing it as a way to make money off selling the heat sinks. But why did all already existing weapons get converted over to the new design too? And how did they convince people living off the grid for years to, pirates, and other criminals to convert their perfectly servicaable and highly customizable weapons to use this new heat sink system?
 
My go to for ME1 was highest damage sniper I had and "All the damage mods (including explosive ammo)", one explosive shot killed most enemies then overheated, bonus is that the overheat time is shorter than the cooldown time using cooling mods with less damage on the sniper so thermal clips ruined my build :'(
 
Firestar said:
My go to for ME1 was highest damage sniper I had and "All the damage mods (including explosive ammo)", one explosive shot killed most enemies then overheated, bonus is that the overheat time is shorter than the cooldown time using cooling mods with less damage on the sniper so thermal clips ruined my build :'(
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I did the same! One shot, shit died, then wait a little, next shot's ready. Combine it with an infinite-cooling assault rifle and you were pretty much set for most situations.
 
Considering I think the best you could do for number of shots was 2.5 shots with a sniper rifle in ME1, why not go for max damage?
 
Considering all the things Star Trek crews do with the deflector dish that don't involve deflecting anything... What was it SUPPOSE to be deflecting?
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Considering all the things Star Trek crews do with the deflector dish that don't involve deflecting anything... What was it SUPPOSE to be deflecting?
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Anything that they might not want to collide with at Warp, primarily. The vast array of techniques used for this means that it's incredibly useful for other functions when you aren't using it to keep your ship from being pelted by space debris.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Considering all the things Star Trek crews do with the deflector dish that don't involve deflecting anything... What was it SUPPOSE to be deflecting?
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CmptrWz said:
Anything that they might not want to collide with at Warp, primarily. The vast array of techniques used for this means that it's incredibly useful for other functions when you aren't using it to keep your ship from being pelted by space debris.
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Honestly, with that in mind I can easily believe it is a higher power protective system than the standard shields, with the unreasonably higher active energies and directional construction that implies that make it so that they use standard shields while outside of FTL instead.
 
E.I.G. said:
Honestly, with that in mind I can easily believe it is a higher power protective system than the standard shields, with the unreasonably higher active energies and directional construction that implies that make it so that they use standard shields while outside of FTL instead.
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It's possible the deflector dish is also unsuitable against energy weapons, being designed to move debris and the like.
 
FaerieKnight79 said:
Except they've used it to expell, gather, and redirect energy before. Including gravity from a black hole. I... don't think it'd be useless against energy weapons.
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I mean, the real answer is of course "Star Trek is not even slightly hard sci-fi". More Watsonianly, perhaps is can only withstand so much direct energy, or phaser beams and similar weapons ignore it due to their own properties.
 
From what I understand (which is surprisingly little even though it's my favourite universe) the deflector dish is designed to project a field in a rather narrow beam in front of the ship and deflect (to the sides) anything (including energy) from impeding the ships travel. Without it the ships shield would take a constant battering whilst in warp or even high impulse and the ride would be akin to trying to drive during a massive earthquake.

Due to its rather narrow focus it is thus rather useless if you try to point it at anything that isn't sitting within a couple of degrees of dead ahead. But if you can get something to sit directly in front of the ship you have options since the only thing that handles more energy on board is the warpcore itself.
 
E M Berner said:
From what I understand (which is surprisingly little even though it's my favourite universe) the deflector dish is designed to project a field in a rather narrow beam in front of the ship and deflect (to the sides) anything (including energy) from impeding the ships travel. Without it the ships shield would take a constant battering whilst in warp or even high impulse and the ride would be akin to trying to drive during a massive earthquake.

Due to its rather narrow focus it is thus rather useless if you try to point it at anything that isn't sitting within a couple of degrees of dead ahead. But if you can get something to sit directly in front of the ship you have options since the only thing that handles more energy on board is the warpcore itself.
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I can't find my Technical Manual (Which annoys me greatly, damn thing should be here somewhere, you'd think it'd be right next to my encyclopedia but noooo) but I recall some details (giant nerd? Check!).

It's main function is sensors, a tractor beam, and subspace bullshit so it works at warp, to basically sweep space in front of the ship so you don't get relativistic impacts turning your ship into swiss cheese. It also cooperates with the Ramscoops to collect interstellar hydrogen to help keep the fuel tanks topped up.

It doesn't do high energy, its for nudging micrometeorites out of the way at most, it won't push torpedoes off course or anything like that, interstellar gasses are collected magnetically. It's a precision tool.

Until you let the Engineers at it, then they blow out power conduits and supercharge it and other fun things.
 
TypoNinja said:
Until you let the Engineers at it, then they blow out power conduits and supercharge it and other fun things.
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"Hello Captain, eager to see your new command."
"Well, yes. Something has been puzzling me ..:"
"Yes?"
"Well, I understand that EPS conduits are used to transfer energy - lots of energy. I also understand that the deflector dish has a certain energy demand - but, I don't understand why you've got five conduits directly from the Warp core straight to the dish, not counting the redundancies, AND further conventional lines from the auxiliary reactors? That's literally more energy than any other ship system gets, and that includes the Warp pylons."
"... there's a reason for that. A good reason. A perfect reason. But it's confidential."
 
Federation starships have always been impressively armed, even in the NG era where Starfleet was adamant it was not a military - the other powers look at a Galaxy-class and say 'that's a damn battleship' while Starfleet protests that it is not, it's a long-duration exploration ship! - but after a certain point in their development, Feddie ships near-universally relegate their multiple phaser banks and torpedo launchers to secondary armament. Oh, there are a few specialised ships built around phaser lances or batteries of rapid-fire quantum torpedo launchers, but for all the rest? The primary weapon is the euphemistically-named 'main deflector dish'.

Thing is, it's a fiddly bastard that requires extensive calibrations to each opponent and is, as so often with the Federation, rather more advanced than they can reliably control. So they prefer not to use it, if they can, relying instead on the secondary armament. But whenever there's an opponent they can't scratch with the advanced phasers or best-in-the-Alpha-quadrant torpedo launchers, their engineering crew calibrates their main gun and does one of a virtually innumerable number of exotic effects that all result in effectively the same outcome, that being blow the enemy away.
 
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