Specialised large and small port beams that can be used to cool down overheated asteroids and ice shards.

In order to use it there has to be coolant in your cargo hold, and every cooling beam consumes 1 cu of coolant per set amount of temp that the roid or shard is cooled down with. Also, the mining beams and cooling beams have to be mutually exclusive. You cannot equip both at the same time on the same ship, and you cannot mine an asteroid that is being cooled down, and vice versa.

It could also lead to additional missions being created for the cooling beams, and maybe even a new badge.

-1 Beams are made up of and transfer energy. While I think the ability to heat up an asteroid indefinitely is silly, the idea of using a beam of some sort to cool just doesn't make sense. You would basically be applying more energy into a system in order to reduce the amount of energy in that same system or 1+3 = 2

+1

I think it makes sense.

Death fluffy, he means we are spraying coolant on a roid to cool it off (I think?)

+1, but sounds horribly inefficient, and should definently be that way in-game too.

-1

For once, even though he is TGFT, I agree with Fluffy. Learn physics, damn. You're making Albert Einstein roll over in his coffin. Playing a science fiction game does not excuse you from utter ignorance of basic science of heat transfer.

Death fluffy, he means we are spraying coolant on a roid to cool it off (I think?)

Spraying coolant on a rock and leaving it there does not cool it off. At all. The coolant, after absorbing heat, needs to be circulated away from the source of heat so that heat can leave the coolant. Same as in your cars, nuclear plants, and computers if you use water cooling.

+1

It's a game. And it would be fun to have cooling beams. You can't throw the "uhh but it doesn't even make sense!!!" argument at every suggestion you dislike. If we measured by that, a lot in VO would not make sense and would need to be removed...

"Spraying coolant on a rock and leaving it there does not cool it off. At all."

Sure it does. The coolant warms up and the object cools down until the temperatures become equal. This is not predicated on removing the coolant; taking away the old coolant does not cool the object in any way. It removes energy from the overall system, yes, but does not leave the object any colder than it was before you removed the coolant. Where removing the warmed coolant becomes important is when you want to keep adding more cold coolant to continue cooling it beyond whatever equilibrium it would have reached, or when you're trying to counteract a continuous addition of heat, such as in the various examples you listed.

Anyway, nobody said anything about leaving coolant on a roid. They said to spray coolant on a roid. When you spray coolant on a roid, it hits, absorbs some heat, and then splatters off and drifts away into space because a spray implies significantly more than the escape velocity of VO's tiny little roids. Plus, the stream of fresh coolant you're spraying will wash away any old coolant that didn't splash off on its own.

Graphics-wise, this could be handled by having the cooling "beam" use an animation that shows splatter rather than the mining animation with all the dust and debris being dislodged. The beam effect itself could also be widened to look more like a stream than a beam, maybe with some particle effects flowing along it to give a sense of motion.

I would rather see an environment were players can have better interactions with asteroids. Right now there are only two. 1) You bounce off of it because it is a fixed immovable object and 2) you create a relationship using one or more mining beams where the asteroid trades you ore for heat.

For there to be the ability to cool an asteroid, I would want to see a more dynamic system where players can claim ownership of an asteroid and actually do stuff to it- like building a cooling system. Certainly a cooling beam would be the easiest way to simulate this. It's just not an idea I'm ready to support because with the vast wealth of safe mining for pretty much every ore, I don't see a need.

^-- This.

Laser cooling is a real thing, but whether it's a good fit for VO is the real topic at hand.

If the lasers is not a great idea, then what do you guys propose for a system or addon that can be used to cool down overheated asteroids and ice shards? The VO universe is littered with asteroids that has good ores in them, but are unminable due to their temperature.

There is obviously a need for getting the temperature down, yet no such system or addon exists currently that a general player can use.

Yeah I tend to float around UIT and grey over-mining roids for my own amusement lel

The solution is to shoot down the ingrates who are heating up the asteroids.

Log on and watch rape some roids you sexy joker!
=)

As near as I can tell, the only reason for the 'heat' limitation in mining is to limit the amount of productivity players can get from mining a single asteroid. I would limit the maximum temperature to somewhere between 200 and 500k. It should also be put on a curve as was done with profits from station trading rather than just the average rate of heat of all mining beams applied.

Ideally mining would be more dynamic. Equipment used on a rock would be different from equipment used on ice. For example, ice should produce ore more easily as it gets hotter and becomes liquid and then more difficult as it becomes gas. Basically, each type of asteroid should have an optimal method or extracting the ore. This does exist to a certain degree in the form of the specific mining beam types, but gets broken when the hd and he type beams are considered.

The ability to arbitrarily cool an asteroid in my mind conflicts with the apparent commitment GS has to forcing players to frequently change location for both trade and mining.

Well, at least let us spray silly foam on one another's ships!

"Heat" was my way of getting around the need for tracking resource quantities per asteroid and eventually having to magically "replenish" them somehow, as they became exhausted, or otherwise deal with resource exhaustion across large areas of the galaxy. I wanted something where player activity would substantially impact availability of natural resources, but in a way that would refresh itself automatically and (possibly) further promote exploration and prospecting. So, we went with "heat" as a thing.

I'm not opposed to some means to cool things as well. It's an interesting thought. Part of the value of heat, from a design standpoint, was making sure afk mining was basically limited by some parameter. Even if local risk (bots, pirates) was low, you would eventually heat up the asteroid and not generate an infinite amount of "stuff" by leaving your computer mining for a week.. or whatever.

A cooling beam raises the possibility of more lengthy afk mining (particularly with possible capship-based mining), with multiple accounts; but I guess if it's based on some limited resource ("coolant"), that does still place a bit of an upward bound on the process.

Dunno. I guess I'm not against it, but the balance would be in the tradeoffs. I could see this being more useful for relatively rare ores and minerals where there's one small roid somewhere that has a big percentage of "X", and a group of people re-cools it to keep working the area. That might need to be offset against some kind of diminishing returns.. cost of replacing "coolant", or value of re-applying coolant to a given roid, or.. whatever. Not sure.

+1 to Dilans suggestion, including missions to manufacture the heat dissipator.

Or make a nanite heat dissipation weapon. Make it manu at say tunguska stations. Make it one time use ammo based like a throw away rep gun. Make it use hive nantes in the Manu mission.

Result is a limited ability to cool high value roids while preventing ask mining. It would promote group mining, which currently is a rare activity
It would also add value to a currently rather cheap hive drop.

Good comments Skytex +1