MercTech: Cooling Systems

General overview:
In the base game, a mech's base cooling (without external heat sinks present) is fixed for each variant. While the game has mechs that use Double Heat Sinks, the fact that the mech should have doubled base cooling isn't represented, leading to many advanced mechs running hotter than they traditionally would in lore. MercTech adds cooling systems as a mech construction item, which determines the mech's base dissipation rate, allowing not only the more advanced mechs to cool themselves more quickly, but to convert an older mech to this more advanced system. For the external heat sinks themselves, very little was changed from the base game.

Heat cap and dissipation rate has also been changed, with a 50% higher heat cap and 50% slower dissipation. While this allows you to fire more heat-intensive weapons before running into heat-related problems, you will need to spend more time cooling off before you can fire again safely, forcing you to be more aware of your mech's heat curve and to carefully manage firing your weapons at the right time.

Single Heat Sink:
Relatively unchanged from the original coolant-based heat sinks introduced during the early 21st Century to control the heat generated by the first directed energy weapons, Single Heat Sinks are simple, cheap and rugged, which has allowed them to be used on everything from combat vehicles and commercial fusion engines, to the modern battlemech. They would even survive the Succession Wars essentially unscathed, while a more efficient variant would become extinct for some time. Although the prevalence of increasingly heat intensive weapons and equipment has relegated Single Heat Sinks to use on cheap militia mechs by the 32nd Century, they can still be easily found virtually everywhere.

Mechlab rules: Single Heat Sinks weigh one ton and take one slot. Each Single Heat Sink present adds 0.075 dissipation per second.

Double Heat Sink:
One of the greatest breakthroughs made during the Star League era, Double-strength Heat Sinks brought forth a quantum leap in the lethality of combat units, as they allow roughly double the cooling rate of a Single Heat Sink for the same weight, allowing a unit to fire more weapons at once without risk of shutdown, and allowing the creation of weapons and equipment that generates significantly more heat than what the old heat sinks would be capable of withstanding. Although the benefits of Double Heat Sinks are immense, their main disadvantage over Single Heat Sinks is their massive bulk, being roughly three times the size. While this bulk wasn't a significant issue at first, the development of lighter, but bulkier fusion engines, structures and armors has begun to exceed what a unit is capable of carrying when used together. Nonetheless, Double Heat Sinks have become the standard cooling system on modern battlemechs.

The Clans had managed to reduce their Double Heat Sink's size, being 2/3rds the size of the original.

Mechlab rules: Double Heat Sinks weigh one ton and take three slots, which prevents them from being mounted in the legs and head, as well as in the center torso unless a compact fusion engine or gyro is present. Each Double Heat Sink adds 0.15 dissipation per second.

Additional Notes:
Some Jade Falcon omnimechs salvaged by Comstar after the Battle of Tukayyid have been observed using a laser-based heat sink. Rather than using a coolant system like traditional heat sinks, these systems convert heat into light, which is then shunted out the mech through mirror-like surfaces. Such a cooling system would be unaffected by atmospheric factors (or lack thereof) but judging by its extreme complexity and lack of commonality among salvaged Jade Falcon mechs, leads to the conclusion that this is very much experimental technology.

Sources in the Federated Commonwealth report the development of an ultra-compact heat sink design, likely as a response to the prevalence of bulky technologies becoming increasingly ubiquitous on the modern battlefield.

Insiders in the New Avalon Institute of Science report a "Project Power Flush", which is reportedly developing a pressurized coolant tank that can briefly boost a mech's heat dissipation capabilities.

3122: Salvage of a Davion mech with a unique dissipation-boosting system has been retrieved. This system appears to boost the pressure of a mech's coolant system to increase its effeciency temporarily.