Starship Corporation

You are completely right about the fuel. That's why I said you could either use energy or volume as measurement. The problem here is, that there is an essential difference between the functionality of fuel and the functionality of coolant:

Fuel gets burned/used/fusioned/whatever and is gone or at least useless after a one-time use. Having more or less fuel on board only affects the maximum amount of energy you can gain from it, not the overall functionality of the system.

The coolant in contrast (always assuming I understand the cooling system right) doesn't get burned/used/fusioned/whatever. It only fows inside tubes and changes its temperature from time to time. You either have enough of it to have the cooling system running or you don't. It doesn't get less during use. Therefore the sheer amount of coolant is not a good measure for the effectivity of your cooling grid.
To stick with the car analogons: The coolant is like motor oil. Oil flows inside tubes and through certain parts of the engine and absorbs the emerging heat. It then gets cooled down by cold air coming through the grill of your car (or something like this) and flows back in the circuit. You won't get better cooling if you fill more oil into your car, but you get a problem if there is not enough. Again this "enough" doesn't depend on how much heat your motor generates but on how much volume cable you have to fill. Sure, you have to fill in more oil from time to time, but this is only for technical losses and has nothing to do with the oil getting consumed by the engine or something.

tl;dr: the amount of coolant isn't suitable to describe cooling effiency because doesn't get less during the cooling process.


Yes, current describes how many electrons pass through during a certain amount of time (A mechanical analogon would be speed). But no, voltage isn't just a mathematical construct. It describes (over some detour) the difference in potential before and after a resistance. A mechanical analogon here is a bit more difficult, but I would go with pressure. Trust me, I'm a physicist. (And wikipedia also says that voltage has a physical meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltage

Having read your reply, it seems to me that there is a divergence in what the game needs to show in order to accurately represent the cooling system. For the design screen, it's in terms of cooling capacity. In crew management, it's in terms of grid pressure. Unless it's considered that it's impossible for any leak or break in the pipe to cause loss of coolant, and is automatically sealed off and rerouted as a new, shorter, closed loop. Leaving any module on the other side of the damage completely without cooling, unless another path exists.

With regard to an air grid (life support grid), I'd not implement it just on the basis that it adds another group of instances to the designs. At the moment, too many instances is impacting both the frame rate and the save/load performance greatly.

guys? ._." while I LOVE a physics argument as much as the next guy, and while you two are TECHNICALLY on topic (related to the topic describes this better ">.>), this IS a description error thread, not a physics debate thread ._."

I mean: it's not like the heat generated from weapons/generators is measured in kelvins (yes I know kelvin is an extreme example) or any other unit I'm aware of (actually, I don't even think the heat is even labled), it's just a simple supply/demand measurement, would a vague unit like something along the lines of liquid units (Lu) solve this? ._."

just seems like you two are a LITTLE engrossed in this debate XD

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