Engineers Ship Builds & Load Outs Beam lasers and Thermal vent?!

[Noobilite]

I'm trying to make something like this: Plasma Hammer
My question is if the thermal heat is actually making the weapons work and if and how to maximize and utilize them properly. I was reading this and it says it's based on it's thermal vent.

Engineers - Thermal Vent in 3.0

I'm reading conflicting info about Thermal Vent. Can someone answer these: Does it transfer your overall heat? So that you can use another weapon that gets your very hot and then fire Thermal Vent to offload that heat to the target. Or does it only move the heat from the Beam Laser itself to...

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So, do I want efficient or something to make it stronger to help out with the Imperial Hammers? It will be on the wings of a cutter, so can I use straight fireing(hidden angling power?!) or is it best to use gimbaled or turreted? I have no idea how the venting works atm. Or what is optimal. Also, do I want thermal spread on my power plant or monstered for more heat?! Will thermal spread hurt thermal vent when active?

I've read short ranged is better because of the extra heat. NOt sure if it still works this way. It says 3.0. what version are we in now?!

Or would I be better of with transfering heat from hammers to the enemy with conduit?

And I thought plasma slug got rid of the heat bonus...

 

[Ceekay]

Thermal vent cools your ship if the weapon is hitting the target although from my own experience two medium beams wont cool a large ship like the cutter (two class 4 vent beams work great on a Vette).

Perhaps you mean thermal conduit (Experimental upgrade that increases damage output based on heat level of the firing ship) so run your ship hot to up the DPS, TBH I've never tried it so I couldn't comment and I usually build for low thermals.

Although I've only tried the Cutter in a few Betas I don't think it's all that suited to fixed weapons, even the Vette will struggle to land hits on smaller targets with fixed beams never mind ballistic weapons like PAs or the charge time needed for rails.

I'd suggest 1 x class 4 and 2 x class 3 gimballed beams for shield stripping and some rails/PAs/cannon in the class 2 for hull damage or even turreted frag cannons can be very effective at close range (they don't fire until the target is in range)

 

[Voracity_T]

Thermal vent inverts the heat generation of the weapon meaning that efficient nerfs the effect.

By all means put fixed on a large ship, such is the path of git gud, just watch your shot speeds and know which reticule is which when firing.
In PvE you should be able to pick up fixed relatively easily and thus if you ever decide to PvP you will already have a small amount of suitable experience with the weaponry types.

Gl out there

 

[Noobilite]

I settled on this:

Plasma Hammer
*Accompanied by GU 97 Rogue F's. Or you can replace the fighter bay with a 64 ton fuel tank for more fire time.

I think I figured out a thermal load that should keep the ship permanently cooled. Overcharged thermal vent gimbaled beam lasers. Unless there is a better option. What would be the best weapons for those side slots? This only allows the Imperial hammers to fire for 5-6 seconds at a time if all 4 medium slots are fired at once. I could use at least 12 seconds potentially. Or more. Have to make binds for fireing with and without the beam lasers. All I can do at this point is play around with the different Hammer and Beam laser engineering to optimize it for damage/fire time/thermals.

 

[Voracity_T]

I settled on this:

Plasma Hammer
*Accompanied by GU 97 Rogue F's. Or you can replace the fighter bay with a 64 ton fuel tank for more fire time.

I think I figured out a thermal load that should keep the ship permanently cooled. Overcharged thermal vent gimbaled beam lasers. Unless there is a better option. What would be the best weapons for those side slots? This only allows the Imperial hammers to fire for 5-6 seconds at a time if all 4 medium slots are fired at once. I could use at least 12 seconds potentially. Or more. Have to make binds for fireing with and without the beam lasers. All I can do at this point is play around with the different Hammer and Beam laser engineering to optimize it for damage/fire time/thermals.

I'd avoid running OC on energy weapons unless your pip management is seriously up to par as DPS is meaningless if you can't leverage it with suitable ToT, hence why LR/Foc' PA's tend to trump Efficient/Oc/SRB. The pilot can fire earlier and reposition faster because of it. If you run a LR beam youll have 30% more ToT and zero falloff, which in all honesty is one of the biggest killers to lasers. Not to mention because there is no heat reduction on the mod it won't effect the cooling process from Thermal Vent, unlike the Efficient mod.

Being that its a Cutter you wanna build try using things on the naccelles that allow the weapons to track with the main guns, using fixed on them isnt outside the realm of possibility but unless you're well versed with your flight manuvers it'd be worth avoiding just for conveinience's sake. The optimum thing to do as far as not having enough juice in the distro is to separate your fire groups. That being said be sure that things such as countermeasures, banks and the like, are not going to conflict with said fire groups. That means no scanners, no nothing. Just firegroup one: Pa's + Beams, and firegroup 2: Rails and Beams. Often the best way to set a ship up for combat is to remove all the extraeneous junk that does'nt immediatly benifit it. Depending on how far you want to take this you can also further optimise your control inputs to better suit combat.

As a side note it might e worth trying standard railguns as they will not refire like the hammers if the trigger is held on with the beams, they will cycle once and then require the trigger to be redeppressed to cycle a second time, this not only gives you far more control when it comes to energy consumption, but it will also generate significantly less heat as thats based, in part, off how much juice your distributor has left. Firing dual Hammers with a near empty distro is going to generate so much heat you will be sacrificing a fairly sizeable amount of time not firing on your opponent as you will need to cool down. In and of itself it might not be a problem but after five or six times your opponent will have beaten out any damage gap you might have had, not to mention the heat damage also incurred.

Quite often it seems something that gets large vessels killed is long term heat damage over the course of a long wing fight. Hotbanks are pretty common now and they are totally at the mercy of a Thermal Cascade weapon, when you throw high heat weapon loadouts into the mix aswell it's surprising just how many big ships kick the bucket simply due to FSD malfunctions.

 

[Noobilite]

https://is.gd/w1FKrr Here is the updated version. I added one level of shielded to the Fuel Scoop to get it to 288 integrity and 100% electrical use.

The weapons groups would be setup with:
1. PA' and APA's
2. IH's and Beams

The first group can fire infinitely. The second group is to fire down on modules and fire between reloads or when additional fire is needed.

I would only fire all of the guns when it's faster or I can kill in one shot.

I believe both fire groups produce the same DPS. One fires faster and the other has better damage potential vs shields.

I will use rail guns while getting access to Imperial hammers. But I will probably like the hammers for ease of use. I hate pressing rails over and over. This ship is meant to be streamlined and relatively simple to use.