If you had to chose between chaff and heatsink on a small, fast combat ship like the Viper, which would you pick? I've been using chaff for the obvious reason of breaking gimbal locks, but heatsinks also temporarily break an enemy's targeting, and they serve the very helpful purpose of saving a ship heat damage. However, you only get a couple of uses out of a heatsink launcher compared to the chaff. On the other hand, more advance NPCs must use fixed weapons because chaff seems to do nothing when they are chasing me. Do the servos (microtracking) on fix weapons lose tracking when heatsinks are deployed? Decisions, decisions!!!
Chaff or Heatsink?
- Thread starter Old Duck
- Start date
I generally prefer a Heatsink over chaff. You may not get as many, but well-timed, they will save you far more than chaff will.
Chaff is pretty , but heat sinks are useful even out of combat.
Sadly I'd take heat sinks, but they have such low ammo, every time I use chaff the enemy has fixed weapons, take off the chaff, suddenly everything is turrets
Murphy.
He's a particularly troublesome and generally unfriendly sort, isn't he? LOL
Everything that can go wrong will go wrongMurphy.
dayrth
Volunteer Moderator
Point defence is way too useful to get rid of. As for chaff vs heatsink, thats a difficult question. Chaff is completely useless against fixed weapons of course where as loosing lock does throw them off a little. Losing lock with gimbels just turns them in to fixed weapons so if your attacker has in in line of sight they can keep firing anyway. Chaff is far more effective against gimbels and for longer. Heatsinks on the other hand can be used in combination with SCBs and have uses outside of combat. If I had to choose for a small ship built for combat I would go for chaff I think.
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Embarrassed to ask, but what is SCB? If it's the shield booster, what's the "C" stand for?
Shield cell bank.
Ok, I haven't used these much (I tend to go with hull / module reenforcement instead), so next dumb question - do these generate a lot of heat, or is it for a more tactical reason that people pop a heatsink while using an SCB?
depending on the size of the SCB and the heat eff of the ship and powerplant.
its best to use them with heatsinks.
It does - if an NPC ship is subject to chaff (using gimbal or turret weapons) they stop shooting at you.
But frequently NPC's use Fixed weapons, as they are already aim bots.
In my experience: A TON of heat. Heatsink almost required. Now, you can get one heat sink to cover 2 shield cell bank usages, but you need good timing. And SCBs aren't needed unless you are really into PvP or are going into High CZs. any RES or low CZs don't need them for the most part, as you can pick and choose your fights a bit easier.