Low emissions power plant!

[bladebss]

I have been investigating a cold run build.

So i wanted a low emmisions PP i knew that i would take a serious hit to my wattage for this and that i would get much better heat efficiency.

I tested this with a courier as i can run a class 3 pp so a class 4 but low emissions should be ok.

Let me tell you, 18% off your output is huge. But.. turns out 38% off your heat it seems is pittence!

My base running was 34% when i tested after it was 2% less at 32!!!!!! This cant be right?

Power is kind of a big deal. Most ships at good specs will run very close to the limmit on the power suply and often rely on power priority to keep it all together. Loosing even 10 to 15% means hevy sacrifice on your build and all you stand to gain from this is heat efficiency so it should be significant.

Now the way im looking at it now the PP has a prety high thermal load, mabe about 35% of all your thermal load, so say a third off that and thats only about 3% off the 30 that your total heat comes to. Hence the pittance..

I, for some reason though that heat efficiency on a PP was not the same as thermal load and would effect the ship across the bord. So 30% heat efficiency would make me run at 20% instead of 30% at rest.. so it is my sugestion that this be made so of something to this effect as the sacrifice you make for the gain you get on this blueprint, just isnt worth it.

Any one had different results?
Something im totaly missing?

 

[Rich Bramwell]

Yea I had a similar surprise when I took a 48% increase in heat on my level 3 dirty drive, only for it to only raise the temps to about 55 max when I hit the FSD, and that's up just 2 or 3 from 52 before. I thought it would be more but that didn't seem to gel. I have not tried a cold build but I can see what you are trying to build and this is what I thought the Engineers was all about, giving you a little more movement in your ship builds so you can build that frosty stealth counter-killer or that super fast red-hot interceptor. Not quite what we thought then.

 

[Loboguará]

Maybe I'm wrong, but better heat eficiency also means that you burn slower when scooping or in silent running. My anaconda manage to scoop with 5a scoop from near 50% to full juice and don't even pass 80% some times 90%. When I need low scooping, I can hit the fsd without burning (but not at max scoop rate). I don't have numbers to prove my point, but I think this is what happens. I'll check the math later, when I have the opportunity.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

I put a lvl 3 low emmissions upgrade on my Python. It's turned the power output of the 7A powerplant into the same as it used to have on the 6A. But it does run a fair bit cooler. It took me 6 rolls to get one that could actually power my ship though.
It still overheats easily enough, using a SCB still takes the heat up pretty high.

I've got a lvl 1 low emmissions upgrade on my Orca, as any higher level upgrade would make the ship pretty useless.

I agree that the upgrade is dissapointing. They should have a rethink about reducing the power cost or increasing the heat efficiency. Both would be better. It also comes at a significant mass increase, yet is supposed to appeal to explorers. Yeah right!

It's probably a good thing that the low emmissions upgrade stops at lvl 3, as a lvl 5 upgrade wouldn't be able to power anything at all.

 

[Rich Bramwell]

Then you will love this, I put a level 5 power hike on my power pack in my Corvette, my 33MW B-spec power pack is now a 42.something MW but my Integrity went from about 185 to 135......I am just waiting for that ''Lucky Golden BB'' that will blow me to pieces in one shot now.....

 

[Robin of Spiritwood]

Hi there,

Low Emissions Power Plants do not seem to work as we expect.
First off - all the other equipment is using the same power as before, so if you needed 20 MW to run the ship, you are still going to need the 20 MW. So the heat produced by the other gear isn't really going to change. You have to modify each module to get that module's heat to drop. I tried Clean Drive Tuning on faster ships. They get a smaller performance boost, but they really don't need much. You can look at Efficient Weapons etc as well.

The only heat drop we get is from the PP itself, AFAIK. So it isn't big.

However, the heat generated by Scooping, charging the FSD, and Silent Running is much more strongly affected. The rate of temp rise is much less. No idea why.

If you want a modest effect and can't afford a Power Loss, a Grade One mod is good. It just costs iron. I have gotten small gains in Power output, and a good drop in heat output from 0.4 to 0.3, with minor mass change. Took a few rolls- about 20, but iron is very easy to collect. Try it with the smaller PP and see - you can save weight and get better flight. It's very good for Explorer builds.

 

[bladebss]

Im not doing this for exploration realy.. im doing ot to make a passive stealth ship that can handle heat well to try and combat the thermal attack.

I was going to combine target lock plasma and dazzel shell to make it very hard to target me. A small light ship can dodge alot of multi cannon thermal shock. And an ecm will deal with lock on missiles if they get one.

Shields are prety important and silant running is just way too risky in a small poorly armored ship.

It seems the o ly option i have is to stuff as many heat synks into my ship as i can, forget the powr plant and go with grade 5 dirty drives. And hope i can make my syncs last long enough to wittle them down or... indeed, run away.

I wish we had longer before 2.2 became the next thing so that the engeneers could be properly balanced out and perhaps have more grades and all the engeneers so we can get a lvl playing field.

I am trying to be pragmatic about the heat, but it looks like im just going to have to play solo or run from every encounter untill they het round to fixing it over the next year.

 

[bladebss]

Yea I had a similar surprise when I took a 48% increase in heat on my level 3 dirty drive, only for it to only raise the temps to about 55 max when I hit the FSD, and that's up just 2 or 3 from 52 before. I thought it would be more but that didn't seem to gel. I have not tried a cold build but I can see what you are trying to build and this is what I thought the Engineers was all about, giving you a little more movement in your ship builds so you can build that frosty stealth counter-killer or that super fast red-hot interceptor. Not quite what we thought then.

Exactly this!

I thought when i did my vulture up with overcharged pp and dirty drives it would run very hot but its just a bit hotter than usual. The only heat trouble i have is when some one shoots me with thermal shock. And then i have no counter but heat syinc that will not ever out last the ammo on a multi cannon. It all could have been so interesting and dynamic.

 

[Siranui]

These are good for explorers and smugglers, primarily. They aren't designed to fend off sustained thermal attack.

The thing is that a 30% decrease in 'idle' heat is really rather good, but it is negated by thermal attacks, because that scale runs 1-300%. So you effectively get only a 10% overall boost to 'heat hit points'.

 

[bladebss]

Not even that. You get 2%!

 

[Deleted member 110222]

Most interesting...

 

[Paelon]

Haven't tried the low emissions PP myself yet, but one thing to remember, is that as your heat increases, your heat dissipation rate increases as well...this goes the other way too. As your heat gets lower, your heat dissipation rate gets lower too. This means that you can potentially be reducing your overall heat output by quite a bit more than the apparent 2% that shows on your resting heat. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Faybs]

This may be something worth asking in the next dev-heavy live stream, which should be soon since the beta's just around the corner.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Yeah, it's kinda weird.

It's actually the same with Clean Drives Tuning for all I know.
Despite what the RNGineer stats show, their increased performance still results in increased heat - although the Stats would suggest upto -60% less heat generation when compared to the Stock Thrusters you just modded.
However, they're not actually "cool drives". The hit their increased performance parameters will cause on the Ship's Temperatures is just somewhat muted.

"This Grade 5 Clean Drive mode runs 60% cooler than an identical performing Grade 5 Dirty Drive mod" would almost sound like a better description.

Thus, so far I haven't found any use for a Low Emissions PowerPlant that'd be worth the effort.
Not much "bang for the buck", unless you need to push something to the extremes and happily applaud 2-3% lower Heat signature.

 

[NascentChemist]

I'm just waiting for Frentox to come along with his amazing heat data curves...

Let me just look for the thread... And make sure I got his name right...


Success! On both fronts!

Basically, you won't notice it near your "steady" heat level. If you were running multiple rails, or scooping, you would start to notice it. Your heat efficiency matters more as you approach 100%.

 

[Steve Solo]

If you wanna mess around with silent smugglers, the dbx with clean drives, low emissions pp and efficient weapons is your best bet. I got about 18% on idle temp.

 

[Devari]

I have been investigating a cold run build.

My base running was 34% when i tested after it was 2% less at 32!!!!!! This cant be right?

The issue here isn't so much that your idle heat will drop much, it's that you can handle much higher heat loads without overheating. Once your ship is under high heat load you will definitely start to notice a difference.

On my Fer-de-Lance I was running 4 x medium incendiary overcharged multis and without any mods to handle heat they would overheat my ship in seconds. I put a decent low emissions plant on it, around 0.3 thermal modifier, which is something like 25% heat reduction. It made a difference but I still overheated quickly. Then I started specifically rolling incendiary overcharged multicannon mods to get ones with secondaries that had reduced thermal load. I also put clean drives to further reduce the thermal load. I can now fire all my incendiary multis continuously and although the heat does rise they will actually run out of ammo and need to reload before I overheat. The idle temps, however, didn't change much. It's the heat generated my the components, and the ability for the power plant to handled sustained heat load, that's improved dramatically.

The power plant itself is just one part of the equation here, it's not going to be the single solution that has a large impact on your ship's heat on it's own but it definitely helps. If you just look at idle temps you won't see much change but if you use a build where you have high heat load from various sources (incendiaries, SCBs, dirty drive tuning) you will most definitely start to notice that the threshold for when you overheat (and how quickly it happen) will be noticeably affected by your power plant's thermal efficiency.

 

[Alex Brentnall]

Grade 5 on my Anaconda. I idle at 16% heat or 14% in supercruise (or something similar).

Shout-up if you want screenshots of the build, mod effects (%) and differences. I'll put a few screenshots in after work of a non-engineered powerplant and an engineered one.

 

[Kyennamo]

I have a DBX that idles around 13 and fights around 18 (with a shield) as long as i dont boost.

I use low emissions pp 3...clean drives 5....3 heat sinks and 1 chaff. For weapons i use cannons. 1 dazzle, 1 explosive and 1 normal.

I can fly and fire while my shield is charging(which generates heat) and it never goes above 18%

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

My Exploration Python has a low emissions power plant.

She's now able to scoop at 100% and charging the FSD, forever!
(Haven't test it on all stars yet)

I forget the details though, it's been a while since I flew her.
Still got some more weightloss planned before we head out exploring again.
She's at 35ly jump range, trying to squeeze another 5ly and she's done!