Elite Dangerous: Heat Management

Heat is what Sensors pick up

Everything generates heat

When your ship is overheating it can even blow up, so keep an eye on your current heat levels and if ship is starting to overheat eject Heat Sink. Laser weapons generate a lot of heat, especially rail guns, some ships can't even deploy such weapons because there is not enough power and other modules will fail. You can set priorities to each module so even if you exceed your maximum power crucial modules (like life support) will not be shut down.

Different ships have different thresholds when they can blow up because of heat.

Reducing heat from Frame Shift Drive

Align to destination targets before punching the jump – this will reduce the amount of time your frame shift is redlining, generating heat.

Avoid engaging super cruise whilst inhibited by other ships – failure to do this will fry an Eagle tout de suite.

Avoid repeated boosting or excessive heat weapon fire before engaging the frame.

Main external radiators

The main external radiators actually reflect whichever is higher out of your ship heat or weapon heat. The fiction is that they're separate cooling systems in terms of getting heat away from critical areas, but the ship still only has one good way to get large amounts of heat out of the cooling mechanisms and into space, so the radiators serve a dual purpose based on which is the highest need.

In terms of game mechanics they're not actually linked. Though things that affect one tend to increase the other and there's a little bit of handwavium in the middle to get the mechanics and the readability we wanted, without one getting in the way of the other .

As Mike says, it was in fact originally called the Weapon Power Capacitor – there's actually bits of code that still refer to it by that name.

Moving heat away

There's no such thing as a cooling system that magically removes heat, whatever method the ships uses in fiction it's always a case of moving the heat from one place to another. First off move it away from critical components, then move it elsewhere to an internal heatsink where it can be stored and bled off safely.

The heatsink launcher is completely separate from this. When you activate it it'll dump as much heat as it can from the ship's main heatsink into one it can eject. Whatever coolant loops its using to perform the transfer remains unaffected.

Heat Generation

Heat generation is a significant issue that has to be managed as you pilot your spacecraft. There is no conduction or convection available in a vacuum, so the heat has to be radiated away to prevent overheating and degradation of system performance. This radiant heat provides a tell-tale signature that is used to provide the information on your scanner about the other ships in your local space. Unfortunately, it means you show up on everyone else’s scanners, too..!

The general rule is: the hotter you are running, the easier it is to ‘see’ you. The operation of every module on your ship contributes to the load on your power-plant and hence your heat signature. A representation of your current signature is shown on your ship’s display, along with a percentage measure of your heat relative to the allowable maximum.

Faster-than-light travel in-system using ‘super-cruise’ of course uses prodigious amounts of power, and the heat signature generated lights you up like a beacon on everyone’s scanners. And even that pales in comparison with the amount needed for long-range hyperspace travel between systems.

Normal propulsion using main engines produces significantly less heat than faster than light travel, and is normally not a limiting factor in general manoeuvring and combat.

Other sources of heat are weapons – some more so than others. For example, kinetic weapons are a good choice to keep your heat signature low, as the heat is generally ejected from your ship with the projectiles. Lasers and other energy weapons and shields, however, do contribute to the heat signature of your ship. In general the energy demand of every system you have contributes to the heat generated by your ship.

The heat vents on your ship operate automatically to attempt to regulate your ships temperature and keep all systems operational.

Additionally heat-sink modules are available as part of your loadout configuration which allow you to jettison heat stored by heating physical blocks to white heat, then ejecting them, having the additional benefit of acting as a decoy to other ships’ scanners and any incoming heat-seeking missiles.

In more extreme situations you can choose to ‘button down’ your ship for a short while, which stops the normal operation of the heat vents. Your shields are inoperative whilst you are in ‘silent running’ like this, and the heat that is still being generated by your ship’s systems builds up. Effectively your ship is ‘holding its breath’ and this is only a temporary measure – your ship will become disabled if you carry on too long.

Switching off your ship’s systems (even flight assist!) and using only gentle nudges of your thrusters to manoeuvre can result in a very stealthy profile, and you can combine this with the right weapons and tactics and achieve a whole new dimension to space combat. But beware – the hunter can easily become the hunted..!

Silent running

Silent running is not intended to make your ship completely invisible to sensors, rather it just significantly reduces your signature, at the cost of slowly cooking your ship and powering down your shields (it was never meant to be something you could do for a particularly long time, either).

A reduced signature means that ships must be closer to detect you as unresolved, and closer still to resolve you as a target.

You won't be getting low signatures with your shields on – when turned on these produce EM emissions that can't be hidden (silent running only affects the thermal portion of your signature).

You will still be able to mess around plenty with module power settings to affect your signature, just that the de facto way to get as silent as possible always involves silent running, and it's not perfect (though you will be able to make it even better by say, shutting down your basic sensors, as they too have an EM emission).

It's also probably worth noting that as part of this maintenance power usage itself is hopefully getting a little more interesting (for example, with our new numbers, the days of running dual railguns on a sidewinder without having to start turning some other stuff off will be no more. and

Plus, the power priority system will start to come into its own for advanced players – letting them have over-drawing module setups that automatically power down some modules as others are activated.

Turning off power to drives (or having them destroyed) is going to completely remove thruster control. This is something that is happening in tandem with a new feature that will give players an option to get back to a starport when their ship is crippled (or say, out of fuel).

Silent Running:

– will turn off your shields.

– projectile weapons generate much less heat.

– breaks lock of missiles and gimballed weapons.

– target tracking for enemy is disabled, so no reticle to see where projectile weapons will hit you, energy weapons not affected as they do not need target tracking.

– builds up heat inside the ship that can be ejected as heat sink.

– can be achieved just by turning OFF your ship modules manually under RIGHT USER INTERFACE PANEL>>Modules, like Life Support, Cargo Hatch, Frame Shift Drive etc.

– will only hide you from enemy sensors but they can still see you.

– to double the time you can spend in silent run turn off manually shields under right user interface panel >> Modules.