Laser Cooler

Laser Cooler OXP
Name	Laser Cooler
Cost	5,000₢
TL Availability	5

Toggle your weapons off and then on (press the underscore key twice) when the heat of the actual laser exceeds 60% to attach the Cooler. Then "fire" your laser until all the heat is dissipated.

Do not press the weapons able/disable key a second time too quickly after the first press, otherwise the Cooler cannot attach. The Cooler must spend about 1/4 sec with weapons disabled in order to get the "Laser Cooler attached" message. You can then toggle on your weapons again.

The cooler will automatically detach when finished or when only 1.0 ly fuel remains and your laser opens fire instantly. Stop cooling when a friendly target is in your crosshairs to avoid accidental hits.

This equipment uses a lot of energy as well as the fuel for cooling. It also needs a ship over 130t mass such as a Cobra Mark III. Your cabin temperature will be higher due to the ship's taking onboard the heat from the laser.

Your cooler can be attached to more than one laser at the same time.

You can detach the cooler from your laser anytime by toggling your weapons off and on.

The cooler cannot start working until the laser is overheating. Usually this is not a noticeable problem, except if you use Laser Cannons with high heat where you probably need to wait a bit or should start cooling one shot before overheat.

License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License version 4.0. If you are re-using any piece of this OXP, please let me know by sending an e-mail to norbylite at gmail dot com.

This equipment requires Oolite v.1.82 to work.

Download

Laser_Cooler_1.2.oxz (downloaded 0 times). Note that the download counter is stuck!

Laser_Cooler_1.1.oxz (downloaded 2718 times).

Changelog

2020.05.05. v1.2  Fixed integration issues with New Lasers, improved integration with XenonHUD.
2015.08.01. v1.1  Fuel usage and cabin temp raising added, thanks to avder and Disembodied.
2015.08.01. v1.0  First release.

Issues

There are a few fundamental problems with laser cooling in space in the first place. For one thing, there's really no place for that heat to go. Vacuum is a rather good insulator, so if something gets hot, it will take quite a while to cool down. Unless one uses some exotic method to bleed off the heat, like in bursts of steam or something (wouldn't that be an interesting sight?), it doesn't "just go away". Any cooler has to work pretty much by moving heat away from the laser and into the structure of the ship.

Which brings me to my .02₢ for this post. Ships should not all cool equally well as they do in the current game. Bigger ships have more mass for heat to go into the structure. I would think that the lasers would cool slower each time they're heated up in a given battle. For the first few bursts the difference would be negligible, but in a longer fight the laser temp cool-off would eventually drop to a near crawl since whatever sort of heat exchanger is moving heat from the weapons to the structure of the ship will be taxed more heavily and the structure will already be somewhat heated up, so there is less of a temp differential for the system to work with.

On smaller ships, the effect would be noticed quicker, since they have less mass/structure to dump that heat into in the first place. They're maybe more nimble or accelerate faster, since they are small, but I think their lasers should heat up a bit quicker and cool slower. It's the tradeoff for being a smaller target with good acceleration and turn.

Bigger ships, especially actual warship,s might have more of a ship to dump heat into and possibly special gear to dump heat faster, but still it's not an infinite capacity as it is now.

Other than not being able to fire the laser, overheating should have other consequences. As heat is dumped into the structure of the ship, cabin temps would rise. At some point, other equipment would also start to fail as ambient temps go up and the efficiency of things like processors and memory storage are hampered or possibly they heat up to the point of a fail and simply blow out. It might ruin some delicate types of cargo as well, in extreme cases.

Yeah, I know, "don't let reality interfere with gameplay". But consequences of heat could be used to increase the pressure on the player in longer battles that more advanced players might get into, making the player have to fight smarter and be more careful to make sure laser shots pay off enough to take them. For a beginning player in the typically short fights against one or two opponents, the difference would be negligible. It would be something one gradually learns to take into account as one gets involved in bigger/longer fights. Ganelon (2011)

But see the Heat Sink equipment from the Ship Configuration OXP

Quick Facts

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Version	Released	License	Features	Category	Author(s)	Feedback
1.2	2020-05-05	CC BY-NC-SA 4	Laser Cooler	Equipment OXPs	Norby	BB-Link

Warning

This oxp introduces the chance of your laser breaking - and the chance of this is much greater if you do not have the laser cooler attached! See here for more detail.