Standard heat capacity. 600 MJ (this information does not exist in the game)

Cooling rate: 6 MW (this information does not exist in the game)

Heat sink launcher. It's cooling rate is 100 units per second for 10 seconds. (Information exists in game)

Class 6 Shield Cell Bank. Thermal load: 640. (Information exists in game)

Power plant heat efficiency. MW of heat per MW of power used. (Information exists in game)

Thermal load for weapons. (Information exists in game)

Thermal load for thrusters. (Information exists in game)

Thermal load for scanners. (Information exists in game)

Thermal load target is subjected to from weapons. This information does not exist in game.

392% 428% 464% 499% 535%

Maximum heat capacity. This is obviously going to be higher than the standard heat capacity.

Believe it or not, the first serious step in the right direction is quite simply a small number of UI changes. No new game mechanics are needed, no massive game or balance testing is needed. The first step is the simplest.Let me start explaining by saying that the biggest problem to start with an almost complete lack of numbers. Let me elaborate.We know that a ship is capable of having a certain amount of heat, above which they start taking damage (100%). Let's call the a ship's heat capacity. And since heat is energy, let's use joule as the unit and start filling variables and units into a table - I'm going to use numbers I pull out of thin air when none are available in the game.I'm using megajoule, as most things on our ships use power in the MW range.A ship can also get rid of heat at a certain rate.We now know that this ship can lose 1% heat per second.Let's look at what the game tells us about things that we know deal with heat.Put this on our ship, and it should be able to cool our ship 16.67% per second. Combined with the ship's own cooling rate, this means that this ship will cool itself 17.67% per second when a heat sink is activated. So far so good.What else do we have?If we cool our ship to 0% and then fire off this shield cell bank, the ship will now have 640 MJ of heat. With a heat capacity of 600 MJ, the ship is now at 107% heat, and will cool down in 7 seconds.What else do we need?Anything else?What's the target's thermal load for Mahon's Retributor? What's the target's thermal load rating for thermal cascade? What's the target's thermal load rating for all the other special effects you can get from Engineers?Without knowing these numbers, it is impossible to figure out how the heat meta is broken. Suppose thermal cascade on missiles imparts 400 MJ onto the target. This might seems reasonable on seeker missiles, but once you put it on a Pack Hound that's 4 * 400 MJ = 1,600 MJ if all missiles in a salvo hits. That'd take 2 heat sinks to get rid of - but only one heat sink can be active at a time, and that only drains 100 MJ/s.It gets worse. The Pack Hound can launch two missiles per second (0.5 salvos per second), and it carries 132 missiles in total. So, if my 400 MJ thermal cascade number is correct, then one single hardpoint with Pack Hounds and Thermal Cascade mod will be able to dump 52,800 MJ of heat into targets. That would require 53 heat sinks to get rid of, but each heat sink launcher only carries 3, so you'd need 18 utility slots to counter a single Pack Hound. That's 10 more than any ship carries.Let's suppose it's less than that. Let's suppose it's 40 MJ. A Pack Hound with Thermal Cascade now "only" dumps 5,280 MJ of heat into a ship, but it'll take six heat sinks (two utility slots worth) and 53 seconds for to get rid of that heat, all for the cost of a single class two hard point.It still gets worse. Let's assume that 40 MJ per missile is correct. Now suppose you're up against an FdL with a huge multi cannon and four Pack Hounds. You might think that this can be countered by 8 heat sink utility launchers, but this is incorrect. With four hard points, you are now being hit by 8 missiles per second. At 40 MJ per missile, this works out to 320 MW. You can only have one active heat sink at a time, so now your heat sink is losing the battle by 214 MW (remember, your ship radiates away 6 MW on its own).In the example ship above, starting at 0 MJ of heat, it now takes 3 seconds for the ship to start overheating, provided the heat sink is perfectly timed. The heat sink runs for another 7 seconds before the next heat sink could possibly be activated. By the time the second heat sink can start draining heat, your ship is at 2,140 MJ - that is 357% heat.That's not going to help you, because your heat is going to climb by an average of 35.6% per second. Let's look at the progression of heat as that second heat sink is being activated on a second per second basis:I think you get my point.This doesn't tell the entire story though. Imagine for a moment that you standing underneath a cauldron filled with molten iron (melting point 1,538 °C). If you were to hold a lit candle underneath the cauldron, would that increase or decrease the temperature of the cauldron?Well, the hottest point of a typical candle flame only reaches 1,400 °C, and energy will always flow from hot to cold - in other words the candle will cool the cauldron. Not as much as the air in room, but it'll still cool the cauldron.In other words, at some point the ship will reach a heat level where it can no longer absorb energy from whatever is hitting it. Let's call the the maximum heat capacity.Let's say for the sake of argument, that this is 300% (or 1,800 MJ for our example ship).So now our ship can't go above 300% - problem solved, right? Not really. As I showed above, this example ship can't lose heat at a rate faster than 17.66% per second, and this only happens if it isn't constantly being kept at that level.We now have to bleed off 1,200 MJ at a rate of 106 MW. This will take 11.6 seconds. That's 11.6 seconds of constantly taking large amounts of heat damage. Again - provided your ship isn't being hit with things that add a thermal load to it.It still gets worse though, because external modules are the first things to take heat damage. That means your weapons, your cargo bay and utility slots. You know - that place where our heat sink launchers are. As it stands, one of the first things to malfunction due to heat is, ironically, heat sinks.For some reason no thought that heat sink launchers should start firing autonomously when they start to take heat damage, even if another one is already active. If that is how they worked, then they'd be far more useful.Remember the scenario with 4 hardpoints of Pack Hounds? We were losing the the heat fight by 214 MW, but now that'll start to activate the heat sink launchers. Suddenly we'll be activating four at once, and now we're winning the fight against the heat by 86 MW. It costs us a lot of heat sinks, but we can now start to fight back or run away without melting.But this is not just about making the heat sink launchers smarter - it's aboutIf the game gave us the numbers for all of these things, people like me, who like theorycrafting, could sit down and very quickly figure out if it is even possible to build a ship that will survive the heat meta. Currently that's not an easy thing to do - partly because the likely candidate ships are extremely expensive in terms of rebuys (and if you get it wrong, you will be looking at the rebuy screen), partly because of the enormous grind involved with getting the materials needed for the Engineer modifications, and partly because of the time required to figure it out.It would also allow theorycrafters to figure out something rather important - has Engineers made Horizons a pay to win expansion? It might be possible to build an unmodified ship that can withstand the current heat meta, but it seems unlikely, and since the only way to find out is through very expensive testing, no one is really willing to find out either.But first thing first - enable theorycrafting in the game. It's not a matter of changing any game mechanics - it is not even a matter of changing the UI, it's just a matter of making the game show us more numbers in the outfitting screen.Personally I do want the heat mechanic to work, but I don't want it to be the end all and be all, because that removes creativity. I want the game to find a rock-paper-lizard-scissors-spock ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock–paper–scissors#Additional_weapons ) type of balance, where heat beats certain types of builds and other types of builds beat heat.This kind of balance would allow for far more interesting NPC encounters as well, because now the NPCs can start to pull from a pool of loadouts that are built around those types of metas. Suddenly elite billionaire commanders can't just shrug off an NPC attack, because that NPC might be rocking one of the loadouts that wipe the floor with theirs in very short time.And this is how we can make sure that everyone in the game, including the Elite commanders, find it to be a Dangerous game as well.