Any ideas on how thermal damping is supposed to work? Not as in "minus dice to perception tests" but as in does it make your armor unbearably warm after thirty seconds, do you have to carry around a shielded heat sink, do we just assume that it works without violating any laws of physics because there's nanotech involved?

Yes

I've always assumed that it doesn't kill people with heat exhaustion since there's no real rules for that. I suppose the fatigue rules could (and perhaps should) be modified to cover heat-related stress, but it seems like too much bookkeeping to me.

I think you would have something that is insulated like an arctic parka but a lot thinner, then a cooling undergarment to keep you from stewing in your own juices.

An additional complication, thermographic sensors can tell if you are cooler than your surrounding as well as warmer. YOu will need systems just as complex as Ruthenium systems to truly blend in to the thermoscape.

Where does the this energy go? It's beamed to the riggers and sams, how else do you think they could power all those drones and limbs!

Ok so I'm sure (and glad) that someone will bust out of a rock and jam a correction down my throat if I'm wrong, but here is how I'm thinking about. Honestly I bet they use some wacky thermo-voltaic system to convert body/gun/electronics heat into back into electricity. Throw in a heat sinks and isolation to build a little tolerance into the system and your good (in sci-fi land at least).
The cooling under garment thing isn't really an option because cooling systems don't make cold they remove heat ... which still has to go some where ie. radiated off like normal, or into a sink of some type (with or without conversion of some type).

i believe you work with a kind of 'ice pack', probably rechargeable, possibly chemical (an endothermic reaction) of some kind. in sr3 it would last for X hours before its rating degraded, needing a refill or what have you.

No this is from the company that made battletech, and I'm talking the original stuff here. You store the energy, and then release it with heat sinks preferably in a large pond.

But yeah I believe that is how it was described in 3e. So the fluff that it only lasts for X hours is gone, but I just kind of assume the virtually non-existent limit is still there so you use it if someone is hiding for 5+ hours straight.

Do you know how many times I have explained that to someone while repairing their refrigerator?

almost as scary:

I was fixing an electric dryer and the lady of the house says " Aren't you afraid you'll electrocute yourself? so I explained that I had the cord unplugged. so she says
" What about the electricity left in the cord"
I told her I had drained it into a bucket and dumped it outside. she seemed happy with the explanation.

I would have to say that the thermal energy being converted into electric makes the most sense to me,possibly using Dilithium crystals or frisson screens or polar bear testicles. but then again I'm no rocket scientist, just a service technician.

In this house we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics. Love the bucket, though.

wouldn't a varient on chameleon suit technology that effected the IR instead of the visible spectrum do the trick w/o having to break laws of thermodynamics? i mean, i'm all for breaking thermodynamic laws. those laws suck. just seems like cloaking technology is laying around not being put to good use.

If you were able to have the surface area of the suit be vast (think, like... coral reef vast, with each "square inch" of coral actually having many many square feet of surface area), such that it cooled very quickly and stayed very close to ambient temperature, wouldn't that be harder to see on thermographic?

Might be hard to stay warm wearing it...

I'm going to have to re-track my "you have to store the energy" stance because well

http://www.army-technology.com/contractors...flage/intermat/

and many many others

SR3 didn't specify it had chemical cooling packs, only that it has two layers, the inner layer "channels the body's heat", and the outer layer maintains the surface temperature of the surrounding air. After two hours, the dampening features begin to fade (losing a point every half hour). It doesn't specify whether this is because there's some sort of 'cold battery' or cold chemicals, or if it's just that the heat sinks can't keep up with it, but it doesn't need to be plugged in to recharge, just opened up to the outside air so the heat can escape (which suggests it's not chemical cold packs or battery powered).

A great many things in SR are "powered" without having a specified battery life.

Wow, anti-thermal cream. Awesome.

I have read reports of people using a wool blanket over a mylar survival blanket to hide from thermal cameras.

It's always been my personal opinion that thermal damping mods for armor have four major parts:
-Themal insulation, like a mylar layer;
-A network of heat pipes over the suit, above the mylar, probably high efficiency Peltier heatpipes or the like;
-A heat sink which can store the heat until later. Think of an insulated radiator that releases the heat when safe to do so but otherwise stores it up;
-A computer control system which automatically balances heat levels with the ambient outside temperature and keeps heat from pooling.

I just assume heat is "vented" via the radiator component whenever the suit wearer dictates it's safe to do so. Maybe it rapidly cools by venting compressed gas or something.

Also if you critically glitch an Infiltration roll. Given away by high-tech flatulence!

As long as I don't have to start managing heat points and upgrading my heat sinks just so I can stay mobile...

That is what the ponds are for.

I seem to remembers ponds being pretty hard to come by when I needed them. Besides, that makes for some easy tactics for your enemy.

Where did he go? I don't know, lets take a look at that pond that appears to be filled with boiled fish