Heat, Stealth, and Detection

Heat is one of Aetheria’s central mechanics because it refuses to stay in one design box. It is endurance, performance, damage, stealth, engineering, economy, and tactical timing. A civilized mechanic. Rude in all the right ways.

Heat As Staying Power

Equipment use generates heat. Heat must be moved, stored, dumped, radiated, or endured. The older ARPG GDD describes heat as a combined pressure similar to health and mana, except with stronger implications for stealth and component failure.

Every item can have a heat/performance curve. Temperature affects efficiency and output. At poor performance thresholds, items start taking durability damage. At the zero point, they fail.

Thermal Layout

Ships have hull-specific heat transfer graphs based on the schematic proximity of mounting points. Refrigeration configurations can maintain target temperatures, ignore points, prioritize parts, or designate heat dumps.

That gives shipbuilding a real interior logic. A component is not just installed. It is placed into a thermal neighborhood with consequences.

Stealth

A ship can hide by controlling emissions. Visibility comes from reflected light, active sensor illumination, radiator output, hull temperature, thrust, and firing signatures. Radiator placement can bias emissions directionally.

Stealth is therefore not invisibility. It is debt management. The ship can delay, redirect, mask, or time its emissions, but it cannot make consequence disappear because physics is one of the few institutions in Aetheria that still files paperwork correctly.

Detection And Identification

Detection reveals position. Identification takes longer and depends on the ratio between visibility and sensitivity, plus scanner capability. The planning docs distinguish sensors, ship scanners, planet scanners, jammers, radiance, radiance masking, sensitivity, item rarity, and lore/tech thresholds.

This suggests a layered information game:

• see that something is there
• learn what class of thing it is
• identify equipment and cargo
• decide whether the target is worth the heat, time, law, and risk

Design Use

Heat and detection should bind combat, piracy, scouting, travel, and trade. Firing a weapon, thrusting hard, scanning actively, jumping through a wormhole, or overdriving a reactor should all create signatures other actors can exploit.