After spending several hours worth of time on the PDSR and trying to get it to work, I have come to the conclusion it is too stringent to function in the hands of anyone except the most perfect engineer. Containment is lost too easily, temperature cannot be brought down except by coolant cycling. With a 70 kelvin temperature difference, the coolant cools it by around 0.35 reactor_temperature by each tick. The reactor_temperature’s heat does not rise nearly as slow as that.
Not to mention containment is anyone’s guess on how to maintain it. I would assume overloading max power is a stopgap way to save it, but that isnt desirable because it will increase current_uptime, which disincentivizes running the PDSR in the long run. Polarity is easy enough and that is the one factor you can work with.
The shutdown doesnt ever work, it is always an emission blowout, because once the temperature is over 100, you cant do shit to prevent an emission, because it needs to be under 100 to shutdown the PDSR. The worst part about emissions blowout isnt the radiation or flashing blindness, it is the massive damage it does to the ship’s quadrants, which means fucking up is a shuttle call, and you will fuckup.
This makes the entire shield system not worth experimenting on or using, and unless it is fixed I predict no one will ever play on the Galactica because of the massive grief potential of causing a PDSR emission. It will be a dead map that no one votes, everyone votes for as a joke, or a map that causes deadpop due to how horrible it is to play on. I feel the entire PDSR needs to be less punishing and more forgiving. Make coolant more effective. Make containment easier to regain. Make temperature increase slower. Remove the damage to the ship that a blowout causes. That is all. Sorry for the incoherent rant.