Heatsink Launcher

Purges ship's heat into a disposable sink block, which is then ejected. Requires ammunition.

— In-Game Description

The Heatsink Launcher is a utility module that can be used to temporarily reduce a ship's heat levels. When activated, all of a ship's internally stored heat is rapidly transferred into a heatsink, and then the heatsink itself is ejected from the ship. The Heatsink Launcher can be used both in normal space and while in Supercruise.

Heatsinks are most commonly used in connection with Silent Running or with larger ships dumping excess heat when making multiple hyperspace jumps. With release of Horizons, heatsink launchers also became important to prevent overheating due to the use of shield cell banks. Deploying a heatsink also regenerates your weapon distributor; each active heat sink gives 2.0MW/s of weapons power, allowing more powerful weapons to be sustained for a short period of time; this effect stacks with multiple heat sinks.

Heatsink Launchers are installed on a ship's Utility Mount and you can install more than one providing your ship has additional Utility Mounts to install them in. Each heatsink has a capacity of 3 sinks and each sink can hold approx 90-100% of the ship's maximum heat capacity. Heatsinks can be launched via a dedicated key binding or launched via the fire button of the fire group the launcher is assigned to. Hardpoints do not need to be deployed to launch a heatsink.

If you use fire groups to launch heatsinks, make sure each launcher is bound separately. Otherwise, every sink bound to that key will launch at once, depleting ammo.

They can be restocked at Starports, or via Synthesis.