So I jumped back into the game after about a 6 month absence. I head to a local spot to farm some bounties and when I'm scanning a ship I start taking heat damage from seemingly nowhere. I'm in the middle of an asteroid field so I'm not close to a star and its not like I have anything overheating. The heat damage randomly stops and I continue. 20-30 minutes later I am getting scanned by someone and I begin taking heat damage again, so much so it eventually kills me. There were no hostiles and I wasn't near a sun...any idea wtf killed me? I've tried investigating online and found nothing. Hopefully some other duders here can clue me in so I can either look to avoid something I was unaware of or correct something. Thanks in advance.

Frontier made some changes to heat in the six months you've been gone. Here are the things I can think of off the top of my head, although none of them really explain what happened to you.

• weapons generate more heat when firing
• engineered weapons can have an experimental effect called thermal shock which imparts heat into the target
• shield cell banks generate crazy amounts of heat (bring heat sinks!)

If it's truly random, perhaps your ship didn't take the six months of updates very well and you've got a bug on your hands. I'd start a support ticket, I bet they'll be able to tell you what happened.

@bane: I'll run through all my setup again. I was pretty bummed because I had amassed at least 2 million + worth of bounties but the fact that I had no active attackers either time I was taking the heat damage was weirding me the hell out.

Did you accidentally turn silent running on? There's a button that closes all your heat sinks to make you harder to detect on enemy scanners, and even moving while that is on can cause an overheat.

@bollard: thank you so much - I was wondering why the hell I started burning up out of nowhere when I engaged supercruise.

For anyone else experiencing this you can see if "silent running" is engaged if it says silent running just above your fuel gauge

Default key binding is DEL