Any gun nut here to answer a Mass Effect question for me?

[Soveliss]

Hello all!

So in Mass Effect 1, weapons use a block of metal from which they chop of sand grain sized bits and accelerate them at high speed, causing the gun to overheat and eventually shutting down long enough for it to cool down.

In Mass Effect 2, gun technology was overhauled, and guns still use blocks of metal from which they chop of sand grain sized bits and accelerate them at high speed, only now, to allow firing bullets faster down range, they use detachable heat sinks to cool the gun, and ejecting them when they go over capacity to replace them with a new heat sink. These detachable heat sinks are referred in universe as "Thermal Clips".

My question for any gun nut out there is, would the term "clip" be appropriate for these heat sinks? Thanks in advance!

[Lustful Bride]

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its science Fiction so...I guess in its own way it might count, but not really. I just chock it up to either the writers not knowing the difference or the in universe designers just using a familiar term to get their point across.

[eBadger]

From Merriam Webster:  "a device to hold cartridges for charging the magazines of some rifles; also :  a magazine from which ammunition is fed into the chamber of a firearm"

The clip/magazine distinction is a thing, but I think not so much, particularly in general speech.  The ME device doesn't actually hold any ammunition so it's not a clip/magazine as we would define it.  But it does serve the same basic purpose of enabling more shots so it's not entirely inappropriate either - and people do tend to use out of date terms for new technology (one doesn't really "hang up" on a cell phone). 

Ultimately, it's the lingo presented in the fiction, so it's hard to call it wrong.  A character might refer to them as "sinks" or something though. 

[Beguile's Mistress]

A clip for a standard RL firearm is as pictured above.  What you describe for Mass Effect is a device attached to a weapon that diffuses heat.  It is superconductive to allow heat to dissipate quickly.  If it requires changing during combat it can be temporarily fixed to the weapon with a clip.  Some may call it a clip because clip is easier to say/type than heat sink.

[Inkidu]

It's analogous enough. Is it a clip in the sense that it holds the ammunition? No.

However, it is the limiting factor to the number of shots that can be fired so the colloquialism is accurate.