> Surely we can agree, all things being equal, the heat affected zone will be larger absent conductive heat transfer? It depends on the parts and is figured ou

> Surely we can agree, all things being equal, the heat affected zone will be larger absent conductive heat transfer? It depends on the parts and is figured out in engineering before we even have tooling made. This is the same situation in vacuum laser and EB here on earth. The minimal heat input allows the part to heat sink itself. If we need more heat sinking we use copper mass cut to shape but that is rarely needed. In production welding there might be dozens of hot, welded parts in the vacuum chamber to reduce the number of time consuming pump down cycles.