dave... nail... head...
dave... nail... head...
Eat Sleep Lase Repeat
The source of the components is not really relevant. The vast majority of PL members use Chinese lasers, and they all produce more or less the same amount of waste heat. It's in how you manage that heat that determines the quality of your projector.
Personally, I'm not running really high power levels, so fan-cooling on the underside of my flat baseplate is normally adequate. I only use TECs to cool my reds and blues to allow me to over-drive them without fear of killing them.
But if I had a 20 watt projector, ideally the baseplate would be made of finned material with large fans on the bottom to cool it. Most of the commercial high-power projectors use this arrangement. Also, Dave's comments above about dumping excess heat into the baseplate causing alignment issues is spot-on. The more cooling you have, the less chance you have of developing alignment issues due to thermal effects.
Finally, your statement that the LT1000 box is the standard is not really true anymore. Look at the projectors that are for sale today. Very few of them still use the LT1000 case. It's a very old design. These days it's far more common to have an optical deck up top with the rest of the electronics below it. And in many cases the optical plate has fins on the bottom and fans below it to remove the heat.
Adam
My projectors are all 10-20W and all add about 100 W of additional TEC cooling load. Two to four, 60 mm high speed (aprox 6000RPM) fans and about 25 % of the area under the optical base plate (where all this heat is being dumped) and nothing overheats even when run un-modulated at 100% for hours. The problem is that the base plate will get over 40C and the efficiency of the diodes suffers and the purpose of the TEC's is substantially defeated. To manage this same thermal load and keep the base plate near ambient (within 5 degrees) takes A LOT more effort.
Although I like fans and don't care about the noise, I like jet engines as well, more fans and ingenious air flow means that the air velocity can be lower and the projector will be quieter.