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[DSMK2]

If it hasn't been done already in the development of the next version, or suggested already, I'm suggesting an-armor like hull damage system that behaves like the way armor is damaged, albeit a little differently.

So I'm playing around with my own space gun, one with an anti-capital ship laser and I'm noticing one thing; I'm killing a large ship by essentially melting away a communications array. Is it possible to do hull damage in the same way as armor? So that once I've destroyed a part of a ship's hull enough, I can't damage that particular hull area any more?

Moving on to a more detailed description of the idea:

The suggested version of hull damage should have a stricter version of armor damage; so that it's possible to nip bits of a ship's hull instead of destroying a wide area, or to "slice" a ship across while leaving it somewhat functional. Focusing fire on a part of a ship destroys more of the hull, allowing increasing access to weapons and subsystems placed relatively far from the edge.

I think for this to work, all ships should have significantly increased total HP (to distribute over the hull), and a hull threshold percentage to have before a ship gets disabled. Past that, the ship goes on it's way to being destroyed.

On the RPG side, this could affect the amount of ship personnel that survives, instead of basing it on the total hull remaining; the percentage of hull destroyed by an attack determines that loss, which gets totaled; Such that destroying a thin hull of a large ship doodad will yield little casualties, while destroying a good chunk of a ship's "main" hull may yield significant casualties... Possibly offset if the ship becomes mostly autonomous...

This could make battles with large capital ships more drawn out; while blasting a smaller ship with a large capital ship weapon may be less rewarding than one might think.

[Flare]

One way to fix the array thing could just omit the thing from the actual hit border of the ship.

[DSMK2]

One way to fix the array thing could just omit the thing from the actual hit border of the ship.

To be specific, I'm hitting the top right prong of the Astral. It's too large to feel like an omitted part of the ship, but it's too small for me to feel that it's destruction would contribute greatly to the ship's hull damage. I just don't feel right, given that armor is somewhat positional, that I can blow up a large ship by focusing fire on on a exposed "tip", rather than through the main body itself.

[ClosetGoth]

Disclaimer: I have not played the game, but I have seen a lot of videos and read guides!

I like the idea posted by OP, and I would like to add one thing that has been bugging me ever since I saw the Apogee. It would be cool to be able to do things like blowing it in half! I mean, if you shoot several torpedoes at the center of one of the sides, it feels like you should be doing some structural damage. I like the idea of breaking parts of it, and maybe that could include permanently disabling things. An example would be that you could destroy part or all of the engines, or destroy a part with a gun mounted on it to put that gun out of action.

[DSMK2]

Subsystem damage and destruction has already been planned or implemented in the (unreleased) build of Starfarer 0.5a, you will be pleased!

To clarify, currently to disable a ship, armor has to be destroyed to get to the hull, armor is not universal but "positional", thus that destroyed spot of armor is where that exposed hull is. From there hull damage is universal to the ship, consistently attacking that exposed hull and reducing the target ship's hull to zero disables it, regardless of how trivial that exposed hull appears to be.

I'm suggesting that there should be some limit, like the armor system, that a part of the hull can be damaged. So that you can't continually attack a single spot of exposed hull to disable the ship; you'll have to attack a different positions until the ship reaches some hull damage threshold that disables it.

[Zarcon]

I'm suggesting that there should be some limit, like the armor system, that a part of the hull can be damaged. So that you can't continually attack a single spot of exposed hull to disable the ship; you'll have to attack a different positions until the ship reaches some hull damage threshold that disables it.

I like this idea, as long is it isn't too hard to put into place, I'm greedy for the new campaign stuff first.   

[mendonca]

My only concerns would along the lines of "Is it transparent enough to the player?".

How do you convey when a given section of ship has received enough damage for you to not bother shooting it anymore? At what point does the ship get disabled? How many 'sections' of the ship do you need to destroy the hull of prior to disabling the whole ship? How does the player know this? ... Those kinds of questions ...

And what about the poor AI? I don't know whether it targets weak spots in the armour at the minute, but I bet the AI could get away with appearing reasonable and not worrying about it. Could lead to exploits, sucking up all those torpedoes in your 'destroyed' section of ship ...

[DNAz]

My only concerns would along the lines of "Is it transparent enough to the player?".

How do you convey when a given section of ship has received enough damage for you to not bother shooting it anymore? At what point does the ship get disabled? How many 'sections' of the ship do you need to destroy the hull of prior to disabling the whole ship? How does the player know this? ... Those kinds of questions ...

And what about the poor AI? I don't know whether it targets weak spots in the armour at the minute, but I bet the AI could get away with appearing reasonable and not worrying about it. Could lead to exploits, sucking up all those torpedoes in your 'destroyed' section of ship ...

I love star wars and its space combat so why not make it like the disabled graphic and make it a twisted burnt stump or have it brake off. Would be awesome to have lasers do focused damage and cut ships apart but do less crew death and have explosives have slower progress to the inside but kill alot of crew and subsystems along the way.

[ClosetGoth]

I think I agree with you on this one, but I think there is an easier way. As it stands, a side of the ship will turn orange as the armor gets stripped away. I think, for bigger ships, maybe it should turn gray and cracked as the hull in that area gets destroyed. Either damage to that area just trickles off, or the ship starts to crumble as you wound it more.

Unfortunately, the more I think about implementation, the less feasible this seems, but I have to agree that losing a ship due to consistent fire at one extremity is a little too far from reality for this game.

[Alex]

My only concerns would along the lines of "Is it transparent enough to the player?".

How do you convey when a given section of ship has received enough damage for you to not bother shooting it anymore? At what point does the ship get disabled? How many 'sections' of the ship do you need to destroy the hull of prior to disabling the whole ship? How does the player know this? ... Those kinds of questions ...

And what about the poor AI? I don't know whether it targets weak spots in the armour at the minute, but I bet the AI could get away with appearing reasonable and not worrying about it. Could lead to exploits, sucking up all those torpedoes in your 'destroyed' section of ship ...

Get... out... of my head! I seriously considered adding this a while ago - inspired by reading about tanks in WWII taking an insane amount of hits, just because there was nothing left to destroy beyond the metal itself. What you said is the exact list of problems/tricky questions that came up.

I think it's a really, really cool idea - but there are just so many evil details involved in getting it to work well.

[DSMK2]

My only concerns would along the lines of "Is it transparent enough to the player?".

How do you convey when a given section of ship has received enough damage for you to not bother shooting it anymore? At what point does the ship get disabled? How many 'sections' of the ship do you need to destroy the hull of prior to disabling the whole ship? How does the player know this? ... Those kinds of questions ...

And what about the poor AI? I don't know whether it targets weak spots in the armour at the minute, but I bet the AI could get away with appearing reasonable and not worrying about it. Could lead to exploits, sucking up all those torpedoes in your 'destroyed' section of ship ...

Oof, doomed to think of "wonderful" ideas.

As you plow through the hull, you're overlaying a extremely blackened/red texture over the ship's graphic, something along the lines of melted and cooling metal; you know that you've reached the limit of the targeted hull area's damage when your shots can travel through that path of destruction  



With the hull damage threshold needed to pass before the ship becomes disabled, I'm thinking of having a static "bar" over that hull bar, much like that... Flux... bar... Bleh.

How does armor work? I'm currently dreaming of adding new vertexes to the bounding box when a shot hits, and having shots hitting near that vertex push it inwards, depending on angle, then at some point, split the bounding boxes apart; to really illustrate that "punching holes in a ship" feeling. Though that feels really calculation intensive.

I was assuming that with this idea, the AI can just continually batter your ship until it's a hunk of melted and cooling metal that can barely move or fire.  

[BeanusMaximus]

I'd say if a ship was taking a big enough battering to one part then eventually the ship would be blown in half o.o But if not you could add sparks to indicate that it's damaged to the max?

[Zarcon]

I'd say if a ship was taking a big enough battering to one part then eventually the ship would be blown in half o.o But if not you could add sparks to indicate that it's damaged to the max?

Hmm, sparks covering the ship are already taken by the overload state when the flux capacitors blow right?    Also, ships that are disabled look pretty stinking dead currently, hmm.  I guess the issue with blowing a ship in two is that it would be even more difficult to explain why you were able to repair it after the battle and fly it later on.   

[DSMK2]

Hmm, sparks covering the ship are already taken by the overload state when the flux capacitors blow right?    Also, ships that are disabled look pretty stinking dead currently, hmm.  I guess the issue with blowing a ship in two is that it would be even more difficult to explain why you were able to repair it after the battle and fly it later on.   

Uh... Technology indistinguishable from magic perhaps? Joking there. Lore will have to show us how ship manufacture, repair, and maintenance works; provided that the ship wasn't disabled in combat. Though having slower sporadic sparks would add nicely to that recently disabled effect.

Brain: Hull gradients! Tougher hull as the attack gets to the center of the ship, weaker hull on edges!

It could force players to do damage control to reduce repair expenses, actual money and time. Having the central parts of the ship's hull destroyed would be a costly and lengthy repair job, while working to distribute damage around a ship would cost less.

Idea culmination:
Distribute hull HP over a ship, rather than treating the hull as one entity; With the majority of the hull's HP near the center, getting weaker as you move away from it. Thus, outside doodads or wings do not contribute much to the ship's destruction. So instead of the current way of focusing attacks on a single exposed hull section to disable a ship, players can either focus attacks to "dig" deeper into the Hull HP rich inner area of a target ship, or attacking from all sides enough that the target ship sustains enough hull damage to be disabled.

Hopefully this should make my idea more clear 

[BeanusMaximus]

I'd say if a ship was taking a big enough battering to one part then eventually the ship would be blown in half o.o But if not you could add sparks to indicate that it's damaged to the max?

Hmm, sparks covering the ship are already taken by the overload state when the flux capacitors blow right?    Also, ships that are disabled look pretty stinking dead currently, hmm.  I guess the issue with blowing a ship in two is that it would be even more difficult to explain why you were able to repair it after the battle and fly it later on.   

I'm not sure about them being sparks, the overload things seems a bit too extreme to be sparks. For example it seems to be a power overland which is dispersed throughout the ships hull. I mean sparks as in the damaged part of the ship should flicker a white/yellow colour.

As for the dead ship, could be used for utterly destroyed ships? xD For the disabled then all the lighting could go off? It probably does that already though lmao