Isn't that awesome!? I mean, it doesn't actually do much for the gameplay, but its just such great eye candy 
And I was looking forward to it for such a long time. BTW, the pieces are randomly generated on the fly, not pre-made.
!!!
(As you can probably tell, I'm a bit excited about this. Also: you can shoot at the debris to break the chunks up further, and eventually destroy them outright when they're small enough. Which actually comes into play in some REDACTED situations.)
Just a few questions: Do this always happen as a ship gets disabled, or is it random or is it conditional? Does it happen with all ships? What does this mean for boarding/salvaging?
When a ship is disabled, there's a chance this will happen. The chance and min/max number of pieces are set per-ship in ship_data.csv. On average, the chance is around 50%.
Ships that break up won't be available for boarding. For salvage, "destroyed" ships will contribute more than they do now, probably about the same as "disabled".
And is this connected in any way to death throes, aka "sinking ships"?
Initially, I was thinking of this "ship breaking up" being the end stage of a longer ship destruction animation. Gave this a try, and it just didn't feel right.
One problem was that taking away the initial explosion - and putting it in later, pre-breakup - took away a lot of the satisfaction of blowing up a ship. And if you put the explosion at the start, it felt weird to have the ship fall to pieces after a delay. That could probably be "sold" better with more visual and sound effects - secondary explosions, etc - but at that point, you're not really paying attention to it and have probably moved on to another target. Felt like adding that in would be more visual and audio clutter than it was worth.
What I tried, btw, was "on losing all of its hull, a ship gets a hidden HP bar with X% of its original hull, which goes down quickly (and can be reduced by further damage), and when it reaches zero, explosion + breakup". Which sounds great on paper! The other problem here was that, as it turns out, ships usually take a *lot* of overkill when they blow up, so X being any reasonable number barely made any difference, especially for ships smaller than capitals.
So, overall, I think I just really like the immediacy of how ship destruction currently works. It's satisfying and it doesn't belabor the point in terms of feedback to the player on what's happening.
