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[nomadic_leader]

Alex is adding this awesome ship breakup effect-- see the twitter. https://twitter.com/amosolov/status/759412823948689408

Best of all, it's actually random each time rather than preset pieces. I thought of a few things for this effect to keep it natural looking. Possibly they are already implemented. The twitter one looks really good, but I don't know if that's because it's already doing all this stuff, or because the dev recorded 100 breakups and only posted the best.

-Bigger ships should break up very slowly; smaller ships faster

-The amount of damage received in the last moments of the ship's life vs the total hull strength and size of the ship  should determine if the ship breaks up into pieces, how many, and how fast the pieces are going initially. I.e. so if one fighter machine gun bullet hits a Paragon with very low hull left, it shouldn't make the paragon explode into pieces that fly across the screen. But if a death star laser hits a destroyer, the pieces should go flying.

-When a ship breaks up, there should tend to be more smaller pieces on the side of the ship that took the most damage before dying, and bigger pieces on the side that wasn't just getting hammered. (Just like it is in the twitter gif so maybe it's already doing that)

-The lines of the randomly generated cleavage during the breakups should more likely, but not always, occur at skinnier parts of the sprite- as determined by the collision bounds polygon of the ship. ie so the Construction rig's skinny front part should tend to break off, rather than break down the middle or something like that.

[Sy]

there was already another thread on the topic here, in case you missed it. your last suggestion, at least, already seems to be part of how it works:

Does it work so that if a ship is long and narrow, it has a greater chance of breaking into two or more pieces along the shortest axis?

i was wondering that as well. do the 'arms' of an Onslaught break off more frequently than, say, the engine block? do halfed Hammerheads usually break at the narrow spinal connection?

This just really depends on the specific shape of the ship's bounding polygon. Something like the Onslaught is most likely to break somewhere in the middle, though the arms can certainly come off as well. They just don't very often because they're a smaller portion of the ship and the algorithm looks for larger pieces to break off first.

For a Conquest or a Falcon, they do break off quite often. For the Hammerhead, it can break down the middle, but it's also pretty likely to lose one engine block or the other.

In general, something long and narrow is likely to be more prone to breaking along the narrow axis.

[Auraknight]

Not sure if off-topic, but reading this makes me want to see a mod-weapon that cleanly splits ships in two when they die from it. And I definitely want to break a long ship in two by ramming it now.

[Sy]

Arondight Accelerator seems like a good fit for something like that, since it has an extremely powerful projectile that already pierces ships.

[michael1]

This seems perfect for a mechanic in which you break off parts of ships to disable weapons/engines or a faction that repairs the broken pieces into weaker counterparts of the broken ship.