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[Linnis]

Tis what happens when you fly a light armored hi-tech ship that was designed for a support role.

Fly an enforcer and i would gladly trade some armor points for dead fighters.

Having to worry about having fighters crash and blow up on your ship hull should be part of the problem of playing as light armored ship.

You are trading armor and hull for armor and hull. Working as intended?

[Wyvern]

Umm... Support role?  Light armored?  What version of the Apogee have you been flying?  Well, okay, its actual armor is pretty light, but it's got basically the strongest shield short of a Paragon, and enough flux venting ability to support either a plasma cannon or a pair of heavy blasters, especially if you mount LRMs (or even no missiles at all) instead of the default MIRV.  It's a strong front-line brawler, and the only real weakness is if your opponent is fielding a sufficient number of broadswords.  When I'm flying an Apogee, if anything more than machine gun fire gets past my shields, it means I've made some sort of horrible mistake.  (And even on the rare occasions when that happens, it's still got enough armor and hull to survive.)

Hm.  I'll admit, if you've only ever flown the default variant, I could kinda see thinking it's a "support" ship.  But, well, that's a flaw in the default variant - many of them are... not good showcases of what that hull is capable of.

As for the enforcer example... Would you trade getting hit by a torpedo for a single dead talon?  That's the level of damage we're talking about, here.  It's a kindof acceptable trade for a ship with strong shields, but I'd never want to make that trade with an enforcer.

[Thaago]

Huh - I didn't realize dead fighters did that much damage. In my experience they usually do about 100 and explode. Not pleasant, but hardly a torpedo.

[Toxcity]

Yea, my ships never seemed to be disabled or damaged that much by fighters, even when they explode.

[Megas]

I use Apogee as a sniper/kiter.  Plasma cannon (and, optionally, ion cannons) at the front, (heavy) burst PD lasers for the rest of the energy slots, and no missiles.

[Wyvern]

Thaago: it does depend: A fighter that dies outside your shield bubble is not much of a threat - since it'll hit once and bounce off.  Not a big deal, and this is probably what you're used to seeing.  A fighter that dies inside the shield bubble or while overflying your hull is notably more dangerous.  A fighter whose engines get disabled while it's overflying you can do well above torpedo levels of damage, though it dies in the process.  This is because the collision damage is applied every frame until the fighter is completely destroyed.

In terms of game-mechanics, I can deal with this; it just requires me to adjust tactics a bit to compensate.  But it still doesn't feel right to me.

[Reshy]

It's an interesting case of Emergent Gameplay and I think it should be kept.

[Coolrah]

Honestly I think these 2 points summed it up perfectly

It's an interesting case of Emergent Gameplay and I think it should be kept.

Tis what happens when you fly a light armored hi-tech ship that was designed for a support role.

Having to worry about having fighters crash and blow up on your ship hull should be part of the problem of playing as light armored ship.

You are trading armor and hull for armor and hull. Working as intended?

I mean not to jump on the bandwagon or anything but I mean when you really think about SF and as a whole I feel like the concept just fits the general balance of the game of the Hi tech vs mid-low tech range. You have your expensive powerful ships but they're expensive but not too expensive to the point the player should feel like their buying the best ship ingame. Just enough to show that the ship they're buying is better in "most" ways than the cheaper sturdier ships. Then you have your low tech ships are usually not gonna have good sheilds, speed, or OP but other times make it up for better armor or decent weapon point placement or some other way to make the ship worth buying and deploying until you can upgrade down the line. Maybe it could use some balancing though or possible more integration into the game as in make it an actual mechanic or somethin. Imo we should leave it as is but its not the end of the world if it changes honestly

[LazyWizard]

It's an interesting case of Emergent Gameplay and I think it should be kept.

The problem is it doesn't make sense for you to be hit multiple times by the same disabled fighter. Fighters pass through your ship to represent them flying overhead on an attack run. Disabled fighters gain collision because they can't avoid running into ships without the use of their engines (and because it's hilarious, presumably). This works for the most part, except when the fighter is directly overhead when disabled and gains collision inside your sprite.

In other words, it makes it appear that a Piranha that got hit with an Ion Cannon has somehow teleported into your ship's hallways and is ramming its way out.

[silentstormpt]

Disabled ships also retain their armor so, destroying a heavy armored fighter when hes passing by ur hull will result in some tears

[Reshy]

It's an interesting case of Emergent Gameplay and I think it should be kept.

The problem is it doesn't make sense for you to be hit multiple times by the same disabled fighter. Fighters pass through your ship to represent them flying overhead on an attack run. Disabled fighters gain collision because they can't avoid running into ships without the use of their engines (and because it's hilarious, presumably). This works for the most part, except when the fighter is directly overhead when disabled and gains collision inside your sprite.

In other words, it makes it appear that a Piranha that got hit with an Ion Cannon has somehow teleported into your ship's hallways and is ramming its way out.

It's more like it's bouncing against the outer hull, after all the ships aren't flat;  They're just rendered in 2D.

[LazyWizard]

It's more like it's bouncing against the outer hull, after all the ships aren't flat;  They're just rendered in 2D.

The problem is it doesn't make sense for you to be hit multiple times by the same disabled fighter.

It will continue dealing collision damage each frame until it leaves your ship's bounds or blows up.

[Wyvern]

It's more like it's bouncing against the outer hull, after all the ships aren't flat;  They're just rendered in 2D.

The problem is it doesn't make sense for you to be hit multiple times by the same disabled fighter.

It will continue dealing collision damage each frame until it leaves your ship's bounds or blows up.

Exactly this - what I'd intuitively expect is a single "bounce against the outer hull", followed by the fighter drifting off with no - or at least minimal - further collisions.  My argument has always stemmed from "This doesn't feel right", rather than from any game-mechanical basis.

[Alex]

Hmm. I haven't been seeing this, myself - despite encountering the "fighter disabled mid-pass" situation multiple times, so I decided to run a quick test.

What I did is put a Piranha bomber on top of an Apogee, then deployed the Apogee's drones. The Piranha's engines were knocked out by the ion cannons, and it got pushed out of the Apogee's bounds while dealing damage. The total damage dealt to the Apogee was something like... 40? 50? And it was pushed out lengthwise, not sideways, so it was close to the worst possible.

Are you guys seeing this with vanilla ships, or only modded ones? The collision damage heavily depends on the relative masses of ships, so if a mod's ship masses are out of line with vanilla values, that could cause problems.

The other two possibilities are that I'm either not reproducing quite the correct scenario, though I just tried it a few more times, or that I'd fixed it between the last release and now, though I don't recall doing so.

(By the way, the way I did this was using Run Simulation in dev mode. You can tell the Apogee to hold fire, deploy the Piranha wing, unpause, press Ctrl-F to turn off fog of war, select the piranha wing in the command UI, press F4 twice to destroy two of the fighters (must be unpaused to work), press F3 to take over the lone surviving one, maneuver it over to the desired position over Apogee, take over the Apogee, and deploy the drones.)

[xenoargh]

Doesn't relative velocity determine how mass vs. mass damage works, though? 

I'm thinking that Piranha was maybe doing, what, a few SU/sec when it ploughed through that Apogee, so it's not a really fair test, unless you got up to full speed before slamming into it.  I think taking a look at the mass/velocity/damage equation and plugging in the values for a full-speed run over several frames might be a better way to model that.

Anyhow, the simplest solution is to just blow up the dead fighter immediately when it hits another ship, dealing some damage on that frame and showing some neat sparky bitz.  That would be fair, and I personally would expect that to do a lot of damage, so basically nothing would change, other than the multi-frame hits which might be causing absurd damage levels occasionally.

I'm not sure it's a problem that needs solving, though; like the whining about hitting asteroids when entering a battlefield, this seems more like griping over something emergent and random that can spoil your day, which I think the game should have more of, than a legitimate gripe about a game mechanic that isn't working.