Collision Damage: Pros and Cons (I can break through any hull)

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    Ahhh... Physics. My favorite academic subject, as well as my favorite subject in games. From when a character flies across the map, limbs strangely elongated and oscillating, to Kerbal Space Program, we all know physics.

    In Starmade, though, physics are strange. In space there is rotational dampening, nor is there vectoral dampening, unless your craft is built with it. In Starmade, ther is artificial gravity, the bolts and missiles you fire from your cannon tubes do not transfer momentum when they hit, you can travel across a galaxy in a Starmade month or so using standard thrusters, and you can travel across systems in seconds... with a jump drive.

    However strange and unorthodox Starmade's physics are, they are smooth and easy to control, except for collision damage.

    The slightest bump absolutely eradicates your space fighters, no matter your shield capacity, and landing on a planetary base is darn near impossible, even though I've set the "velocity threshold" or whatever it is, to 20.0 instead of 2.0. The most obvious way to counter this inconvenience is to build larger ships and larger docking ports.



    However, collision damage's ability to negate shields, can come in useful, for example, I built a ship with a 120x120 square of advanced armor at the front with a thickness 0f 180 blocks. I smashed this into a pirate station, which was immediately neutralized. However, since your normal Starmade astronaut doesn't have 2,592,000 blocks of advanced armor lying around, and the thrusters needed to achieve maximum speed, you may as well dream of this experience.

    Knowing its hull penetration abilities, I created a weapon that I guarantee will penetrate most, if not all, armor.

    starmade-screenshot-0020.png
    By all means, guys, create your own. I had to ramp up the amount of laser cannons and Push modules, but the possibilities are endless. Innovate, guys. I love to see people do things as a result of something I did.

    EDIT: So far, I have only launched 3 x 3 x 3 cubes from the launcher, and 19/20 times it created a tunnel all the way through the ballistics test cube. I can't upload photos for some reason, but if you build one, you'll discover that this is a pretty viable weapon.
     
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    Ithirahad

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    Collision damage is broken, this is a known issue but it's been on the back burner for a while. That's why stuff shatters as soon as it touches something. (That's also why there's a warning in the config about it being bugged.)
     

    Mariux

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    I think that collision damage shouldn't ignore shields. While I do agree that it might discourage people from flying safe and not colliding (if they do, the shields would simply regenerate) it makes ships vulnerable to griefing.