Hull Armor Absorption

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I've seen many suggestions for fixing the "buttery hull" and core drilling issue so I thought I'd throw one out there myself

Impact distribution/ absorption:

When a hull block is hit by an AMC it will distribute the damage to all adjacent hull blocks. The initial hull that was hit could take majority of the damage itself and distribute the rest to all blocks in a specific radius. Hardened hull would distribute the damage over a wider area. The armor value of hull would also play it's part further reducing the damage.

I imaging regular hull would only absorb damage in a 3x3x3 box around the impact zone and hardened hull could absorb damage in a 5x5x5 box, or some spherical facsimile, with perhaps the further blocks absorbing less damage.

How Would this affect combat?

Instead of AMCs simply being able to drill a single hole to the core and destroying it, the amount of damage would be spread out and thus armor would be more effective. Having thicker even layers of armor would actually make sense.

Hull has an armor rating of 25 and 100 HP. This means every hit will be reduced 25%. You shoot at a flat square block of hull with a cannon dealing 100 damage. The hull damage is spread out across the hull, the impacted hull taking double damage, dealing 20 damage to the impacted block and 10 to the surrounding ones, the armor value now reduces the damage by 25% causing 15 and 7.5 damage to each piece of hull. That center hull piece instead of taking 2 shots to melt will now take 7 shots and there will be significant damage to surrounding hull as well. This will also help against the overwhelming penetration power of shotgun arrays.

Upsides:

With basic figuring a single layer of hardened hull would require a single AMC to deal 1600 damage in order to one shot a block.

While capital ships can pile on armor and get the biggest bonus fighters would benefit from this mechanic as well without being over buffed as a flat increase of hull armor would.

Downsides:

Repairing ships would become much more difficult because superficial hull damage could be internal as well. The Astro Technobeam should be given a "splash damage" effect as well to combat this. Or be alleviated by additional repair mechanics such as "repair to blueprint"

 

[AxNinjaX]

I am in full support of this idea; it\'s certainly more elegant than hull buffs or AMC nerfs. It would also make excellent armor layouts pay off, and enhance the importance of powerful AMC clusters.

Just one quip, though; how should armors deal with missiles?

 

[jzimmerman4]

This is deffinetly the best idea so far. I really like it since it make the hull act as one instead of individual blocks.

 

[mtech47]

This is deffenitly the best Idea so far and more people need to see this

As for missles I think that the current mechanic works well enough as long as the other problems with missles are worked out

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Missile mechanics don\'t really need to be adjusted against hull, they already apply splash damage.



This system wouldn\'t actually adjust the damage a ship takes but spread it out. After battle damage would at least look more impressive as more blocks would be damaged and less would be just missing.

 

[marineten]

i would say this would fix the armor being useless right now

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

Additionally if armor was granted some damage threshold this would go even further to make armor more effective. A small DT of say 5 would make weak shots hitting thick armor layers of armor while not being considered op

 

[mtech47]

This would deffenatly make core drilling harder, but core drilling still remains the only real tactic to prevent core drilling there needs to changes other than armour, this has been brought up in other places -http://star-made.org/content/space-battles-should-be-more-epic- (but armour still needs to be worthwhile)

What if the damage threshold was based on the thickness of the armour that way a tank can\'t be shot to death with a bb gun but a lightly armoured ship can

Idea for missles, have missles be able to pass though sheilds with a probability that is inversly proportional to the percent of sheilds remaing but starting at 70% sheilds and having any sheilds at all would give you 20% protection. So at 70% sheilds there is a 0% chance of the missle passing through and at 1% sheilds there is a 80% chance of the missle passing though sheilds. The formula being P=80-(8/7)*S P being the probability of the missle passing though and S being the % of sheilds remaining This would mimic a lot of Sci-fi in that damaged sheilds don\'t stop everything and provide a response to the increadably annoying habit that sheilds have of popping back up when missles are about to hit

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

The DT could very well be based on the armor although it should never be too large a number, even a single layer unhardened hull will spread the damage out over 8 additional blocks. A single AMC would deal 3.5 damage to the initial block and 1.8 to the surrounding blocks if the 25% armor is still used in addition to DT. A DT of 2 would completely negate the damage to the surrounding blocks and the block that was hit would only take 1.5 damage. I don\'t think even with DT successful hits should ever do no damage at all. Of course a minimum damage could be added, DT could be set up to take 1 damage if it other wise would have taken none.

Personally I think any weapon should start penetrating shields before 0% but at decreased capacity, a heavy shot may buch through a 15% shield and deal 50% of it\'s initial damage to the ship below. I have also seen other games use \"lucky shot\" to bypass shields and armor the attacker would otherwise not be able to deal with, it was actually the only thing that would kill tanks in GSP.

The idea of a missile getting lucky and compleatly bypassing shields at 69% is scary thought, this would probably still be something that effects shields at lower leverls... at most 25% and even then it might be a bleed through effect and not a 100% impact.

 

[PolloLoco]

I really hope Schema sees this. A feature like this would make hull design a lot more important.

To add to this idea, perhaps damage could be spread more effectively by a curved hull than a cubic one? This would counteract the \"shoebox effect\" of ship design in Starmade.

 

[jzimmerman4]

Agreed! It would also make sence to do that because square corners are relatively weak, hence why the windows on airplanes are oval. My question is how would the game calculate that?

 

[Vyor]

This would be awsome, and give noobs at least a running chance against pirates :P...





god I hate them so D:

 

[oninoni]

This is a brillian idea! I hope Schema reads this xD

This would give Hull a real Purpose (Except looking cool ... )



Oni

 

[S7ormblade]

I think this would improve the game dramatically! It would also give people a reason to put stronger hull on their ships.

 

[Vyor]

In theory you could have a quad layer of reinforced and it could take some hits... but at the moment you soould just use sheilds, as they are much better...

 

[4eeJZ2xewfZycb]

I think that damage should bounce around a bit, like a shockwave rippling through a hull. What I mean by this, is when you hit a hull block (or maybe any block? It\'d be amazing to see engine hull get hit and damage the engines a bit), it looks at how many hull blocks it\'s attached to. If it\'s attached to 1, then the hull block takes 50% of the damage instantly and gives 50% to the 1 other, which then takes 50% of that and repeats the process.

Attached to 2, 33%, attached to 3, 25%, and so on. The damage would bounce back and forth like this until it\'s negated.



Another thing, a hull block should be unable to absorb more damage than it\'s allocated. If, for example, a hull is surrounded on 4 sides, and it can only take 10% of a blow, then it instantly takes 10% if the blow, not 20%, and the remaining 90% is shared with the other 4 blocks. This would allow ships with massive weapons to outright blow huge holes in the hull of ships.



Downside? If just hull, it would result in unconnected hull plates beind used to absorb damage. Rather, I think that all blocks should be subseptible to this, which will result in bleedthrough, but also means a strong enough weapon wouldn\'t just take the hull off a ship, it\'d blast a hole right through the ship and possibly take out the entire thing! We\'re talking about capital ship vs fighter, of course, not capital ship vs capital ship.



This, compounded with the idea to make AMDs less accurate, the \"Space Battles should be more epic\" idea, and the ship core idea, would be amazing. Capital ship battles would be actually worth watching! :D



Edit: I realized that it\'d be best if the hull only delegated damage to the components if there was no more hull blocks to bounce the damage to, because bleedthrough would take out most ships quickly.

 

[Lecic]

I like how it makes hull work as a single entity instead of individual blocks.

 

[Vyor]

want!

 

[NeonSturm]

BTW: you can make a not spaced array of 7*7 docking slots on top of a core (1 block space between core and array), build a core+1-3 shield + 1 power system + faction module for each docking slot. and put repair beams behind (faction module = 100/1%=10k hp + 1200 + 120/s? from shields)

Now you just need docking systems on your ships hull and nobody can penetrate it for 30-60 seconds.

 

[Drogoth63]

this is brilliant. core drilling has been the most main based tactic to destroy a ship throughout. even the AI rely on this kind of tactic, it lacks such variety to destroy a ship which is becoming rather dull.

if this was actually added to the game Armor would become much more reliable than having to be just a mere decorative block that its only purpose is to make the ship look good and be so very useless that you might as well just build a ship completely replacing all of the hull blocks with shield blocks in order to actually be combat effective.