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"

Repost of my thread from the old forums to continue the discussion

 

[Zedrackis]

What your really going on about here is core drilling more than hull properties. Don't misunderstand my position, I think the default hull values are horrible. But until you get around the fact that you only need to kill one block to nuke a ship (the core), add the fact that one block is always near the center of the target marker, and that AI turrets always aim near perfectly for that one block no amount of non-universal armor like shields will help.

In fact if anything would really help it might be to armor the core block like a faction block and give it high hp. This would incourage people to target other systems first, like the weapons comps, or thrusters to gimp the ship long enough to kill it. Even more so a pilot who realizes his/her ship is disabled beyond quick repair, and given the option of escape might just bail out and log off/run away to avoid being killed with the ship. There by avoiding extra loss. Under current design any could walk into your massive capital ship and just start shooting the core with their pistol, which seems absurd. At the very least the ships core defenses should scale with the mass of the ship.

 

[Zedrackis]

This occured to me a few minutes after I posted. A good solution to core drilling would indeed be buffing the core. By adding a default of 75% armor to the block and treat the block as having its base HP + number of blocks in the ship as it actual max hp. This way if you core drill a ship your forced to choose between a long grind of the core, targeting other critical systems or reducing the ships mass to weaken the cores defenses. Which is much better than just buffing hull armor. And of being based on the current block count of the ship, a fighter sized ship would still die fairly quickly, while core drilling massive capital might require lots of missiles or a lunch break.

 

[Sven_The_Slayer]

I have seen a lot of suggestions for adjusting the health of the core based on the size of the ship. This would certainly make fights last longer but does nothing to actually prevent core drilling. AI will now fight other ai properly and that is probably the best core drill prevention I've seen so far as it actually works. By allowing the armor to spread shots out what you do is make combat a little more interesting. It's impossible to drill single block holes through armor and the thicker the armor the harder it is.

One idea I mentioned in the old thread was you could add a very small amount of damage threshold to the hull and weaker shots when spread out enough will do significantly less damage to large chunks of armor while simultaneously not being considered OP in a fighter to fighter situation. This would also help against the high DPS shotgun style cannons as most of the low damage would be just absorbed.

 

[Elit3]

Like ablative hull armour? I think the strength of the hull should take into account the amount of power generated, for electrical discharge reasons.