Ramming Ships

[John Sheridan]

A solid feature to have.

It could work like so:

If a small ship rams a big ship, the game uses existing ramming calculations (speed / mass / whatever) to figure out (besides bouncing / pushing effect), the damage to each ship, or more clearly, who is getting the most punished from the two ships, on a % basis, and applies damage to each ship on that % basis.

So if your small fighter rams the 10000 mass ship (or vice versa), the big ship may get two cracked hull blocks, but your fighter disapears.

If two ships of identical mass hit each other, the damage is 50% to each at the impact point. The damage "missile style" done to each ship can be based on how much bigger or smaller the first ship is compared to the other, in this example here they are the same size, so the ratio is 1, so 1 multiplied by some general rule for ramming damage to be invented. E.g. simple example: Ratio of 1 * (0.5% of the ships total blocks get damaged per 1KMH speed at impact) = "fake missile hit damage to ship at impact point". Minimum impact speed of 20KMH required to initiate etc.

I'm using missile damage as the example for this for the crator effect

Goes without saving, shields SHOULD NOT significantly protect against ramming. Most sci-fi shows have displayed ramming damage significantly cutting through shielding.

Your carrier will fair way better anyway than the small fighter you ram or that rams you.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I for one say that ramming should be implimented.
But sadly, it would result in horridly bad lag...

 

[therimmer96]

You cant just consider mass when talking about ramming. What the ships are made of should count, so a fighter can crash land on a planet, leaving a trail in the dirt, and only taking minor damage, instead of being oblitorated on contact. Speed also needs to play into affect, so that a nudge from my shuttle craft in the hangar of a station wont cause damage. This I suspect is the reason we dont have ramming mechnics yet, there is to many variables to consider first, It would be to taxing on servers at this stage.

 

[Chosen Mimes]

it would be a horribly powerfull griefing tool.

\"lol ima griefer with no building talent. i gunna ram me ship of rock stuff and grey hull into this wonderful masterpiece of art this guy built over 3 days lolololol!!1!1!!\"

it\'s funny because it wouldn\'t even be considered griefing. \"It\'s normal game mechanic lulz\"

I\'d prefer no raming. it\'s far too annoying and also too resource intense.

 

[therimmer96]

IF it is added, it should be a config option, as some servers dont mind greifers, in their eyes if it is possible, it is allowed

 

[Qweesdy]

Hi,

I\'ve always thought that shields should repel things (including other ships). If 2 ships (both with shields) are on a collision course, then they should bounce off each other before they collide. To have an actual collision you\'d need to be moving fast or have no shields.

Of course I mostly had this idea to reduce the effects of the current (bad enough to kill servers) collision detection code; but it would also help to reduce greifing if collisions caused damage.

 

[Legolas170]

Who\'s to say the scifi shows are correct? If you have a condensed wall of a plasma like material, denser than your hull, what\'s to say it wouldn\'t impact the shields?

 

[John Sheridan]

20KMH minimum impact speed required to trigger damage calculation

I didn\'t mention it in my first post for simplicity, but yes hardened hull ship ramming a ship of nothing but thrusters would survive far better.

Now, a fair point about the griefing potential of ramming.

Solutions:
Make turrents enemy whoever rams you (or you ram)
Reverse away
Stay away from populated areas
Dock your ship
Fight back
Having a decent economy will help deter \"built to ram\" ships which would be an expensive exercise. Especially if you are aiming for a big ship.

This is space, boy, be ready for anything! Go back to minecraft creative if its too rough!

But yeah, the problems with this game appear to be performance related in hitting things, and gravity + big objects = max server cpu usage it really needs to be rewritten more simply it would appear

 

[ardiel]

Mass should factor into the amount of inertia, not damage. Mass should just determine which ship gets bounced and by how much.

Damage should come from velocity and should apply equally to both targets because speed is relative. Mass should NOT effect this because the ships materials are made of the same stuff. The ship didn\'t become more massive at the point of impact, the individual blocks are not more durable than before just because it has more of them.

Basically if a fighter crashes into a cruiser, and the fighter disappears, there should be a fighter sized hole in the cruiser if they are made of the same hull. It would be uneven if one is hardened hull and the other isn\'t.

 

[YX33A]

This could be interesting. Balanced correctly it would be great. A properly built ramming prow could make all the difference for such a attack as well.



And of course Mass will Affect the damage. Kinetic Energy is Mass*Velocity as we all know. So will the shape of the ship smashing into the other ship(IE is it like a bullet or a brick?), and even the material used to make the prow will come into effect.

 

[Art in Music]

Go play Space Engineers if you want a space ship crashing simulator. Otherwise, Star Made not having ships take damage on impact like that--which I account to shielding--is a great feature since we have these giant ships bumping stuff around all the time.

 

[ardiel]

Mass effects the kinetic energy but does not effect damage the way the OP is saying.

If the damage worked that way, humans would be bulletproof because they have way more mass than a bullet does.



Shape and hull thickness will also matter, but let\'s not get ahead of ourselves.

 

[John Sheridan]

Now it can be in StarMade too. A fine addition.



To the person (ardiel) talking about similar damage to small and big ships = bad idea. Mass should be factored in so a bunch of little noobs dont make 5x5x5 cubes and ram your big ship all day unless they enjoy dying and not doing any damage to your titan.



I get your point about my logic implying humans should then be immune to bullets because they weigh a lot more, but this is a game and it has to be fun. Keeping big ships basically immune from small ships ramming them is a protection from randoms doing a 1 hour-on-server-being-a-deadbeat. People can still grief your ship, but its going to cost them a lot more in resources / time etc. Which is how it should be.

Space engineers seems to have taken a fair few ideas from StarMade, StarMade can get a ramming system off that, except without the cool \"ship splits apart and goes its own way\" thing which I find very cool, but could live without if it just get crator damage instead

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Other than that, this is not very useful. If people wanted to ram ships, they would use disintegrator blocks to do it. They take down shields if you have enough of them, and they damage hull as well as missiles. Ramming isn\'t the problem, its really if people want realism.

As for the idea of ship collisions, ships should take shield damage from hits. That way there is a little protection plan against people that would ram ships. If the rammer is pressing against the bigger ship for a while the shields will constantly go down. So, the ship with the weakest shields should take hull damage first when the shields go down. It just makes sense to me because shields repel things.

I have a clip that shows what im taking about. (My friend showed me this a while ago. I don\'t play Halo.)

http://youtu.be/Vc3ktEpgRI8?t=4m51s

?I\'d like some feedback. I don\'t really like the idea of ramming, but if it had to happen I think this would be best way to do it.

 

[ardiel]

Yes it could make sense because in some lore ships have shields to help with minor collisions and even some times to maintain the structural integrity of ships. Some non combat ships have shields, not for fighting, but to protect them from space debris.

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I suggest a deflector array module which lowers ram damage to your ship, and also a density enhancer, which does not increase mass, but increases your ram damage.

 

[John Sheridan]

Imperial_Gold, clearly you have never tried ramming a ship with disintegrator blocks, they are currently useless - as useless as missiles. Even piss weak shields fully stop a 5x5x5 cube of disintegrator blocks.

Unless Schema makes disintegrator blocks penetrate shields, then they will remain useless. Watch more sci-fi, you will see how when two ships of similar size collide, shields do nothing. I find it abit naive you said ramming is \"not very useful\", I almost stopped reading your post when I saw that. It has a tonne of uses. Suicide when losing a battle e.g. kamikaze, demoralise your enemy etc. Dont want to get rammed, dont want to get shot at? Then dock your ship

This game is more than minecraft creative in space, thats why it gets boring, you build your big ship, then what, nothing to do, you seem to prefer it stay this way, whereas I think it should allow you to be a cunning SOB, a backstabber, an honest merchant, whatever, but allow the possibilities

 

[Angus and Alexis]

I find that being a Mercinary Nomad is an awsome RP in servers.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Have you ever lobbed a disintegrator missile and a ship? I used one that only contained 6 blocks and it took out an Isanth no problem (Isanths are terrible, but still). I used it on my other ships as well. My ship with 10,000 shields could not stop it. I have video proof that they penetrate shields as well. Here is Tom messing around with god mode and disintegrators.

http://youtu.be/gljjGfQWZMk?t=5m55s

As you can see, they do break shields. Note that the disintegrator ship they were flying would not do over 1.1 million damage, so it wouldn\'t break the shields on first impact. If the shields were lower than the initial damage they would go down.


It has a tonne of uses. Suicide when losing a battle e.g. kamikaze, demoralise your enemy etc.


Other than these, what other contributions to the game does this make? You say \"It has a tonne of uses.\" but only lists two. Please list other possibilities this could create.

Furthermore you seem to think I fortify the concept of a Minecraft-like Starmade, where all you do is build and kill the occasional mob. I can see that Starmade has substantial potential for great things such as becoming that \"backstabber\" or \"honest merchant\". Just because someone doesn\'t agree with your suggestion it isn\'t right to falsely accuse someone of that. I like the idea of realism in Starmade, but not this feature. If it has to be implemented, it should be a config option. Please try not to generalize people too much as that will land you in trouble. Remember that this is just an opinion and should be treated as such.

If I came off as harsh or critical I apologize.

 

[John Sheridan]

Isanths are useless ships, a 5x5x5 cube beats an isanth, that therefore invalidates your suggestion that disintegrators do real damage, there useless against shields (which is all ships). Unless schema makes shield recharge take FAR LONGER to start recharging, then the ability to do damage via a number of disintegrator blocks that cost LESS than the ship you want to destroy, is near impossible.

SURE, you could make a 4x4x4 cube of disintegrators and ram a little shitty ship of the same size and ruin it, but when you are having to put in as many disintegrator blocks as the actual size of the ship you want to destroy, then its plain silly.

I love the idea of dock a mini ship / torpedo of disintegrator blocks and undock as you close on an enemy and BOOM, but right now thats not possible because disintegrators are useless.

I still like the ramming idea, but you have brought to light another issue: how piss weak disintegrators are at the moment against shielded opponents... not to mention missles, which are also piss weak, and too slow to hit anything moving