Ramming Ships

[Imperial_Gold]

If you read the rest of it, you can clearly see the destructive power of disintegrators.


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.


Here is a picture I drew detailing the missile. (the block with the circle bit is a thruster, I forgot to write it down in the legend)



There is one shield block in the middle behind the second disintegrator, and another disintegrator is behind the first one. This simple device blows ships out of the water. It even fits in an un-enhanced docking module. Just 6 disintegrator blocks in total. Also, a solid block of them is not a good way to use them.

 

[Syzygy]

Please don\'t add this. I would hate to not be able to nudge my other ships into correct orientation anymore, or to accidentally land to hard on my planet. I enjoy that I don\'t have to check to fix up my ship every time I land it. Sure its cool, but I wouldn\'t want to be playing with it 99% of the time. It would definately have to be able to disable if implemented.

 

[John Sheridan]

Syzygy, you could still nudge, there would need to be say a 20KMH minimim impact speed for ramming damage to begin to be calculated etc, nudging is fine

Imperial Gold, I read your whole post, I exagerated a little on disintegrator costs vs ship to blow up, but they are still useless against any \"real\" ship, unless disintegrators have recently changed (in the last month or two).

 

[AmeriChris]

the idea of building melee fighters with powerful wings on the sides. They can brush up on your ship, slicing the hull and exposing your ship to the vacum. Imagine spilling fuel or oxygen because of this. I think this would be cool.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Not useless, but inefficient.

As for the actual ramming idea, I have a question. You say:


shields SHOULD NOT significantly protect against ramming


What is stopping me from getting a decently sized fighter (say 100 mass), and ramming the crap out of a large frigate (3000 mass) and killing it?

 

[Trollerbobman]

You guys should be listening to Imperial_Gold.

Not only is he being mature, he is also proving you, John Sheridan, very wrong.

Dis-Integrators are not useless, I have made many bombs out of it that can take out ships 4-6 times the size of the bomb itself.

 

[Zovc]

what you do is you make a low, wide plane, with large wings, and on the wings, little docks a couple blocks below, with little bombs... you launch the bombs while whisking above a large cruiser or battleship. They are hard to turn around to face a little ship like this. so yea, you just fly over and drop the bombs onto them, and fly away. Now imagine if you had 20 pilots that are extremely good at doing that and hitting one hole. they could tear right now to the core and kill the ship. simple as that. or you just get alot of bombs and make several passes. Single tearing down of the dread naught. Though you would need a fleet of the big bombers to take it down probaly.... prepare your dirt.... and to defend against the bombs: any terrain.

why? cheap. and the damage goes to the block and a certain radius. so if you fill up spare space with useless 1 cr terrain. it will help slow down the bombs from sliping through an opening

 

[FlyingDebris]

But I just don\'t think that this would go over well. There are just too many variables involved to make this work.

 

[John Sheridan]

\"What is stopping me from getting a decently sized fighter (say 100 mass), and ramming the crap out of a large frigate (3000 mass) and killing it?\"

Read my original post. The fighter would be destroyed into dust, the large frigate would barely have a scratch.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

I\'m glad that someone is being nonpartisan in this situation. :D

 

[Ninjanoto]

i like the idea of ramming ships

 

[Imperial_Gold]

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


Suicide would then be pointless. If I\'m in a fighter and severely damaged, it would be in vain to crash into the enemy. As you said:


The fighter would be destroyed into dust, the large frigate would barely have a scratch.


And due to the damages I\'ve taken (even more now from turret damage), the impact does even less damage. Also remember that the ship is so badly damaged that I feel the need to do this. Why else would you suicide if you only had a few blocks in front of your core?

Although I still don\'t like the idea of ramming, with my ramming idea, at least the large ship will take shield damage. You would still be annihilated but hey, sheild damage. At least you got something out of it.

Now let\'s say we have two ships at 3000 mass. Ship 1 has quite a bit of damage. Ship 2 barely has a scratch. Ship 1 feels the need to crash into the other. This is where it gets interesting. Ship 1 begins bolts to Ship 2. Ship 2 sees this and zooms back and strafes. Both have reached max speed, so Ship 1 can\'t touch Ship 2. This leaves Ship 1 taking even more damage because surely Ship 2 hasn\'t stopped firing. Ship 1\'s endeavor was futile. Now the captain of Ship 1 and his crew are at spawn or in escape pods (they fled knowing their captain\'s ridiculous plan) are looking at their incredible failure with much regret. They will be haunted by this memory for the rest of their lives. Good job captain.

 

[Megacrafter127]

The idea of ramming damage makes sense(in my eyes), but needs some work in the details(especially in the maths). I would suggest the following:

The damage is only dealt to the (2) blocks, which caused the collision-event.(The interaction of shields will be explained later). The amount of damage depends on the speed(the movement vectors are subtracted for relativity) and the mass difference between the colliding blocks:

damage=|v|*(m¹/m²) v...speed ; m¹...mass of colliding block ; m²...mass of this block

If one or both of the blocks are beeing destroyed due to collision damage, no bounce is applied.



Shields provide some protection from ramming. The maximal absorbed damage is calculated this way:

maxAbsorbedDamage=sh/N N...amount of blocks in the ship ; sh...the strength of the shield(not the maximum)



If the ship core is destroyed due to collision damage, the ship is turned into an asteroid(if possible) and will explode after n seconds.

The amount of collision damage and absorbed damage can be amplified by a specific factor for balancing.



I hope, my attempt to nail the idea using maths succeded, and provided the possibility to discuss/modify specific aspects of the idea on an extact level.

 

[Iskandar]

The game isn\'t really coded for ramming as-is.... on the server I play on, we\'ve recently had a problem with griefers using a bare core to ram and glitch inside larger ships, which then allows them to bypass the shields and steal/destroy the ship from within. Unless the coding is changed extensively, that\'s what would happen with any ramming efforts -- the smaller ship would glitch through or into the larger ship while the server lags unresponsively as it tries to calculate and update the positions of the two impacting bodies. Changing the game engine to respond otherwise is a bit more involved than just adding a couple lines of code -- it would pretty much put development right back to the beginning.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Trust me, all if not most of those exploits and lag will be ironed out. In it\'s beta or finished state Starmade (hopefully) won\'t have that.

 

[John Sheridan]

Imperial Gold,you obviously would not ram a mothership in your tie fighter. You would not be trying to kill one to begin with in a tie fighter. Hurrr. Honestly... just give up.

If two mothersips are fighting, and one is clearly losing, ramming is a good idea and could heavily even the odds, if the other guy is awesome and reverses fast enough or gets out of the way, then too bad for the suicide rammer. He needs to do it more craftily, although on a side note I\'ve written numerous posts how reverse and side speeds should be reduced. I don\'t recall saying ramming should be easy.

Megacrafter I like your idea about big ships turning into asteroids when they blow up.... or at least into an asteroid like mess of hulls, and set as a new entity added called \"Destroyed large ship [Original Ship Name]\" or something.

 

[Imperial_Gold]

Ramming could actually work. However, I still think shields should come into play a little more than you say. For example:

Ship 1 and Ship 2 are of equal mass. Ship 1 has little shielding. Ship 2 has good shielding for it\'s class. Ship 1 wants to ram Ship 2. Since shields do not affect ramming too much, ramming is a perfect way to destroy Ship 2. Ship 1 also has most of the important systems in the back (AMC, power, power tanks etc.). Both ships take great amounts of damages. So even with most of it\'s front portion missing, Ship 1 can dominate Ship 2.

If shields protected a ship against ramming more, Ship 1 would take grave damages, and Ship 2\'s shields would be halfway/three quarters gone.

But Imperial, can\'t ships with heavy shielding dominate ships by ramming them? Yes and no. Since Ship S (ship with heavy shielding) has such heavy shielding it can survive more rams than the average ship of it\'s class. However, it\'s shields account for a good bit of the ship, meaning it has less room for power, AMCs, etc. So here is another example:

Ship S rams a ship of equal mass (Ship A). Ship A\'s shields go down to 25%. Ship S\'s shields go down to 50%. Because Ship A isn\'t focused on shields, it has more room for AMC, power, etc. That means it can take Ship S\'s shields down quicker than Ship S can take down Ship A\'s shields. Now, since Ship S has higher shields, it takes a little longer to beat, and Ship A has low shields but Ship S doesn\'t have the firepower to make them go down swiftly. They both have an equal opportunity to kill each other. This would be really good for Ship S to have a buddy to tip the scales. Ship S can back off now to give his buddy the kill.

I still think ramming isn\'t right for Starmade. Maybe a mod or a server option. Besides, ramming is universally considered a dick move. If you\'ve ever played War Thunder, you know what i\'m talking about.

 

[wolfboyft]

I agree. And there should be ramming in bobbies. For launching dis-integrator missiles!