Despite my already being confident in knowing it's a nearly unfixable problem (at least to fix within the rules of FSU), I spent my entire afternoon on it because clearly you all know better...
Yes, that is
clearly the sentiment we intended to convey...
Investigation shows that this definitely not fixable in that it's a flaw in the design of the ship itself. There are too may bounding boxes, all rotating around and the mixture of all those bounding boxes into FSO's (shall I note here, rewritten) collision code makes it nigh impossible to create an HTL model with the exact same hitbox exploits.
Now that is interesting. We already knew, from the Volition bug report, that there was some problem that prevented the crystal from taking hits even back in retail. I suspect that if Volition had had the time to investigate the problem further, they would have made the same discovery. This is the sort of unintended emergent behavior that happens when multiple complex systems interact with each other.
Lykurgos88, have you tested the retail Shivan Comm Node model with the latest FSO collision code?
In order to make something work like it used to, I had to break every single FSU rule we have about model replacement. I have no idea how that will affect other campaigns and missions, either.
Well, I do know that other campaigns and missions have used the crystal trick, but on the other hand they still allow you to destroy the comm node normally. I'm curious as to the extent of rule-breaking though. Is it as simple as adding an extra subsystem to deal with the Special Point overlapping the subobject, or is something else involved?
Regardless, thanks for your diligence, MjnMixael.