[SadisticSid]

I don't recall this being put forward before:

Say you have a destroyer with thick heavy armour and a fighter attacks with a Subach. It'd be useful to modders (particularly me ) to have fields which negate a fixed amount of armour, shield and subsystem damage from any one hit by a weapon. Perhaps on top of that have a field which specifies a percentage of damage that is negated, much like damage reduction/resistance in D&D.

In addition, special weapons (like beams and bombs, perhaps) would have an 'ignore damage reduction' flag which is fairly self-explanatory. I think this sort of functionality is already hardcoded in somewhere (a cruiser with 100000 hitpoints will die much sooner from being shot at with a Subach than an Orion with 100000 hitpoints will), so would it be simple enough to give modders control over the exact values?

[Flaser]

I already proposed a system like this several moths ago - except I used the SPECIAL system instead the d20 for grabbing ideas, here is the big thing:

Multistage Developed - Improoved Damage Simulation

Stage I - Improoved Damage Formulae

Damage Treshold / Damage Resistance - Damage calculation system

A basic overhaul of the current damage system and instead the exiting - and somewhat hackish- flag system.
It will use a separate armor.tbl which either contains a variety of armors or is an addenda to ships.tbl.

Damage calculation is now: (Weapon Damage - Armor Treshold)*(100% - Armor Resistance(%))

The treshold simulates the deflection power of the armor - this will put an end to all the HUGE, BIG SHIP and ect. flag frenzy that never seemed to offer a perfect solution.

Armor Resistance is not really necessary at this point since you can simply assign higher hit points to bigger capships, but if you wish you can already simulate hevier armor plating and stuff like that.

Stage II - Armor Strengh Simulation

Penetrating Damage = (WeaponDamage - Damage Treshold*ArmorHp(%)) (100% - Damage Resistance(%)*ArmorHp(%))

Armor Damage = (WeaponDamage - Damage Treshold * ArmorHp(%))*Damage Resistance(%) / Armor Endurance

Penetrating Damage = the old damage value aplied to the ship as usual
Armor HP = pretty self explanatory - the status of the armor
Armor Damage = this will be substracted from the ArmorHp
Armor Endurace - think of it as the armor resistance to falling apart. It simulates that even if the armor takes damage (absorbing it) it's stucture is less deformed than the interior of a ship, since the armor was designed to do so.

This advanced model introduces the wear of the armor - so the ammount of damage will gradually increase. That way a tiny fighter will be able to deal the last shot to a destroyer if the bombers already ravaged it with their heavy bombs.

This is the point where armor resistance becomes necessary - it actually simulates the ammount of damage the armor absorbs when a shot goes through it.

Stage III - Localised Armor Stats

Self Explanatory title - segments of the ship have their own armor simulation - prelude to true armor plate simulation

Stage IV - Segmented Damage Model

Once Segments are defined in Stage III - they can be used for simulating damage to individual parts of a warship.

Stage IV-2 - Complex Segmented Damage model

Segments have key components(subsystems) that dictate the segments performance.

Stage V - True Surface Damage Simulation

Development of true armorplate simulation on the surface of the ship.

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Stage VI-A - True Geometric Armor Plate Simulation

Armor plates have a thickness - may be impossible due computing needs
They take damage accordingly

Stage VI-B - True Geometric Damage Model

Ship sections take damage based on the penetration of projectiles into the ship's interior.

Requires advanced ship parts with varied components - uses the already suggested Reliability/Performance/Repair system with key/secondary systems in a subsystem or a ship section.

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BTW someone even coded smg. like this

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,17366.0.html

[Deathstorm V2]

Erm... no offense, but I'd rather see something more like Sid's idea - negate a portion of damage applied by the weapon.

[Flaser]

RTF..mm...text.

Damage Treshold is exactly that.

[SadisticSid]

I think he means start out with something simple and maybe consider a complex armour system later on. There is the problem of feasibility as well - as I understand it, anything past stage 2 in your model would require considering different parts of the ship as independent constructs. So they'd have to be defined, algorithms for breaking up the ship into constituent parts written and/or POF support for this implemented, backward compatibility abandoned and whatever other things that would make it intrinsically difficult.

Of course I'll let the SCP guys speak for themselves

[Flaser]

Sid, that's exactly what the whole stuff is: See - Stage I. It's quite simple, only a minor alteration of damage handling.

As for the later - well it is definitly not backwards compatible, but there is a point where clinging to old traditions is outweighed by the benefits of using a more rewarding new system.

[WMCoolmon]

It sounds possible but would be a LOT of work. I'm sure you'd need a few campaigns that would use it before any coders would touch it. That is, to do all the stages.

Stage 1 might be easy to do, depending on how FS2 deals damage to a ship. It could also be very tedious.

Implementing anything of this sort would probably break multiplayer with previous FS2 versions as well. Again.