[Nuclear1]

In my view, it would be coded so all "small craft" regardless of which side their on, would run from the explosion.  This would prevent any side from taking the advantage.

Well, substitute "fighters" with "me" and you probably get what I mean actually.

[CP5670]

I managed to find and reinstall WC Prophecy a while ago.  Would it be possible to have that style of cap ship destruction?  You get a death cry (no biggie scripting can handle that), followed by a massive shockwave (built in, although would like to create a big shockwave that just throws you around without taking much damage).  But whats missing is the secondary detonations, while keeping the ship mostly intact or at least in big pieces, but have explosions keep going off at least a few minutes after it's death. (sorta like batteries, fuel and ammunation baking off)  You get to see the devistation after it's all done, instead of just a few big chunks floating around.

You get some of the small explosions around the ship before the main shockwave goes off. Although I agree that in general, the capital ship explosions could use a lot of improvement. I think that's the only aspect of the graphics that is still more or less unchanged from the original game.

[Colonol Dekker]

Well If the coding slowed down debris  to a few KPS, the Devbris lods could be made to resemble a "burnt husk" and add the FS equivalent of "persistant corpses" so the debris doest "pop" after a few minutes.

[IPAndrews]

If a fighter or bomber is within a certain distance of a cruiser or larger class which has just hit 0% hull strength, then regardless of whether that fighter/bomber is hostile, friendly, neutral, or whatever, it'll drop whatever its doing and make a run for it away from the dying ship.  Granted, it can't be that simple,

Have the game engine automatically give high priority evade or keep-safe-distance orders to any small ship when a large ship is destroyed. If you have a garbage collecting routine that removes such orders once the big ship has finished exploding, then you have a solution which makes use mainly of existing code. I think. 

[CP5670]

What does ai-evade actually do? I never found it to have any noticeable effect when I tried using it.

[IPAndrews]

I'm guessing it's supposed to make the ship run in the opposite direction (indefinitely?) as opposed to keep safe distance where they only run so far from the ship. 100% guessing of course. So this reply is in fact pretty worthless.

[CP5670]

That's what you would think, but the AIs don't seem to behave any differently at all when given that order. They don't hesitate to attack the thing they are supposed to be evading.

[IPAndrews]

Sounds fishy. I'd be tempted to Mantis that.