Fighters can cripple non heavy-armored components of a ship - so it mean antennas, sensor-arrays, lights, exposed turrets, heat sikns ect.
Anything other needs firepower that is either:
-A big bomb designed to penetrate the armor -->you need a bomber
-A high-caliber/high-power gun -->you need a bigger ship or a ship built around the weapon: a gunboat is the only think I can think of that's player control able
-Special high-penetration weapon --> it won't do too much damage, good for crippling equipment with medium armor - so heavly armored stuff can't be damged with a fighter.
The Tr/Rs system I keep babbling about can have a nice addition, but needs a hell a lot of SCP development or just general table tweaking and massive additions to current pof-files (mostly empty subsystems you have to attach to the surface and group the exiting ones along with turrest into sections).
A note for SCP: This is not a request, this is not critism. It's just a thought up damage model, that may or may not be possible to implement with a reasonable ammount of work.
I know a bit about the code and the way FS works, but I'm not a coder just an amatuer programmer.
I tried to think of solutions with minimal coding.
I also feel the need to note that IIRC Randow Tiger suggested this solution earlier in another form, I confess that I looted a lot from his general idea.
It doesn't require the change of the bounding box code or geomod or tweaking the graphic engine (if you don't count collision detection for bullets that, I don't know if this has anything to do with the bounding box).
The hit detection code needs to be completly revamped, although it can be cirvumvented with using a lot of untargetable susbsystems - however the limits of the engine can kill this solution.
Things needed:
-Implemented hull-plate management:
A)The ship's surface is littered with armor plates. They are either an SCP trick that divides the surface and handles their strengs, or empty intargetable subsystems, that cover the ship preventing shots from reaching the subsystems below.
B) These plates have to handle the bulk of the damage model:
I) they have their own hp
II) they reduce the damage with a treshold, then round it down by their resistance
III) a further fraction of the reduced damage is substracted from the plate's hp
IV) the treshold and resistance values are funtions that follow the plates's hp (so if a bomb, devastated the armor, even a fighter can cause massive damage)
A per/poly solution was suggested before - it can lead to too big armor plates.
Using empty susystems has another problem IIRC: the engine can't handle to many of them.
A hackish solution could be using an damae-table/ship that hold all the data for them, but I don't know how feasible this idea is.
The biggest problem is still the detection of hits on the plates and defining the arrangement of the plates.
This may actually be an addition to the common pof standard - I don't know how the community would react to that.
-Section management:
A) Subsystems and turrets are grouped into sections - they could be empty untargetable (or targetable?) susbsysems too. They simulate the bulkheads of ships. Big anti-cap. turrets may be a section on their own
B) The statistics of susbsystems are influenced by section's status - their actual hp won't change buttheir performance will. If enough damage is aplied to a section of the ship there simply won't be power and/or lifesupport in the area pulverising guns and any manned/unmanned equipment
This addition may be abandoned, but IMHO it could be a nice plus.
-Improoved ship damage model:
A) Certain subsystems' damage controls the entire power of the ship (reactor, engine, bridge...it actually has to have an effect!)
B) Hull damage will later change to internal damage: it damages the frame of the ship, an internal model has to be made as a backbone - damage to the backbone kills the ship:
I) - if it's engines are online or an explosion does the damage it tears itself apart
II) -otherwise it becomes a derelict. (This is the point where a Geo-mod could fit in in the very far future) (This feautre can be abandoned, once again it can be too much work for too little gain), or at least no explosion is played when the ship breaks up
C) Certain subsystems can explode - they will be handled as a bomb exploding inside the area - they damage the frame, other subsystems and the hull like any weapon
IMHO this is less of a graphical/model tweak and more of a complete revamp of the current systems.
The best way I can summarise the whole idea is this:
Sections of the ship act as idependently as possible
To simulate their interaction, the 'existing' damage model is used to show what the destruction of one thing does to the others.
Furthermore, an actual chain of power needs to be created - so the energy will go through a "net". An algorythm will check if it can reach a system from a power source (that's why including backup sources will be smg. additional in future designs) (the algorythm could work by checking the neighbours of the system - if any of them is online, so is the system, the mentioned SECTION system can be a skeleton for a simplier system, where power and simulation of internal engineering happens only between sections, lessening the drain).
The critical part I spoke of is the frame: instead the armor, this will be the vital component of the ship. Building them is IMHO up to the model designers.
However I though of a couple of things:
A) They consist of a single or multiple subsystems (the first acts pretty much like the current hull, the later can simulate that only a part of the frame is damaged).
B) Destruction of any frame subsystem will kill the ship.
C) They can be eiher internal or close to the armor (more like a hull)
This is not as easy a kill as it sounds, unlike the older hull, this time, you have to puch through the armor, then take out all the systems that covered the frame, and only then can you actually kill the ship.
That won't be necessary in every scenario, just shooting a cruiser to resemble a cheese more than a warship will have crippled it so much it won't be more than a floating hunk.
Moreover heavy bombs will eat through ship internal like a knife through heated butter. (Although the double "armor" can be finally given a new meaning - just include another set of armor susbsytems inside the mode).
Before anyone stats to recite a dozen reasons why not to use the system let me do it beforehand:
-It need work - from SCP - and quite a bit of it
-It will definitly won't be backwards compatible with the old stuff
-If implemeted, it will make a tons of work for modders.
The later needs a little more insight IMHO after all this is smg. that will interfere with their work the most:
-Armoring a ship can be a real pain, though some algoryth can be made to equally cut the surface of the model into roughly equal portions (a further feature for the FSDev Studio?)
-Placing all these subsystems can be pain (?) - well you already have to place a couple of them, if it gets implemented it can be lowered to actually creating sections only - then all you'd have to do is place the subs into the sections. (MORE WORK :sad: )
-It's useless unless it makes any visually apparant difference for the player (...erh....well it is a though think):
If we used the bombs' code to simulte subs going of we could get coud result - some new particle effect will have to be created though to show - however the code for that is already there, so it's an artist's job.
All these subs (including the plates - IMPLEMENTING THEM in the first place is the REAL PROBLEM) can be already blown off - of course this mean more WORK for modellers since they have to do a model for the destroyed sub too :sad: (....until Geomod comes along in the infinitly distant future :sob:)
-What about all those section events, how will you control them?
Okey, I don't know, but I assume this can be achieved, after all fighters have similar effects when damaged.
-
