And yeah, ships in FS can withstand X hits because that's the table value. didn't a Orion in FS2 intro get pierced (destroyed) by a SINGLE beam from the Lucifer? IIRC, in-game it takes several hits. So, which of the two is the reality of FS universe?
We already know the beam for the Lucifer is wrong in FS2 (although even more powerful beams would take multiple hits). However, we also know that they've upgraded the Orions since the first Great War since they have to participate in beam warfare effectively. It's really not that difficult to explain (and frankly should be obvious) unless there's a scene in FS2 demonstrating the same thing.
We do get to see a Deimos corvette getting beam skewered so the engine allows for that.
You seem to forget that a bomb hit, a beam hit and a collisions are completey different in the way they deliver damage.
I've noted several times in my posts that they're indeed different but that the impact of the explosives they use would yield even greater impact effects than a collision would.
Furthermore, you can't do the reverse and say "because
OUR MODERN doesn't allow for it, what actually happened doesn't count". Logic dictates you do the reverse and say "this is what happened, how can that be?"
We have to take it that the ships can eat that much damage as a fact since if it was effective to use collision then that tactic would have been used more often. Or at the very least, used against the Shivans when the situation started to turn dire. It's not even physically impossible, it's just that our seafaring ships aren't built that way.
Secondly, you cannot simply ignore the basics of warship construction. Yes, that friend of mine works mostly on civilain vessels (he did work on a destroyer once..or was it a mine sweeper? Whatever), but the basic are the same.
Ships are not slabs of metal. Ships are mostly hollow internally...you know - to put stuff in. The armor, the bulkheads, the reinforcing structure - it all scales badly.
so yes, in a collision with the Repulse the whole front of the colossus would crumple. There would be nothing left of the Repulse tough. Cause mass keep going and some armor isn't going to stop that amount of mass.
Which is what I said? The Repulse will crumple against the Colossus while the Colossus would sustain damage to the front sector but that wouldn't constitute a show-stopping damage for the Colossus (in the middle of a war, the bulkheads would be sealed off, broken parts cut off, and the Colossus continuing its mission sans front beams).
However, you're making the assumption that the Repulse is a single ideal object where at this sort of scale, the proper way to model it would be as a collection of objects. As such the momentum of the Repulse is not absorbed all at once but as a continuum over time.
An issue that you're still not understanding is that pound for pound, the structural toughness of our seafaring warships aren't that far apart. However, the Colossus is meant to eat beams from even multiple Orions simultaneously and shrug it off while easily blowing them away in return indicating greater toughness. As you've also said, large objects behave differently; this means the way the collision will occur will not be as if they're ideal objects and reduces the damage of collision.
Furthermore, collision damage is particularly bad in the sea because ships are not sunk by damage but by water (your friend should agree with this particular phrase). Losing 10% of the hull below water could be devastating. But there's no such equivalent for spacecraft. Unless the Colossus was built such that losing the front section would mean loss of control (which would be an incredible case of not building redundancy into such a huge ship) it's not anywhere close to a crippling attack. It would literally be just losing perhaps 30%.
And funny how you ignore my very own example with the kamikaze attacks. I asked a question you still didn't answer.
I went all the way back to page 5 (which was before I even posted) and none of your posts even had the word "suicide" or "kamikaze".
Frankly, if I have to choose between beliving you and a YouTube clip that only marginally applies to the situation, and a guy who works on actually designing and simulating large vessels...it's a no brainer.
Who doesn't even know the full situation. It's not like you explained to him what these ships were meant to endure, how much larger one ship is compared to the other, how much tougher one ship is compared to the other, how they collided, the velocity they collided at, etc. and then he went and properly thought it through rather than giving the "common sense for modern construction" answer.
All of which everyone else here is considering. Modern ships aren't even designed to eat damage; they're designed to avoid getting hit.
