A key feature for vehicular sims is damage modeling, and it’s probably a must for capital ships, unless you want the biggest ships to simply be HP sponges like in Eve online. Granted, eve online does have an interesting ship fitting system, where modules on ships are customizable. You can’t just look at a certain ship and know immediately how to fight it, there are always a few popular fits.
Another vehicle based game, War Thunder, uses a modular damage system. After coming in contact with a player’s vehicle, a projectile goes through a journey. First, the game looks at the angle of approach of the projectile in relation to the angle of armor, to see if it should bounce. If not, then the thickness of the armor in relation to the caliber of the shell is measured. If it penetrates, then it can wreak havoc on all of the modules inside, including crew. Different shell types have different effects.
high caliber HE does not pen, but devastates the modules inside anyway. Solid shot like APCR can go in the front and out the back, but anything it doesn’t hit is untouched, whereas an AP shell with explosive filler can take out the entire turret, etc. I think this is the ideal damage model for I:B.
Instead of APCR, you could have electromagnetic railguns slugs, HE could be missiles, etc.
I have nothing important to add to the discussion, just that I have a nerdgasm thinking about this and hope that we reach the stretch goal and that it is that detailed.
Is it possible to have the hitbox (I assume it’s separate from the graphic model) where each surface has its own healthbars for armor and the respective ship module it protects underneath? I have a faily simple but deep system in mind if anyone’s interested.
I’m very much in favour of a modular damage system, but I wouldn’t want it to be too easy (like Elite: Dangerous where you just select your target from a list). Fighting smaller ships it would just be incidental as weapons might not be that precise, but when engaging larger capital ships it would help determine your attack strategy; for example, everyone forms up and approaches from behind to take out the engines.
Yeah. From what we’ve seen of combat, it would impossible to actually aim for anything on a Helicon (corvette?) or smaller, unless the ship speed is slower in the real game.
Although percentage change of hitting various systems could depend on direction of attack as a compromise.
Capital ships could use different areas to target of course.
Different weapon types with stats for probably to hit and damage to subsystems vs hull damage (vs shields?) would be good.
I’d like to see things like blowing up thrusters, especially on capital ships, having a much more catastrophic explosion in oxygen rich atmospheres, and affecting their handling even to the point of potentially being unable to stay aloft.
Main engines should have more redundancy and be harder to destroy, of course.
War Thunder doesn’t damage models pretty decently, I think. Not super-realistic, but a good balance that works well for gameplay. And sometimes planes are kind of bugged or unfinished DMs which can make them really unfun, like a single stray bullet taking out your ailerons.
Well in most flight sims, you can’t really aim at fighters when dogfighting, your main goal is just to hit the enemy. I imagine this goes for the Hellion, which parts are hit are just an additional thing. Maybe you get lucky and disable it completely, or maybe it glances off the armor.
