Ramming mechanics

dieaready

Incorporating ramming damage would be problematic from a balance/meta perspective, but what if instead of damage, a shock mechanic is used instead?

Shock would work on the basis of causing 'stun' to parts and crew. Reactors would shut down into a failsafe mode, requiring some time to restart (larger reactors takes longer time to restart), factories would jam and require crew to clear and fix the jam (more crew = faster reset), and crew could be momentarily stunned and take time to recover (crew in bunks/quarters could be immune to stun). Weapons, shields, thrusters and other parts could continue to function as per normal (crew are strapped in place when manning equipment), except that reactors/factories are temporarily offline, and they would have to rely on storages for resupply. This effect would apply across the entirety of both ships.

Shock would apply based on the momentum divided by the mass of the ship, and would have to reach certain limits before different effects would be applied, so much small ships ramming a large ship would result in shock applied to the smaller ship, while the larger ship would not be affected or have less effect on it.

Example: A 2000 ton ship (A) is rammed by a 500 ton ship (😎 with a relative velocity of 200 units.

Shock applied on Ship A: 500t x 200 / 2000t = 50
Shock applied on Ship B: 2000t x 200 / 500t = 800

Crew stun requirements: 0.1s stun per 10 shock value, max of 3s
Reactor shutdown requirement: 300 shock
Reactor restart duration: 3/6/9s (S/M/L) after a crew enters the reactor (ie, push the restart button)
Factory shutdown requirement: 500 shock
Factory restart requirements: 4 crew-seconds (ie, 4 crew to clear the jam in 1s)

Effects on Ship A: Crew is stunned for (50 / 10) x 0.1 = 0.5s
Effects on Ship B: Crew is stunned for (800 / 10) x 0.1 = 8s (reduced to 3s max duration)
Reactors shutdown for 3s (crew stun) + 3s (small reactor) + travel time (if any)
Factories shutdown for 3s (crew stun) + [4 / crew in factory]s + travel time (if any)

As it can be seen from the example, the lighter ship suffers more (which is to be expected), and it would be difficult for a much smaller ship to have an impact on a much larger ship, while keeping ramming as a tactical mechanic. This also makes storages much more useful for buffering the downtime while the reactors/factories restart production.

Of course the numbers/formula can be adjusted and tweaked for game balance, this just serves as an example of how ramming/shock mechanics could work.

Walt

dieaready Incorporating ramming damage would be problematic from a balance/meta perspective, but what if instead of damage, a shock mechanic is used instead?

I'm not convinced this is true. Can you elaborate?

Lafiel

For reference of some older discussion:
https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/7171-something-about-ramming
https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/10038-ramming-damage-impact-armor
https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/10041-a-proposal-on-ramming-mechanics

This is a good way to account for lowering realistic damage to be playable.
For simplicity the system would be using the existing impulse system which naturally would also pass on to weapon's hits. It would be very troublesome if the shock rules also apply here, though. So there should be either discrimination or allow hits to have a toggle to enable it for certain weapons. Also for those who have disabled shaking effects some kind visible effect should be there to indicate stunning events e.g. shock indicator above crew and parts.

dieaready

Biggest issue IMO with a penetrative ram is not the ram itself, but from the ability to put nuke storages just behind the initial armour layer, so now you have a (relatively) cheap armour piercing nuclear missile that explodes inside of your enemy's ship.

dieaready

Walt There are two options for ramming: elastic (bounce off) and inelastic (punch through) ramming.

With elastic ramming, both ships would take instantaneous damage and bounce off each other in opposite directions, and possibly simulate the ram damage by an 'explosion' on the point of contact based off the tonnage and velocity of the ships. However, you can then have long rod 'spaced armour' high speed rammers that would be able to abuse the impact damage to do multiple rams with barely any losses (spaced armour pieces in the front inflict the damage to the enemy ships at the cost of some armour and structure), bouncing off hard enough to avoid incoming fire and speeding off then turning back to repeat.

While this may sound bad enough, we also have tractor beams, which means we can also shoot armour pieces or even nuke storages or large reactors covered with a thin layer of armour into enemy ships, where the resulting impact would destroy the armour on both sides, and release the nuke/reactor explosion at point blank on the enemy ship. This is disproportionate damage for little cost, and not much counter.

If we use inelastic ramming, where the ships can potentially punch into each other (which can be done by using the velocity of collision x mass to generate a damage pool, then reducing the velocity of each ship for each part damaged/destroyed till the pool runs out), this situation is even worse as now you can potentially embed nuke storages or reactors inside an enemy ship before it explodes, allowing players to potentially make nuclear AP shells from tiny ramming ships, which is disproportionate damage for its cost.

It would basically be along the same lines of the explosion gun ships except that they would be easier to make and pilot, allowing nearly everyone to use them. This would result in any large ship in MP being torn to pieces from a smaller swarm of projectile ships, which I think is not good for the game.