I've made one ship for my Carnivore faction that tends to explode itself: The Carnivore Carnikaze.
I did a bad and blew myself up in such a way so that the explosion didn't damage the enemy
~Kamikaze Ship Shaming
And frankly, sometimes it doesn't explode as planned. And yes, I know that Kamikaze is on roadmap, but I instead ask how would it work? There are two methods I've thought up (And one is more balanced than the other.)
1: Contact Explosives
The less balanced method. It's just "Strap on these weak explosives on the front and watch it explode on contact!" and, honestly, that's not easy to counter. The other one is easier to counter, but it's still kind of hard to integrate. Anyway, there could possibly be multiple payload sizes, but they get more and more heavy, to the point where for the last one it makes the ship UBER SLOW. But if it hits, BOOM.
2: "Sticky Bomb" Ships
These ships have a detonation timer. After they attach onto the enemy ship, they're stuck on it, and begin to countdown to oblivion. The least powerful one should still have a pretty long time until explosion, like 10 seconds. This way, allied ships can pick it off before it explodes. For the future blink drive though, the blink drive could teleport into an empty spot on the ship, making it required to have preparations, and help build a new microgame of preventing Kamikaze ships exploding. But maybe for the blink drive they can have it so that it has a load up similar to the FTL drive, and then have it temporarily disable the ship's subsystems.
Which method do you prefer? I prefer the second, as it has so much potential. But, One seems more obvious and easy to implement. Well, I hope Walt likes the second idea, because I think it carries a lot of potential!
As An Extra, Here's a concept picture for method 2.
