Warheads and Impact Damage

[mar3usmc]

Something is very wrong with impact damage in general, and warheads not exploding, when armed, when destroyed by an impact or your ship collapsing on itself from an impact.

I have a set of cruise missiles I made a while ago and some new bombs recently. The missiles, kinetic and explosive, use to devastate any armor, light or heavy. They are now doing ZERO damage to either armor types upon impact, and the explosive version are not exploding upon impact. Get those close, and just setting them off manually does the explosive damage, but the warheads, when armed, will not explode from the impact.

Is this a known issue? Did Keen make some stupid change?

[Malacanth]

Just checking, did you know they made it so that you have to arm the warhead before it will detonate? This is via countdown or destruction.

If not, it is a checkbox on the warhead, it can be armed ahead of time, pasted or welded in as armed from a projection, or can be toggled to arm via timer block, as well as some scripts can arm them.

[mar3usmc]

Wow, I just did some impact/explosion test vs a flying plate of metal.... VERY strange results.


Just a warhead, armed, with a light armor block under it. It is "penetrating" the armor plate
but .... not in the sense you would think. It is NOT damaging the plate..... but magically passing through it.

A second plate below that, 5 block spacing, did manage to set off the warhead with one armor block below.

Gonna test a double plate now, together I mean.

Results: Passes through the double plate, passed through the second plate plate 5 blocks lower, and then blows up on the Thruster under that.

I don't care what anyone says, impact physics are all messed up right now.
I think Keen did something unintentional in the last update.
This can't just be due to just the HP increase. Impacts, even on single player, are NOT being registered and handled properly.

[mar3usmc]

As said in the OP, the warheads are armed.

[Ambitious Dreamsickle]

you could possibly set up a sensor with a detonation trigger so the explosives detonate within their perspective blast radius. this may help yield a better result as your warhead could be getting destroyed too quickly.

[mar3usmc]

Yes, I know how to do this, but it is not as good as it was before. Impact + detonation is far better penetration and damage than just detonation at the surface.

[NYVS]

Add small hydrogen tank 3 small blocks (60cm) behind warhead of missile. Look for double flash...

[DiabloDBS]

@mar3usmc
Yeah i think they toned down both a lot. Especially small ship warheads against large ship armor as well as small ship collision against large ship armour. Both, at least for me, doesn't do a lot these days.

A while back (like a few months) when i tested my old (like a few years) small ship torpedo designs and they really sucked even when not compared to when i designed them. At first i though my scripts were messed up and it took me like 5h of testing to figure out that my scripts are perfectly fine.

Even when i place one of my small ship HE torps dead on a large ship light armour plane it will only do as much as a dent. And my AP torps, which have blast door blocks as collision points and having 6 art mass blocks, just get wrecked only leaving a small dent even if at 500+m/s. The warheads won't even detonate as the PGB is probably destroyed before it can trigger the warheads.

I also noticed that acceleration cannons won't work well anymore. If not observed projectiles just seem to vanish. When i fire a projectile remotely while observing the target site nothing happens.
When i sit in orbit observing and check via remote nothing happens at the site, while i see the projectiles fly off.
When i weld a chair on top of one of the projectiles and sit in it i hit the target spot on... so i guess you gotta be Schrödinger or at least his cat to make it work..

I guess all of this is part of reducing strain on the server system. Removal of ultra fast objects, reduction in damage especially small vs. large so that small ships ramming large sturctures just don't put up any strain etc.

PS: If you want to tell me to turn on experimental.. nope that was before that patch and after the patch i did exactly that and it still seemed to be the same issue.

[mar3usmc]

^^^ pretty much diablo I am in the same boat. A few year old design that I was retesting and updating does pretty much nothing against large block targets; light or heavy armor.

The bouncing, on a dead on perpendicular impact, really annoys me.

I could see perhaps the kinetic versions not doing so much against the large block targets, although at 100m/s that is a great deal of kinetic energy. However, the explosive versions SHOULD work much like they did in the past, but no longer. It is just sad. They are pretty useless now as I will not be targeting small grids with them. *sigh*

[DiabloDBS]

Yeah .. well not much we can do about... i tried some modded warheads which have adjustable yields and they do a bit better but still.. without an AP head you'd need two hits at the same spot.. which even with well done algorithms isn't too practical once the target moves even at a small angular momentum.

IMHO a Torpedo at several hundred meters per second concentrating the complete impact force should penetrate at least one large light armor block especially since i added art masses for exactly that reason.. so that the impact force will be even higher and a penetration more likely. I even had cases were it penetrated heavy armour and still triggered the HE inside the ship (set to 6m after impact)

Well what can you do... i am not sure if i like the changes of the last updates too much.. if we give up on a lot of mechanics, some of which aren't even there in exp. mode, then i doubt i can have fun playing SE in MP anyways..

And since i never had too much problems running my MP servers (for 8~10 players) in the past (yes if left uncleaned we also had micro lags and hefty simspeed drops) having several large ships and several bases with playable ~40 fps (on my right) and rather constant .8 simspeed (dedicated server not one of those virtual servers) .. i am really not sure if the new constrains are worth it for me as i don't have to play with 16,32 or 64 players especially if i my torpedo spam has similar effect as cheap 5.54x39 HP rounds have on anything harder than *soft wood* ....

Well if i find the time i'll test if there is any kind of block that at least increases the kinetic impact damage... .. maybe a rotor or piston build will do so..
Maybe i should also test an ore warhead again as my old ore shotgun did similar damage to the light armour as the torpedo... would at least be cheaper.. even if i'd to change the design to accommodate a connector .. especially on the maintenance bay remounting the torps for the smaller ships...