Can anyone explain collision damage?

[Major Twitch]

How does it work? Have been messing about ram ships:
First hit and kill just damage to the ram plate from what I could tell.
Second impact against an enemy ship I took internal block destruction, and no outer block lost. I have no idea what was lost, because I couldn't edit the ship and remove the outer armor shell to see inside without first fixing the ship. The ship is completely encased in armor.
Next up I one hit killed a medium ship and lost my rear armor. The rear armor plate was about 10m to back of the ship and smallest of the external armor plates. But it was not part of any physically collisions, all contact was on the ram plate.

What in the world is the mechanics behind this.

[SmugFrog]

What were your settings for collision damage? Full?

[Major Twitch]

Yeah that save has Full collision.

[SmugFrog]

I'm curious about that too then, how it works. I went down to the lowest setting for collision damage because full felt very unforgiving. I was thinking initially maybe the force applied to the front, to your ram, worked its way through your ship and is applied to the internal structures - but that seems like a bit much to be going on behind the scenes (Space Engineers type deformation) - I'd bet it's more based on damage being applied to the ship overall with all of the blocks in line taking a base # of damage. I haven't experimented with it but I have been wondering how well a ram ship of the best solid armor blocks would hold out.

[Major Twitch]

If I had to guesss... it is the same issue that space engineers has, the physics engine cannot keep up, or doesn't have enough updates per second, once you get over 100m/s. Which causes parts of the enemy ship to phase through you armor and end up colliding with internals. I wanted to find out if there is method to the madness or just simply another physics engine failing.

[Tyrantosaurex]

I can't explain why seemingly the wrong parts are being destroyed, but I can give you a simple rundown of the damage system:
Currently you have both individual part health, and total system health (Hull integrity, if you will). Well taking damage can and will knock off individual parts, hard damage like collision effects the total health pool more, which can lead to instant death in some cases (Even without your ship blowing up).

[Major Twitch]

So "hard" enough hits causes damage to all blocks when it applies Hull integrity damage? What is "hard" hit? Precent of the health lost over 50% of block or Hull integrity?

[Tyrantosaurex]

Originally posted by Major Twitch:

So "hard" enough hits causes damage to all blocks when it applies Hull integrity damage? What is "hard" hit? Precent of the health lost over 50% of block or Hull integrity?

Any hit applies damage to the overall ship health, however colliding with something at high speeds will apply more damage to the entire ship than the blocks that hit first - either way I don't believe it should be damaging other blocks individually, but I could be missing something somewhere.

[Pepulata]

I destroyed a station with Railguns... So far so good. Only problem is a chunk 3km X 20meters started spinning insanely fast because I hit it and the knockback is kinda over the top. And that chunk slapped my ship right in the face and killed me. Respawned, flew back to where my ship was and it was fully intact. No damage to any block at all. Had to salvage it though, as i do not know about a "Repair" function for dead ships you owned :/

And sometimes I misjudge my speed and turning and ram an enemy ship with high speed and I do not really take any damage... Its sometimes weird...

[KillerAO]

It has a lot to do with mass vs mass, if your ship is higher mass then the target he will be taking more damage then you do,

[Uthael]

Google keeps throwing this back at me. Collision damage has since been reworked and I've been searching for info so I don't have to do testing myself.
... Sadly, I've found no info other than the patch notes of the mentioned rework (link below).
I've heard on a server that it spreads in a cone from the point of impact.
It does respect mass, speed, angles and damage reduction, so it's possible to bump a smaller ship and knock it away without damaging it.

https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/445220/old_view/1700561993855034589

[TheDeadlyShoe]

collision damage does indeed spread from the initial block. Armor reduces collision damage.

Hull damage, that is to say damage to your HP bar, gets taken when your blocks take damage; afaict its impossible for it to take damage in any other way except scripts.

[Avery Lillius]

An interesting question. One I've been playing with myself. Not sure how viable a ramming ship is, but here is my understanding of collision damage mechanics from my testing.

the damage to the main HP bar is straight forward enough so I will be talking about block damage only. Damage from the impact is transferred from the block involved in the collision to adjacent blocks. So having your ramming plate connected directly to ships internals is a bad idea. This damage can transfer over many blocks the more the damage the farther it seems to transfer so there is no way of preventing damage transfer by splitting up the pieces. The damage is not strictly linear so changing the way the blocks attached could not prevent the damage either. There is also a component of clipping to account for so the object you hit could clip through your armor and damage internals behind it. So a gap is needed between your internals and ramming plate. The size of the gap would need to be larger the faster your ship is.

So to make a ramming ship, or ship resistant to collision damage. The ramming plate or bow should not be attached directly to internals, and should have a sizeable gap between it and the internals. Instead connect the plate/bow only to the armor on the top and sides of the ship. the armor it attaches to should be large plates able to withstand the damage themselves. Ideally running the length of the ship. The side/top armor will need to be attached to internals at some point so in order to prevent the ram/bow from breaking off the ship it should be attached to as much as possible.

Such a ship is not immune to collision damage, but in my test proved to be highly resistant to collision damage. However I have not tested this concept in combat, and am still unsure if a ramming ship would be advisable.

[Uthael]

I've done PvP combat and have had the most success with a ramming ship. Mainly because Impenetrable Shields can be abused too much for weapons to be viable. Ofcourse, this means we do combat with fleets where each ship is worth 8-9 digit numbers in Avorion/Trinium.

From my experience, ramming a ship into another moving ship too fast (2.5k+ m/s) just makes the ships bounce off, spinning like crazy or clip through each other. So... Keep that in mind when designing.