Ship damage, disablement and destruction.

[MeZuE]

Just wondering how this, D, D &D, would work. It seems in the show that most ships are crippled long before they have a warp core breech or otherwise exploded. I think it would feel more real if it was rare for a ship to actually be lost to a warp core breach. It seems that ships tend to just die similar to a person leaving behind a hulk. In other words systems are damaged till it ceases to be able to operate rather than the hull reaches zero and boom.

I think it would add a lot to a battle for ships to hang a round for a bit. An example: There is a large battle, 20 something ships per side. Your ship is badly damaged and for all intense and purposes out of the fight. Your job now is to stay alive till you and your crew can be rescued. So you spend your time putting out fires stabilizing systems and if necessary evacuating your ships. After the battle a rescue survivors/salvage ships mission is activated and people get brownie points for bringing the boy and girls and their toys home. Over time the ships burns or otherwise deteriorates away to nothing.

Exploding ships should be reserved for more powerful weapons and rare critical hits. Or poor crews.

So what do you peoples think/how has it been explained that I have missed.

[KO_Gilligan]

we recently were discussion in another new thread about ship damage, and I started one about damage and explosions awhile ago. Plus there is one other thread where we went into debris and such quite awhile ago.

A lot of people have wanted damaged ships like the show, and we have speculated that there will not be alot of debris hanging around. But the best example is Cryptics STO trailer video - check it out. There is an instance where we see a ship get it's nacelle blown off - yeehaw

[Mooshique]

I assume that once the ships shields are depleted (On the subject of shields, could we have temporal shielding? Or is that kind of foolish as we probably don't even have temporal weapons?) the ship then has just 'hull power' which once depleted the ship - um - dies?

[Freejack]

After recently re-watching "Nemesis" on AMC where Picard has an amazing ship to ship battle with Shinzon, I likened it somewhat to a human body shutting down as it is exposed to hypothermia. As systems and extremities are lost, energy is rerouted to the core.

Shields are not the end-all be-all defense mechanism of a ship. Forward shields get hit. Further attacks may get through the reduced shield, but at a reduced effect. Weapon systems might take a hit even if you still have 20% shields.

A body of mass at high velocity and momentum might get dampened by your reduced shields but could carry enough energy to penetrate the viewscreen and 'space' the bridge, but the computer will have emergency reserves to seal the breach as the ship turns away from the attack.

The aft shields could go down and the nacelles could be taken out leaving the ship with with impulse power only.

The ship comes about and faces its opposer head-on seemingly crippled and defenseless, but it still has power for life support and damage control (perhaps the last line of defense). The warp core is still active, but without warp engines the ship is virtually 'dead in the water'.

"Full Impulse Ahead!" (aka Ramming Speed!) and Picard does the unexpected. Decks are cleared and ships collide. Emergency forcefields seal the breaches as the ship takes irreparable damage. Rent the movie again to see the outcome, but it is a perfect example of ship-to-ship, duel-to-the-death combat.

Knowing your vessel and it's capabilities is the supreme context of what being a captain is all about. Cryptic will give us these abilities and limits, but it will be up to us to learn just how far we can push those envelopes.
:cool:

[MeZuE]

Well I think my point was missed a bit.

OK so take a tank for example. You could beat the armor/side of it with a wrecking ball or shot it with a gun forever with out its hull reaching zero and it just exploding. For it to exploded fuel or other weapons cashes would have to be hit. But it could become disabled if its engine was hit and weapons were damaged. In “real life” solders ect don’t run around taking sometimes health/hull down to zero like in a video game. Most of the time they use a rocket and obliterate the tank. If they can’t they fire a rifle like round taking out the engine. Think of the Coast Guard that has to stop a boat that smuggling drugs.
Most of the time it seems that phaser, disruptors and photon torpedoes don’t outright blow a ships a part. (There are weapons such as the borg and Domion beam weapons that outright blow ships apart)Most of the time they(Kling Fed Rom ect) go after vital systems till the ships crippled. (Usually it will have multiple hull breaches and be burning) Only if they have to do they out right blow a ship a part by pounding it with lots of torpedoes.

So back to the questions. Will we be running around taking hulls down to zero to kill ships or will we be attacking ships systems and bringing ships down that way. I would like to see ships be considered dead/destroyed when it’s crew dies/abandon ship. When the atmosphere is vented to space and life support is off line the ship/player is dead.

In naval battles most ships didn’t exploded to little bits after another ship hit it with weapons fire. They sank cause their hull was breached and the crew couldn’t save it.

So yeah.. a bit nutz and to specific I think.

[Mantiss]

My guess from a developer standpoint would be NPC ships exploding and leaving behind "salvage" for loot. Except in cases where you needed to disable, board, tow away etc an NPC ship as part of a mission. Another point might be that the larger ships are less likely to explode and will become crippled and/or disabled based on targetable areas. (Also, adding the ability to spare or kill your enemies would be great for the good/evil paths)

For PvP I hope they give a bit of depth to combat in terms of tactics, disabling key systems, jamming, anti-torpedo systems etc. However there has to be something that makes a disabled ship go away after awhile. Otherwise in large battles the servers could become clogged with disabled ships all overn the place. Same thing goes for PvE where a bunch of "hulks" would only burden the servers.

Larger ships certainly shouldn't randomly explode and should be much harder to truely "kill". While things like shuttle craft should pop like popcorn when hit.

[djnattyd]

from what iv'e gathered so far, the battles will be like they were on TV i.e. taking out subsystems rather than a "one shot, one kill" approach.

Sure, if your in a shuttle and your facing off against a Negh'var then i guess it'll kill you in one but in an even battle i don't think we'll be seeing ship being blown to peices, instead it'll be bits missing here and there (Nacelles, impulse drive etc.) and ships that are just dead in the water but still intact. (imagine the breen energy weapon)

[Trekkie]

I definitely want ship destruction as realistic as possible, but the problem is that if a ship is destroyed that player will likely want to get back into combat as soon as possible and if their ship stayed on the battlefield for too long things might get a bit dull. Perhaps just those vessels controlled by non-player characters could remain so that players wouldn't have to worry about something like this.