Making crashes more interesting

[Warlander]

The whole premise of this suggestion is that matter is never destroyed it just gets converted into something else.

 

For arguements sake lets say your ship is either in a dog fight, burning up in the atmosphere, clipping and object, crashed, or even fully destroyed.

 

So when your ship is taking partial, continual, or total damage to various parts or the whole ship hp is being taken into account before total destruction occurs. This hp when damage is taken should convert that damage into a physical form of scrap that will fall off your ship or be flung into the air depending on how much damage was suffered but should only generate scrap equal to the total hp of the parts taking damage. The physical form of scrap should come in a few forms such as shards, chunks, sheets, parts, or items that react to the physics engine.

 

These pieces that fly off should be able to be collected by the basic gathering tool. Their stack value for how much scrap should be set by the devs but it could be both scrap or whatever components the auto repair device takes as well to fix your ship to 100% if you take the time to track down all the parts that fell off your ship.

 

In the case of pvp in space shooting a ship would see parts flying off the ship which could float around and be dragged into gravity of moons or planets and burn up in the atmosphere or be allowed to rain down to the planet for players to scavenge or salvage. Likewise if you are burning up in the atmosphere you will be shedding scrap over potentially 10s of kilometers that people could salvage at a later date. Likewise it would be interesting if there were some kind of magnet you could use to collect the various forms of scrap with that are magnetic in nature.

 

But in the case of a crash the force of the impact should fling the scrap around you to create a debris field. You could potentially find everything needed to fix the ship if you take the time to hunt it all down in the area and suppliment what you lost with additional scrap. This would allow players to have the choice to either track down the debris, make scrap from the surrounding environment, or head back to the crash site with additional scrap.

 

Or if you want to be extreme and the crash is complete at terminal velocity you could have it so that when you crash there is a low random chance that actual items could be both destroyed and also flung into the debris field such as engines, switches, or whatever elements are currently on your ship that you would then have to track down, repair, pick up, then reset onto the ship. Adding a bit of realism but the potential for those items to be lost and require you to replace them if you cannot find those items.