Element damage inconsistencies

[BasserUK]

Hi all,

 

I've been playing DU since November and had mixed results with element damage.

 

I watched Markee's stream last week where his space only ship fell into atmosphere and plummeted to the ground at nearly 1000kmph. His vertical boosters slowed him down to around 500kmph before his ship crashed destroying outside elements but leaving his seat, container, fuel tank and core intact.

 

My friend was transporting some ore back to base travelling around 300kmph at less than 200m from the ground when something caught the ground. It destroyed almost every element on the ship including the core which was insulated in the centre of the ship. Elements all over the ship that had no contact with the ground were also destroyed.

 

I don't understand this. How is damage calculated? Is there actually anyway to insulate elements from damage?

[Fra119]

I don't think you can protect an element from impact damage. Main reason is because impact damage is only applied to elements, so voxels can't mitigate/absorb it. Second reason is that imho (but it's just a guess based on my observations) the game doesn't really care about which elements were caught in an impact, it start from there for sure but it keeps on going on until the damage has been fully applied. So if you suffer a damage higher than the overall hp of your ship (all element's hp combined) then your ship goes full red. 

Space engineers worked differently as far as I can remember, there was no way that the back of your ship suffered damage from a frontal collision.

 

About how damage is calculated: I don't know, but elements can withstand a certain degree of damage thanks to their hp, but as you add voxels and cargo (which only increase mass and doesn't give you more hp in case of an impact) then your max "safe" speed goes down if you want to be able to withstand an impact. So heavier ships (expecially bigger and loaded) are less likely to survive a crash even at lower speed.

[sHuRuLuNi]

23 minutes ago, Fra119 said:

impact damage is only applied to elements, so voxels can't mitigate/absorb it.

 

 

Which is terrifyingly stupid.

[BasserUK]

Thanks for your replies.

 

Yeah I was thinking the damage worked the same, an overall damage number from the crash the distributed across the ship.

 

I'd like to see that be improved so that it focuses on the area of impact. I understand in a high speed collision that more than the area of impact would receive damage but at slower speeds when parts of your ship haven't collided with anything, it's silly to apply damage to them.

 

I agree too that voxels should be able to provide some damage insulation.

[Gottchar]

Mass x velocity x contant = total damage

 

with a few extra things though:

-up to some minimum amount, the damage is ignored, which is why very light ships, personal shuttles, can drop to the ground at 150km/h and not take any damage.

Due to this, should you want to test this, do it with some "proper" ship and inflict large damage, trying to smack a shuttle with 200km/h again a mountain will give very varying results.

-angle of impact does kinda matter, as the collision nullifies your velocity perpedicular to the surface you crash into, meaning if you move fast, close to the ground, and touch it a little, on flat surface, you might get lucky and not take a lot of damage. Often enough though the server only registers the collision once you are "a meter deep" and therefore your ship just fully stop and you take full damage. So luck and server speed is involved.

-supposedly fuel tanks explode and deal further damage, I didnt test specifically for it and cannot say

-supposedly voxels help again collision and heat (speed in atmo) damage, this sems to be wrong.

 

Once the game decides how much damage your should take, lets call that number "D", it starts at the point of impact, or where the laggy server thinks it was, and applies up to D damage to the closest element. If there is damage left, it applies to the next closest etc, until it has, in total, dealt a total amount of D damage, or everything is fried. So at least in PvE, there is no point placing the expensive items in the back or anything like that, if at all, I would place large hitpoint elements to the front, because I rather repair one XL engine than 100 adjustors. In the end, just ignore the notion of putting any kind of elements to the front or back, to have it better in case of a crash. An XS container with some t1 scrap to restore your normal containers however would be nice to have somewhere at the outside, on opposing ends. Oh, and if you have big elements and get expensive scrap, still have some cheap scrap for windows, toilets, etc.

 

I did my tests when there was still durability loss for crashing, so I didnt do 100 crashes and make a spreadsheet. Also, this is all about PvE, I have no clue about PvP. I could also swear landing gear has some extra properties regarding collision damage, not sure though.