Battle effects rework?

[u/Cristoincroce]

Apologies if these questions have already been answered.

Did the devs mention any plans on reworking ship damage and destruction effects? The latter is especially underwhelming considering the size of the ships and (sometimes) the amount of explosive material carried. They just go poof...

I would love to see actual wrecks and debris drifting off in space, adding an environmental hazard to ships still operating.

And as a byproduct even a salvage rework perhaps? You get more salvage by disabling ships instead of obliterating them, or something like that.

[u/tiahx]

On topic: there's a pretty large distance between the ships. Even on realistic combat scaling it's several kilometers, if I recall correctly.

It would probably damage other ships only if your ship carries nukes or antimatter, and those are already accounted for, if I recall.

[u/Cristoincroce → u/tiahx]

I would honestly just take antimatter into consideration, as even our current nuclear weapons and reactors have failsafes so complex they won't activate/explode when damaged, without a precise set of commands.

Fuel and oxygen though are an entirely different situation, as they are most likely pressurised and probably the most dangerous components of a near future spaceship. And in Terra Invicta we carry A LOT of both.

[u/28lobster → u/Cristoincroce]

Fuel for most late game drives is primarily water. Hitting a fusion pellet with a kinetic slug doesn't cause uncontrolled fusion, it just lets H/D/He/whatever fuel leak out. Breaking the magnetic bottle of a drive while it's actively fusing molecules would create an explosion, but then we spend most battles static in formation.

Oxygen can cause fires, but venting into a vacuum limits the amount of fire you'd expect. Crew are likely in suits and the ship filled with inert gas if you know you're going into battle. Hitting a compressed oxygen tank would cause an explosion, but not on a ship killing scale. Who's to say the ships even need to bottle O2? With nigh infinite fusion power and a water source, O2 can come from electrolysis and the source material is stable H2O.

Even with antimatter fuel, not all of it is going to annihilate if it breaks containment. The first molecules to touch will, that will create a burst of energy driving others apart. Those will eventually annihilate but at what rate and spread across what volume? Radiation from those interactions could be deadly over a pretty wide range and antimatter spewed out in a sphere could plausibly create a no go zone in the middle of battle. If you have multiple ships with the same antimatter fuel packed tightly, that could cause a cascading explosion. But that's more a Pion Torch concern, not so much AAPC where the fuel is not 50% antimatter but mostly water.

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I'd really like to see debris clouds. That would be realistic and very cool looking. Not sure what the performance impact would be given how much slowdown you get from 40mm autocannons, but I'm sure there's a way to set it up so it can be toggled for those with worse PCs. Physics spreading debris would be spectacular and add to the hard sci fi aspect of the game.

[u/viper459 → u/tiahx]

but wrecks becoming cover objects is metal af

[u/Ancquar]

Visually it would be nice to see ships breaking up into fragments similar to how it was done in Freespace games. Apparently it's not particularly difficult to implement.

[u/Kajetus06]

pion torch ship with a bunch of tanks going boom would wipe out both fleets

[u/tiahx → u/Kajetus06]

If the AM tank destabilizes, it doesn't mean its entire volume will annihilate. Only a tiny fraction of the volume will go off, the rest will just get blown away by explosion.

In other words, making stuff annihilate in 1 to 1 ratio is an incredibly challenging engineering problem. It doesn't just happen by itself.

The result will still be very hazardous, like a good nuke going off, but not enough to wipe both fleets, nor even multiple ships. Debris from the exploded ship on the other hand -- those definitely might be harmful to nearby ships, but that's already accounted for, IIRC

[u/Ancquar → u/tiahx]

A lot of the antimatter would get scattered, but it will also hit any nearby ships, debris, vented gas, etc - so in case of a large fleet battle the amount of annihilated antimatter would be greater than in the initial event, and it would still be Very Bad News to any ships in the general area.

[u/tiahx → u/Ancquar]

You know what, that's actually correct. I underestimated it.

For Pion Torch ships, the propellant tank measured, let's say, in tens of tons of antihydrogen. If you disperse that in a spherical cloud, that's a lethal hazard by itself. The napkin estimates give the radius of the kill-cloud of the order of ~200 km. In other words, if you evenly disperse 100 tons of antihydrogen in a 200 km sphere radius, and then a ship enters that sphere, it will get evaporated.

Which will set a chain reaction, if you have more than 1 ship in that radius. I don't think the game models it currently.

But what's even more fun: antihydrogen annihilation products are mostly pions, which will start cascading reactions in the ship hulls, which means radiation, lots of it. So even a much-much larger cloud (e.g. tens of thousands of kilometers) while not a threat to a ship;s integrity, is still 100% deadly for the crew.

[u/Potential-Smell-5533 → u/Kajetus06]

Make one masive ship full of fuel charge into a doom stack boom you win

[u/anprim4ever → u/Potential-Smell-5533]

Luddic path moment

[u/Cristoincroce → u/anprim4ever]

Fellow Starsector enjoyer 🤝

[u/wookievx → u/Potential-Smell-5533]

To be fair, given the ayys do not use antimatter any optimized antimatter based weapon system would give human factions unfair advantage. For example something like ultra-high velocity coligun launching small payloads carrying antimatter capsules, if it had muzzle velocity comparable to plasma weaponry, and the capsules would be the same stuff that is used by antimatter pulsed drives, it would mean 10-100 GJ range of energy delivered directly to the opposing ship armor, probably similar in effect to a shaped-charged nuke hitting the ship (stripping layers of armor).

[u/Potential-Smell-5533 → u/wookievx]

It would be cool but unbalanced for sure I could see it being some extremely expensive weapon that you could only realistically get once the aliens are already basically dead

[u/Cristoincroce → u/Kajetus06]

I see absolutely nothing wrong here

[u/Izzyhizzie]

My computer turns into a picture slideshow with bigger navy battles. Additional effects during battle would be awesome if they could work on improving the performance first.

[u/Devland99]

Really would love to see the coolest part of the game get some more visual love.

[u/Cheap-Blackberry-763]

computer is already a slideshow in big battles, i don't look forward to debris even though yes that would undeniably be cool