'Splosions: When things go boom

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 3:43 am

I apologize in advance if this idea has been suggested before, either recently or in Days of Yore.

Why don't explosions cause any damage? In TNG, VOY, and DS9, ship captains have conniption fits over the thought of practically any ship within the same sector suffering a warp core breach. The "oh ****, their warp core is about to breach, Ensign get us the hell out of here" scene is a staple of Star Trek. Yet in Fleet Ops, even when explosions are massive enough to shake the screen about, ships that visually appear to be colliding with the unlucky ex-vessel are apparently unscathed. What's with that?

My suggestion is to have explosions do some damage! Not enough damage to K.O. another unit, necessarily, but enough that you don't want to have your fragile light cruisers parked next to the enemy's Negh'Var when that thing goes the way of Bikini Atoll. Larger ships and stations with larger explosions would naturally do more damage when they went kablooey. For the sake of balance, I would suggest that stations, short-range units, and Newton-class repair ships take less damage from explosions than other ships, since the former has already been plagued in the past by the Jem'Hadar bugship ram-spam and the latter two are especially likely to be close to an enemy ship when it goes up.

Questions? Comments? Complaints?

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 3:54 am

I tell you what.  I made explosions cause damage based on size once...

it was cool and all, but it was the most anoying thing in the world, and could change/end battles, just because you actually blew up that last enemy cube.   not that great.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 3:57 am

I tell you what.  I made explosions cause damage based on size once...

it was cool and all, but it was the most anoying thing in the world, and could change/end battles, just because you actually blew up that last enemy cube.   not that great.

To compensate for the larger size of Borg ships, their explosions would probably have to be set to cause less damage proportionally.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 6:51 am

In a lot of DS9 Dominion War episodes, we see ships blowing up left and right that don't seem to affect the ships near them.  Specifically Sacrifice of Angels.  For example, the 2 mirandas that bought it right next to the Defiant didn't seem to affect the ship.  It's really up to the writers' mood that day as to whether or not a ship blowing up affects nearby vessels.  Or if they just want to add "suspense".  

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 7:46 am

I'd say that the warp core doesn't always suffer a catastrophic breach.  Usually, it loses power before it's containment structure breaches.  It's when the destruction is too fast, or just some shitty luck, that things go very, very, very wrong.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 7:54 am

Well, remember that antimatter is antimatter.  When it is exposed to matter of any kind, we have Boom as soon as those magnetic bottles lose containment.  There should always be a shock wave.  But we can't have our hero ship getting blown up by inconveniences like physics!   So while explosions should happen, we don't always see this in trek because they're too busy with creating plot contrivances like what happened in SoA.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 8:33 am

I personally think it would be interesting if ships were pushed away slightly from explosions, sort of like the Klingon shock wave weapon from stock A2. The larger the explosion, the further ships are pushed away from it. Just might add a bit of ambiance imo. 

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 8:46 am

I personally think it would be interesting if ships were pushed away slightly from explosions, sort of like the Klingon shock wave weapon from stock A2. The larger the explosion, the further ships are pushed away from it. Just might add a bit of ambiance imo. 

Now that's an interesting idea. Not sure how that would work out gameplay-wise, but it would be fun to try out.

Mal, just as well since the Miranda is a small ship and the Defiant has a short weapons range, so ideally, it wouldn't do much at all 

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 12:23 pm

maybe the explosiondamage could only happen whhen special things happen?

i.e. explosion only happens if a subsystem is destroyed.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 1:07 pm

I really like the idea of explosions if a subsystem is destroyed, even if it seems a little pointless. If a little explosion is the second effect of a destroyed subsystem, what's the point then?

And if you make it too complicated like

shield generator and sensors destroyed = ships movement speed down to 33 % (passive ability - emergency directive A)

for example, you would expect the devs (or modders) to write many many new odf's for damaged versions of the ships.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 2:16 pm

Mal, just as well since the Miranda is a small ship and the Defiant has a short weapons range, so ideally, it wouldn't do much at all 

Hmmm... what does ship ship size or weapon range have to do with antimatter?  Even if the miranda is a small ship, and has less antimater than say, a galaxy, it still has to have a considerable amount to go to warp speed.  So there's plenty there to cause a shock wave.  It only seems to be a danger if there's only one ship around when a vessel blows up, then we have to get the Enterprise out of there asap.  But if it's a huge battle scene, they figure we're too stupid to notice.  Just keep staring at the screen and look at the pretty fireballs going off in space.  Well I noticed, Rick Berman!

Anyway, I really like UM's idea of it pushing ships away.  Doing damage can cause far too many game balance disruptions, but a small repulsion effect would be really neat.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 5:43 pm

Repulsion would definitely be neat (or attraction ... Romulan black holes  ) . In big battles actual damage would quickly cripple the player with the weakest defensive capabilities and the one with the shortest range weaponry I think. Sounds like this idea is more eye candy rather than new features - probably something that will go on a low priority to do list but would still be fun to see

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 6:24 pm

effecting ships in other ways I agree with.

Any thing but doing damage. 

What if it disabled all special weapons as long as the explosion was there.  it would be devistating for cloaked ships

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 7:26 pm

Hmmm... what does ship ship size or weapon range have to do with antimatter?  Even if the miranda is a small ship, and has less antimater than say, a galaxy, it still has to have a considerable amount to go to warp speed.  So there's plenty there to cause a shock wave.  It only seems to be a danger if there's only one ship around when a vessel blows up, then we have to get the Enterprise out of there asap.  But if it's a huge battle scene, they figure we're too stupid to notice.  Just keep staring at the screen and look at the pretty fireballs going off in space.  Well I noticed, Rick Berman!

No, I agree it was a dumb plot hole. But I meant in terms of gameplay mechanics, ideally in Fleet Ops even if explosions caused damage, it would just scratch the shields of a short-ranged ship like Defiant.

Re: the subsystems idea: That could be really interesting. If the ship's engines and shields were both disabled at the time its hull integrity hit zero, simulating a warp core breach, perhaps it would cause (larger?) damage and possibly a weak repulsion wave (after all, we don't want our fleets flying all over the map!) - but otherwise the explosion would be smaller and shorter-lived and it would do either significantly less or no damage at all? That could be a hedge against people using exploding ships as a deliberate tactic.

posted on December 23rd, 2009, 7:30 pm

Repulsion would definitely be neat (or attraction ... Romulan black holes  ) . In big battles actual damage would quickly cripple the player with the weakest defensive capabilities and the one with the shortest range weaponry I think. Sounds like this idea is more eye candy rather than new features - probably something that will go on a low priority to do list but would still be fun to see

Hence the idea of shorter-ranged ships having a passive bonus against explosions. Ideally, explosions wouldn't deal damage on par with the latinum explosions or Dreadnought Missile weapons (in)famous from stock A2, but act more as a rather powered-down Field of Fire type effect. Just enough to incentivize keeping your destroyers away from capital ships (yours or the enemies') when they explode, without being enough to totally ruin your whole day by wasting your battle-hardened armada because of an ill-placed plasma torpedo.