Ramming Qualities

How big and fast would a ship have to be in order to be able to effectively ram another ship and slice it in half? My idea is to place the front with a few layers of the hardest blocks in the game, then ramming into a ship and breaking off parts of the ship.

Well, firstly I'm not too sure whether Fr0stbyte is going to
add crashing mechanics like that, but if he did the following things would
need to happen:

Ship damage would be arranged in blocks, which currently, it's not. It's
arranged in hitpoints. However, I think having blocks breaking and the
hitpoints together is a better idea. That way, ramming will work, and if (for
whatever reason) you manage to split the ship in half, it will do a lot more
damage than if you destroyed the same number of blocks on the surface of the ship.

Now, if we do have damaged arranged like that, it isn't the speed of the ship,
but its momentum that's causing the damage. Due to the void of space, ships
will retain their momentum nearly indefinitely. Now, larger ships going at the
same speed as smaller ships have more momentum, but in turn, impacting a ship
would cause more friction (and hence drag) slowing larger ships down much
faster than smaller ships.

There is also the difficultly of shields. Now, while you could ram a ship
without shields, the result would be ugly. If the enemy has shields up (which
they should if they see an enemy ship nearby), and you don't when you ram, your
ramming head would either bend backward, be pushed back through your ship, or
(depending on how powerful the enemy's shields are) go through the shields (but
this will slow down the your ship, again, proportionally to the enemy's shields).

If you both have shields up, it will be quite a different story. You would
literary bounce off each other, like rubber balls. Of course, if you are
ramming at a higher speed, there is the chance that your shields will be
destroyed, or that you go through their shields, it all depends on the circumstances.

Now, if you have your shields up and they don't, you will impact like a cannon
ball. You will probably smash a large crater in the side of the ship, or go
through it, or just hit the side and bounce off, it depends on what types of
ships are in play.
If you both have no shields, then you are going to do damage like you were
probably expecting. Blocks will go flying, and you might get your ship stuck in
theirs (Like they did in Star Trek Nemesis), or you might go through the ship completely,
or again you might glance off the side of their hull.

Now, I will provide an example, probably the best way to do it, too.
You start off in a cloaked frigate, perhaps one like mine, shaped like an
arrow-head. You sneak up behind the engines of a larger enemy ship. You wait for
the right moment (whenever you feel like), then de-cloak and activate the shields.
You head straight for the enemy's engines, accelerating as fast as you can.
Hopefully, no one will notice your approach, and raise the shields on the enemy
ship. When you hit the engines, they will explode. If you manage to go through
the engine layer and are ploughing through the ship, the explosion will push
you forward. You turn upwards, and smash through the top of the ship. The
consequences are: one large ship destroyed or nearly destroyed, one frigate
that has about a 1% chance of making through the ship in one piece, and a lot
of resources wasted on both the frigate (cloaking devices are very difficult to
make) and the larger ship. For added boom, why not pack your frigate full of
explosives, so when it does exploded somewhere in the centre of the enemy ship,
it goes BOOM!

There, answered your questions? If you want to know the best way to ram a ship
(using my version of Futurecraft physics) and survive, just ask.

I solved this problem quite easily. RAMMING THROUGH SHIP=WASTE OF BLOCKS FOR RAM. It would be much simpler to ram a tiny bit into a ship and then explode a large amount of TNT. It would create too big of a hole to be managed by blast doors, airlocks, etc. It would drain nearly all the air out of a ship and then you have a comically blue-headed, airless, exploding enemy crew to laugh at.






P.S. Make sure that the TNT's power level is OVER NINE THOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That reminds me, is there any sort of planned 'top speed'? As in a limit that you can't acellerate a ship past? If not, then ramming is a real possiblity.

Crashing is possible to calculate, but once it does, everything will get screwed up and useless (from a technical standpoint), so I'm not intending on weaponizing it. Even so, when a ship crashes into something it may still do a considerable amount of damage. You just won't be getting your ship back.

In the end, it would probably be easier to just make a small ship packed full of TNT, park next to the enemy craft, and detonate. (assuming you have a mothership nearby to spawn at.)

JoshzPruitt wrote:

In the end, it would probably be easier to just make a small ship packed full of TNT, park next to the enemy craft, and detonate. (assuming you have a mothership nearby to spawn at.)

Or, instead of making tnt, you put a buncha engines on a craft filled with something heavy, and then fly as fast as you can at the enemy ship.

Buggy1997123 wrote:

JoshzPruitt wrote:

In the end, it would probably be easier to just make a small ship packed full of TNT, park next to the enemy craft, and detonate. (assuming you have a mothership nearby to spawn at.)

Or, instead of making tnt, you put a buncha engines on a craft filled with something heavy, and then fly as fast as you can at the enemy ship.

How easy are engines to make though?

JoshzPruitt wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

JoshzPruitt wrote:

In the end, it would probably be easier to just make a small ship packed full of TNT, park next to the enemy craft, and detonate. (assuming you have a mothership nearby to spawn at.)

Or, instead of making tnt, you put a buncha engines on a craft filled with something heavy, and then fly as fast as you can at the enemy ship.

How easy are engines to make though?

No idea.

What about ramming with a specified part of the ship, say the wings(Assuming it has them), would the damage be carried over to the rest of the ship, or would the wings just fall off?

I don't know yet. Pain of coding it aside, physics simulations are hard and I don't want to bog down the cpu with lots of on-the-spot calculations. If I did it, then when a ship section's hp gets down to zero, blocks will be destroyed in a pattern determined by the nature of the hit. Armor piercing slugs will make a clean hole. Explosives will make a wide-tattered hole. Collisions will probably create a large tear, potentially making the damaged part snap off and float away. Don't hold me to that, though. It's low priority.