Maybe its an idea to make some components of a ship vulnerable to attack, like the engine. if you could shoot it several times it could brake down, and that also counts for communication, radar, weapons. and if you could target specific components you could disable a ship

This has been discussed many, many times before, and ultimately, the answer we've all arrived at is that ship disabling is bad.

I wouldn't be opposed to some performance loss, however.

hitting the ship itself isnt always the easiest thing, shooting a specific part of a ship would be all luck. this would be more logical on capital ships though.

i vote for this for any large ships that are larger than the moth

and stations as well

Yes, as vIsitor pointed out, absolutely all of the discussion on the vaguely related subject of disabling has been nothing but criticism. It's kind of a mystery why someone would post a thread on the suggestions forum merely to shoot the idea down, but just check out some of these quotes!

I would have to think about it more to give a more in-depth answer, but in short they (non-lethal weapons) sound great.
YES NON LEATHAL WEAPONS ROCK
Another idea is a probe that disables radar for a short period of time. This could effect the entire sector or certain range.
I'm sure this has also been discussed before at length, but on a similar note systems damage would be a very interesting concept to implement. As your ship is brought down in armor points, there is a greater and greater chance that your ship's systems will be damaged.

As we can see, this has supposedly been discussed almost as often as people have started their posts with the line "been discussed at length", and everyone, all of the time, thinks it's "bad".

Also bean, perhaps the reason you've been having trouble shooting specific parts of a ship is because you keep targeting the center. If you targeted the wings, I'm sure your shots would hit the wings more often, but of course then you stand a greater chance of missing altogether. (Strategy? Interesting gameplay? PICKLE SURPRISE!? Hmm....) Of course, this obviously isn't implemented yet because there's no reason to target specific components yet. God your such a n00b sometimes.

The game already registers where you get hit, and marks the appropriate section on your ship's little wireframe, even for the smaller ships like the Centurion. Yes, being small is advantageous in this count, because it makes you harder to hit. No, it's not impossible... I hit Vultures almost exclusively on the wings, and Proms in that fat badonkadonk of their's. Consequently, when I fly my IBG, I almost always end up with my front section all red, and everything else completely undamaged. The ability to target different sections alone would be interesting.

Some ship designs naturally would lend themselves to protecting their more vital systems. The Valkerye's got those two wing-like thingies to protecting the body, while the Prometheus doesn't have wings. Thus it would make the way you fly your ship a wee more important. An experienced Vult pilot can take advantage of the ship's slimness to present a smaller profile to his opponent. With component damage implemented, a pilot flying any ship would want to take advantage of it's shape, to present the least vital systems. This'd be a skill based, and judgement based kind of defensive flying, even with the small ships.

How wouldn't this be a good idea?

The problem with non-lethal weapons would be: wtf would happen if someone used them in a duel?!

I agree with bean in that this should be done for capital ships.

Mynt. You are right about the tactical aspects of component damage.

Disabling, however, is mostlikely a Bad Idea, though.

What happens to the person flying the disabled ship? Do they have to wait? Will they be transferred back to their home station?

In the latter case, there is no difference from 'death', not counting the explosion. If your aim is the ship's cargo, disabling is effectively useless. Since we are not able to transport ships (yet), and there is no clear-cut reply from the developers to that (please teach me otherwise, I'd love to be able to transport ships), disabling them to get special ships like the Superlight is out, as well.

If they have to wait, well... think about it. Would you like to have to wait perhaps hours until someone actually comes by? I see the player-driven content here (pirates disabling a ship, hiding nearby to lure in unsuspecting traders), but the frustration for the disabled pilot would be quite heavy. And if you keep on letting players self-destruct, regardless of their being disabled, you effectively equate disabling with death.

There's also the problem with its implementation. In EV Nova, there are weapons with the attribute 'disabling', i.e. they will not, not ever, destroy a ship. That would be a possibility, there are numerous ways to balance this, if necessary.

Another thing is rescuing. How will rescues be possible? Will it require a repair module? Can capital ships pick up stranded fighters and send them out to battle again?

Almost all of the above in my post has been mentioned on these boards already. The general consensus (driven by logical argumentation) was that disabling would be incredibly difficult to implement, due to its ramifications and potential for frustration.

Personally, I'd love to see disabling put in-game, but the posts on the topic (granted, those I remember) convinced me of its near-infeasibility.

Performance loss would be another thing entirely. If parts of the ship that are 'red' (a damage threshold below which it could not be damaged would be necessary) would still retain some level of usability (perhaps 10% of its original ability), it would work almost like disabling. It would still be plenty frustrating for the pilot in question, but not eternally condemning or basically pointless.

what would be a reason for component damage? it makes the game a little harder damaging components in a battle and disabeling systems where you rely on. it could be interesting for the more skilled players, players that know how the game works and have already played many hours in this space dont have any difficulties any more or maybe less.

but it also could be used in missions, big transport ships carrying tons of material could be disabled and robbed by the opposite nation, thus it would create more depth in the game.
this doesn't have to be a bad idea, its just a rough gem that needs to be polished, it could bring more excitement (not that it is boring ;) ) and it could create an opportunity to test a pilots skills.

and there is one component that needs to be adjusted, the engines. i agree if you cant fly anymore your as good as dead, so what if you could damage the engines but that only effects your speed

If you're flying around in space, and your engines blow, you're as good as dead anyways. What's more, you deserve to be dead for turning your back on a hostile. How's that for discouraging runners?

I don't think utterly disabling a ship's mobility is a good idea, non mobility ship systems sure, but not the engines. Getting stranded somewhere with no engines would just be... annoying. Engine damage should peak at say removing the ability to turbo and top speed getting cut to 50m/s if the ship takes more engine damage than that then it should just explode.

Just a quick response here, and people may want more detail, but.. just have time to say this real quick:

We really need to improve on the mechanics of how "piracy" works, and that is planned. For instance, we want NPC pirates to be interesting in some way, and not just irritating the way they were before. (There are some obvious ways, like dynamic / named pirate clans that organically form and assault people, and can also have their hideouts assaulted and so on.. but all of this depends on the basic "piracy" idea being a bit more fleshed out than the current "drop your stuff or I chase you around").

I forsee the use of a "disabling" weapon in much the same way that I vaguely remember it from the old LucasArts games and early Wing Commander series. Namely, certain weapons could disable engines on other ships, and were only useful for disabling. In our case, the "disabled" period would only be a few minutes, during which the pilot would need to wait before regaining power. This would make a more meaningful point at which the threat of being destroyed vs dropping cargo would be clearer. It could also play into other cargo-based gameplay, like a redux of CtC type activities and the like. Again, not totally sure on how all the gameplay mechanics will work out, but I'm not fundamentally opposed to the idea, and am looking into it as a small part of how to improve our general "piracy" mechanisms.

Disabling components of capships should definitely come, in time.

Capturing actual enemy fighters will probably be awhile yet. It IS possible to transport ships in shipping containers, but only for capships (the containers are intended to be large). We don't actually have this happening yet (in convoys), but it can in theory, and probably will eventually. So.. I would expect that ship-capturing gameplay would probably require an organized pirate clan with a capship and a big cargo hold (disabling the ship and some kind of tractor beam type thing). Anyway, not sure on all that, but it'll be awhile yet.

Capturing enemy capships will probably appear more quickly, since the mechanics on that are less complex.. capships that have docking bays, at least. I already have a bunch of notes for how to potentially do that.

So, anyway, I covered a lot of mildly off-topic related stuff, but yes, component damage is not fundamentally bad in my opinion. For the moment, expect it to arrive on capships and some temporary-engine-disabling option for fighters.

Ooh! Ooh! I have an idea, incarnate! Remember how you guys had originally intended for the Marauder to hold big crates out in front of it? Perhaps you could take a second go at it, and use said crate to transport ships (one at a time)?

Of course, thats just me rambling...

The way it is now, ships in cargo crates don't have engines, and there's no way to equip an engine to a ship :P

"If they have to wait, well... think about it. Would you like to have to wait perhaps hours until someone actually comes by?

How would having your engine blow up *not* be fatal, to you if not your ship? If all else fails, /explode.

It's possible for missions to equip engines to ships, so we could just automatically add an engine for a ship when uncrated or some such. But, that's kind of a hack, we're still sorting all of this out.

I don't think having your engine be disabled for say.. 2-5 minutes would really be that big of a deal. It's long enough for piracy to really be effective, and short enough that the disabled person doesn't have to float around forever.

visitor: chances are, fighter-scale crates will always have to be transported by something Capital or larger (Trident, etc). But, we'll see. Making the marauder have dynamically linked cargo crates behind it is not very high on my priority list (compared to say, large scale combat stuff, faction redux, interface repolishing, etc).

Maybe it disables your powercell more than your engine...

Oo, good call. You retain full maneuverability, but your weapons and boost are worth next to nothing. That could work, since you could still limp back to a station, if we allow crippled players to make in-system jumps.

Hmm, knocking down the powercell's effective grid could work. A "disabled" ship would have its functioning grid knocked down to say 1, meaning that weapons, and turbo are taken offline. In sector jumps would only require your ship to have 1 functioning grid instead of say a full 20 needed for wormhole jumps.