why is it that some times i'll crash into a roid at full speed and it doesn't even scratch me and other times i'll bump one and blow up. I may be exagerating a little but the fact is htat id does seem a bit variant.

There appear to be weak spots in the ships. For example, I brushed by the edge of a station at ~40 m/s in my Vulture and was destroyed from 100%. Other times, I've rammed a station head on from 160m/s in a Centurion and gotten <20% damage done.

Yeah, either this is a latency issue that they haven't figured out how to solve or else they are using a really odd collision resolution algorithm. I've raised this with the devs before and never gotten a satisfactory answer, so at this point I'm just resigned to the occassional wierd death.

The strangest answer I ever got from a dev regarding the collision code was that damage was proprotional to the absolute value of the cosine of the angle of incidence with the object rather than the absolute value of the sine (as you might intuitively expect). For those of you haven't gotten to trigonometry yet, what this means is that you take less damage from flying face first into something than you do if you just glance off of it. If this is true it well utterly inexplicable and bizarre.

A less bizarre answer might be that because of latency sometimes your ship updates with the server after the server has already decided that based on your last known speed and heading, you would have buried yourself 10m deep in the object and blows you up accordingly, resulting in what was from your client side perspective a glancing blow turning into a 100% hull failure.

There are no weak spots on the ship. It's been confirmed that the collision and damage system is still screwy in need of a complete overhaul. The damage is completely random sometimes. Even tapping a roid with a Prometheus can result in an instant death. Thankfully this is rare. It's more of a common occurance with weaker ships.

Shoot the wing of a Vulture, then the cockpit, then tell me there's no weak spots.

Celebrim, where did you hear that? Cause, well, it's wrong.

Yes, the collision damage is a bit screwy. We haven't actually looked into it in a long time. The collision response system works fairly well now (although when objects are interpenetrating, it tries a little too hard to resolve the collision), but the actual damage calculated from it doesn't make sense. It should be proportional to the impulse applied to your ship, and it isn't. It's proportional to the cube of your relative velocity, and there's a bug in the code where if it detects multiple collisions it divides it by some factor (instead of averaging, as was intended) before taking the cube. So there you go; one collision hurts a lot more than several. *shrug*. It's clearly wrong, but probably not hard to fix. I'm not gonna mess with it for 3.2.3 but maybe afterwards.

Relative velocity refers to the relative velocity of the contact points.

If you have 0 speed and then rotate into an object, the relative velocity of the contact points is not 0.

Just to clarify.