As you probably know, the wings of the Vulture are very vulnerable. Brushing one up against something, or shooting it just right will destroy the Vulture instantly from any health level. Is this a bug or a feature?

What's a veature? ;)

I think that it's a price to pay for the Vulture's extremely tiny head-on profile.

In theory, every point on a ship is as weak as every other point. A projectile weapon striking the wing will hurt as much as if it has hit the main body.

Now, I haven't tested this, but what's probably happening is this: if the wing just barely clips a solid object (like an asteroid), it creates a lot of torque on the ship object, which causes it to spin, which causes a whole bunch of other collisions, which will kill you very quickly.

It's just one more variable to take into consideration when considering whether or not you want to use the ship (as is its small head-on profile.)

Nope, you don't spin. You just brush against it, the screen flashes red for the normal time and you explode. It happens with weapons too, but you need to hit it at just the right angle.

Well from experience I can definitely say that the Vulture bounces around and jiggles a lot everytime you collide with one. At least in my Marauder. That may or may not have anything to do with the instakill.

Well, not just the wing, If you hit any part of the vulture against anything that isn't a ship, it instantly explodes.

Vlad> No you don't spin, you just die. Like magic. It's not a matter of seeing your crosshair going spinning out of control, which I think is what would happen, you just lightly tap it and die. I think the minimum is like 20m/s of hitting anything and not instant dying. It's like AstroLander! Only all the other ships are tanks.

well, I can skid the bottom of the vulture at a station and only lose 1%. And I haven't actually "collided" in a vulture yet, so I don't know about anything else.

My suspicion is that this is do to the bug(s) in the collision code, not with anything particular to the Vulture. It probably is simply most evident in the Vulture because the Vulture of all the ships is most different in shape from the rest of the ships. I have noted in all ships a tendency to take a low ammount of damage from a head on collision, but to die quickly when brushing the side of your ship against something. The same effect can be demonstrated in a bus (the only ship I've deliberately tried to issue with a collision). Take a bus and turbo head first into an asteroid. You will bounce hard and take 30%-70% damage, but you _won't_ issue. Take the same bus and clip the corner of an asteroid with the side of your ship. "Boom".

I don't know what the collision algorithm looks like, but I can tell from how the 'black box' acts that its a mess. Superficially, collision damage seems to be nearly the inverse of what you would expect and at times the results seem to have been rolled from a d100 random number generator. Maybe part of the algorithm measures the distance you are from the polygon edge in a misguided attempt to determine depth of penetration, and because the vultures wings are so narrow they are particularly likely to be 'edge to edge' contact rather than 'face to face'. But I don't really know. I just know that making the collision algorith more intuitive is and has been in my top 3 improvements to make in the game engine for as long as I've been playing the game.

I still miss the days where I could boost into the side of a roid and in s7 and fling myself towards a sector hole via bouncing. Good fun.

From what I understand, all damage is calculated based on the proximity of the damaged area to the absolute center of the craft. So a bus would look like this (+ means more damage, - means less and . is just to space it out):

.------
.------
.-++-
.++++
.-++-
.------
.------

And a vulture like this:

.......--
.......--
.......++
.......++
----++++----
----++++----
....---++---

So explain how that works out? I agree with Celebrim, someone must have changed a - to a + somewhere. :)

The Vulture currently looks like this:


.......--
.......--
.......--
.......--
++--+--+--++
++--+--+--++
....++----++

Not right.

Collision damage is not based on distance to the center of mass.
Only explosion damage is.
Collision damage is based on forces applied to your ship at the point of contact.
The problem is that there's also angular velocity you have to take into account. The Vulture has an interesting shape where you hit the outside corner of a wing and the ship spins around. Then if the ship spins far enough, the other wing may collide with the asteroid (for example) and cause even more damage. Not just because of the second hit, but also because of the increased velocity of the point-of-contact.

That's not it, rogue, but what it does do doesn't make any sense either. When multiple contacts are detected, it uses the force applied to an arbitrary contact point and divides by the number of contacts found, so essentially the more collision points you have the less collision damage you take. It's clearly broken.

The damage applied should be (but isn't) proportional to the cumulative impulse applied to the ship after resolving the collision. The shock is what causes the damage, not the force. (I think we'll ignore stress/shear forces and frictional wear...)

I figured this out a while ago, and I have an experimental fix for this that I think I'll commit, just to make things exciting in the next version. Actual collision damage may need to be tweaked, but at least it should be more consistent.

Oh sweet. Does this mean what I think it does? Tearing off your Vulture's wings? :D

you could be your own rocket!