Quite simply, running into things barely does any damage. You can run into an astroid at 200m/s and not even lose 5% of your hull.

Discuss.

Head on collisions that is.
If you just barely scratch something at 200m/s you have not even 5% left sometimes

What are you running into? Cause I get beat up by then cappies all the time.

/me wanders off in search of the pillow roids...

I would love to see true ramming implemented in VO. The nose of your ship would need to be a bit hardened against damage, while the rest left vulnerable...

First, the wingbug needs to be fixed. Then, and only then, can collision damage be tweaked.

ZZ brings up a good point. If ramming a roid at full speed does so little damage, flares and missles should do comparably little damage with anything but a direct hit.

but flares and missiles could be filled with magical anti-spaceship nanites.

what, exactly, is this wingbug everyone talks about?

IIRC, objects get caught in each other very easily, causing damage many times in a short period of time. It's probably why head-on collision damage is so low; you're hitting the object multiple times (although it doesn't seem like it), so they have to lower the per-hit damage to make your ship not blow up instantly when you tap the side of an asteroid with a vulture wing.

The way a1k0n explained it, it was that your wing (or another part of your craft) intersects with an object, and is bounced back. However, your ship has an 'attitude correction' which makes it turn in the direction opposing the one you just were pushed in; your ship collides again. This happens over and over in a very short time, and this, if I remember correctly, causes the massive damage.

The problem is that VO does not have 'good' collision algorithms, I think, but perhaps I understood wrong.

Most games have a simpler collision model (everything collides as a box or a cylinder or an ellipsoid, or a hinged combination of these). We are insane, and do collision detection & resolution on arbitrary convex meshes. The collision *detection* code works very well. The *response* doesn't always work very well. And the collision response forces -> "damage" calculation is just batty.

This isn't easy to explain, and what follows isn't a very good explanation. If we fully understood what, exactly, was the problem, we'd fix it.

If you hit something head on, you bounce off it easily... it's like throwing a superball straight at a wall. If you scrape your wing along something, it causes torsional forces on your ship, trying to tear the wing off. This is where things get screwy, since we consider our meshes totally rigid, so it turns you (around your center of gravity) to face the asteroid you bumped. In the superball analogy, the thing starts spinning and the next several bounces are all in random directions. Each of these randomly-directed secondary bounces are what cause lots of extra damage for us.

Ray added code not long ago to cap the spin velocity as a result of a collision, which should have helped the wingbug immensely.

Why not kludge a fix where the damage from the first impact prevents further collision damage for a short time? (E.G. .1 seconds). That way scraping wouldn't be able to cause repeated damage for essentially the same contact.

Of course I don't have a clue what I am talking about.

Well, I only have personal experience to fall back on, but it hurts alot more when I slide and scrape my elbows/knees along a concrete surface, as opposed to just running head on and bouncing off of it. Makes sense that scraping would do repetitive damage for a single contact.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=scrape - (v) scrape, grate (scratch repeatedly) "The cat scraped at the armchair"

Of course if you hit a wall head-on in sufficient speed, it'll kill you, whereas if you scrape your elbow along it in same speed, you'll just get bit more pain...

Considering how amazing 45th century tech is or should be, I'm surprised any collision takes much damage. Seriously, a biocom mine does 10500 damage, right? And that's as much as the avalon did, right? So were talking some of these ships can survive a nuclear bomb from the mid-5th millenium fairly easily. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but a nuclear bomb from the mid-5th millenium should be even more devastating than one from the early-third.
Think about that now.

Different types of energy. A nucular bomb in space would only be doing heat/radiation/someshockwave damage, while a nucular bomb on earth would be pushing enough waves of matter (air, and the shockwaves) to tear through and break apart things.

I don't think you would even have shockwave damage from a nuclear explosion, since a wave (that would be felt as a shock) would require a medium to travel through (only some particles can 'make their own') and although space is far from empty, density is usually quite low. Just saying.

So, just radiation damage (heat is radiation, too...)

To clarify; I said 'someshockwave damage'. Basically, debris from the explosion, gas particles...

Most likely anywhere we're going to be fighting in vendetta has a much higher concentration of matter, imo. Think b-8, or deneb. There is going to be dust from astroids, giant pieces of capships that have been reduced to burnt-out hulks...

I'd like to see Flare Splash damage eliminated as well, since we're at it.

Remember this quote:
a1k0n: "We are insane..."

That's a joke, right? Even after 100 years of constant fighting in b8, you wouldn't get enough scattered mass in there to carry such shockwave from an explosion. The universe is just too big.
And, most of the debris from past battles (be it ship wrecks, gas particles or frozen itani corpses) would just float away into depth of space, away from the "populated" center of the sector.