What's the formula for secondary explosion strength for engines?

[NuclearStudent (OP)]

I looked on the reddit and searched the forum, but I was surprised by the fact that I couldn't find the answer easily.

Anyone know? If not, I'll do some destructive testing of my own and get back to you guys.

[MarcAFK]

I can't find it, but have a suspicion that it's virtually linear with engine size, perhaps with a little randomness.

[alex_brunius]

I can't find it, but have a suspicion that it's virtually linear with engine size, perhaps with a little randomness.

Shouldn't it logically depend on engine power output rather then size? Aurora is often logical

[MarcAFK]

Well, searching the forum I found another question about it where they showed a 1500 power top tech level engine had a secondary explosion strength of only 20 or 30... so... I dunno. Unless someone finds the details buried in an arcane mechanics post, or steve shows up we'll need to science this.

[NuclearStudent (OP)]

Well, searching the forum I found another question about it where they showed a 1500 power top tech level engine had a secondary explosion strength of only 20 or 30... so... I dunno. Unless someone finds the details buried in an arcane mechanics post, or steve shows up we'll need to science this.

I think that small highly boosted military engines had larger explosions than large civilian engines with roughly the same engine power, but I can't remember.

[Kytuzian]

Okay so I did it, it's a bit sloppy (like this forum post is going to be, because I accidentally deleted the previous one), but the results seem consistent, so without further ado:

Engine size doesn't matter.
It's linear.
See the following graph (mean explosion damage vs. engine power):



The equation is:
mean explosion damage = 0.12 * EP + 0.81

And the standard deviation is likewise linear (I can pull up a graph if you guys want) and the equation is as follows:
stddev explosion damage = 0.07 * EP - 0.11

Also, as the previous post says, military and commercial engines might be different (I can test if people are curious), but I did all military engines.
I can also put the actual data up here if you guys want, but the means were all calculated from many explosions (between 30 and 336), most significantly more than 30.

[MarcAFK]

Nice graph, were all the engines tested the same tech level? I Doubt it makes a difference because that seems to match up with what I would expect.

[Kytuzian]

Nice graph, were all the engines tested the same tech level? I Doubt it makes a difference because that seems to match up with what I would expect.

Yeah they were all interal fusion confinement drives (I don't remember if that's the exact name, but eh). Power modifiers varied a little, but it doesn't look (at a glance) like any of the points are significantly out of line. Don't feel like doing a hypothesis test, so just going by sight.

[alex_brunius]

I suspect that the explosion of commercial engines is the same strength vs power, but just have much lower chance to happen ( Since explosion chance scales with power modifier it can never be above 5% ).

[Steve Walmsley]

Engine secondary explosion strength is random between 1 and 25% of engine power.