What causes ships to be destroyed?

[iceball3]

If we wanted to build the toughest ship on a given tonnage, yes.

I've been focusing more on ships consisting mostly of very low-power engines: Cheaper per HTK, and more likely to be hit.
Add enough base-tech railguns (capacitors are expensive and can explode) to handle moderate ASM attacks and you end up with something promising.
Exceptionally crummy for its size...but sturdy, costing about 1/5 of a respectable warship, uses practically no fuel and it can rebuild itself multiple times over (all components are dirt-cheap, 1000MSP from a storage bay last forever).

Why not use armored gauss turrets for even more extreme internal durability? Granted, they'll be kind of big for the PD they provide, but they'll actually be able to track incoming missiles and tank hits rather well.
Maybe a good mission-purpose of a craft like this would either be an escort, or a mothership-support ship hybrid.

[Iranon]

@ Mor: Sorry, no link and no exact recollection.

@ Iceball3: Because Gauss cannons are expensive, armour is expensive, and armoured Gauss turrets even more so. For the price of a properly armoured Guass turret, I could get get a whole ship:

Code: [Select]

Yorikke class Corvette    8 000 tons     153 Crew     308 BP      TCS 160  TH 320  EM 0
2000 km/s     Armour 3-35     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 2     PPV 36
Maint Life 1.72 Years     MSP 60    AFR 204%    IFR 2.8%    1YR 25    5YR 370    Max Repair 18 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Spare Berths 2   

160 EP Commercial Magneto-plasma Drive (2)    Power 160    Fuel Use 0.54%    Signature 160    Exp 2%
Fuel Capacity 15 000 Litres    Range 62.5 billion km   (361 days at full power)

10cm Railgun V1/C1 (12x4)    Range 10 000km     TS: 4000 km/s     Power 3-1     RM 1    ROF 15        1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Fire Control S00.2 16-4000 (1)    Max Range: 32 000 km   TS: 4000 km/s     69 37 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Stellarator Fusion Reactor Technology PB-1 (2)     Total Power Output 12    Armour 0    Exp 5%

This design is classed as a Military Vessel for maintenance purposes
Less extreme than my original concepts (reasonable armour, 62.5% machinery, too small for maintenance storage or damage control systems) but seems quite practical. It may be literally cheaper to build than to destroy with missiles. Can easily be made slightly more capable (more range to fight against beam-armed ships, better RoF if expecting small missiles) for a modest cost increase.

[alex_brunius]

1. Any ideas on how secondary explosions work? What can cause it (any weapon, mesons, shock damage) what is formula?
3. How maintenance failure cause ship to be destroyed?

1.) Engines, Powerplants and Magazines all have an explosion chance that you can see when designing them. This is the chance to trigger a secondary explosion when the component is destroyed. In the overall ship design it's given as "Exp 5%" for reactor and "Exp 2%" for engine in above example. Low tech magazines and high power reactors and engines have higher chance to trigger secondary explosions when destroyed.

3.) If you don't have enough maintenance supplies to repair a component that breaks it is instead destroyed, with a chance as in 1.) for secondary explosion.

[Iranon]

The explosion chance is clear... but what about the size of a secondary explosion? What does that scale with - size, power/capacity/actual magazine load? Will an empty magazine explode? What about a magazine loaded with warheadless buoys?

[alex_brunius]

For engines and powerplants I'm pretty sure it scales with their power ( so indirectly with size ). Since it's internal it also ignores armor (naturally)

Magazines should also scale with their capacity, but I'm not sure if it takes into account if they are loaded and/or with what they are loaded. That is an interesting question I'd also like answered.

[sloanjh]

Unless there was misleading info in a authoritative location,  it's not applies 1 at a time. If a component with 5HTK is hit by 7 damage, it's destroyed automatically, then a 2-damage hit is applied to the next component of the same type (I wasn't sure the same type is selected, but confirmed by Steve here).

I would be surprised if this (by which I mean "all components of the selected type are destroyed before the type changes for that particular hit) is the case, based mostly on vague memories from many years ago.  By my reading, Steve's post upthread does not confirm it - I read him to be saying that that was the algorithm to allocate any damage remaining in the hit.  In fact, my recollection was that the DAC has an entry for each component (which isn't quite what he said).

John

[Mor]

I agree. The way understand it. When X-points of damage penetrates shield\armor.
1. A random component type is picked from DAC (aka probability table total ship size to total component size)
2. If one of its component isn't damage, X damage is applied against that component HTK.
4. Queue FUN stuff for secondary exposition chance.
5. Back to step 1 with X minus HTK .

What confuse me is that note in tutorial 15 about internal armor and HTK calculation.

1.) Engines, Powerplants and Magazines all have an explosion chance that you can see when designing them.

I was afraid of that, I hopped for some rare\crazy events on top of that. Anyway, while the Engine explosion chance has been described in Steve's tutorials from a few years back, in the create new project window you can see\test it only for Powerplants and Magazines. (And unfortunately Missiles/Magazines seems a bit overpowered in comparison)

3.) If you don't have enough maintenance supplies to repair a component that breaks it is instead destroyed, with a chance as in 1.) for secondary explosion.

If so, than I guess it comes back to how secondary explosions work.

[iceball3]

The explosion chance is clear... but what about the size of a secondary explosion? What does that scale with - size, power/capacity/actual magazine load? Will an empty magazine explode? What about a magazine loaded with warheadless buoys?

Looks like, no, a magazine won't explode if it's empty. So the explosion size probably purely depends on how much payload goes off from a failure to eject.
It's actually kind of amusing, as most nuclear weapons are actually really difficult to set off on accident in the real world. Hitting a nuke with a bomb is going to more likely make it unable to detonate, rather than cause a detonation.

[83athom]

It's actually kind of amusing, as most nuclear weapons are actually really difficult to set off on accident in the real world. Hitting a nuke with a bomb is going to more likely make it unable to detonate, rather than cause a detonation.

Except anti-matter weapons. If those get damaged, containment would probably be lost causing the whole thing to go boom. And regular nuclear munitions may go as well as the force from a reaction (enemy weapons fire) may cause a chain reaction in your own munitions.

[Iranon]

Anyway, while the Engine explosion chance has been described in Steve's tutorials from a few years back, in the create new project window you can see\test it only for Powerplants and Magazines.

Explosion chance of engines seems to be a straightforward 0.1*PowerMultiplier.
Useful when evaluating other people's designs.

[bean]

There's some way to see it in the project window.  I believe it tops out at 30%, which accords nicely with the 0.1*modifier number you give.  (I was checking for a friend who wanted exploding ships.  No, I don't know why.)

[83athom]

A bit off topic, but still on track. The image refers to one of my FACs right before they returned to the colony after an engagement near the asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter. It is sill alive, but I wonder if it would have survived if it couldn't have repaired the reactor.