Ship damage ideas

[stevesims]

Right now Oolite has an old-Elite style model for ship damage. The ship gets hit, and looses shield power, then you loose energy from the energy banks, and once the fourth energy bank is depleted you're dead.

I used to play ArcElite quite a bit, and that had within it the concept of equipment damage. Once you lost your shields there was a chance that you would loose items of equipment. It was frustrating getting your docking computer destroyed, and could be fatal getting your extra energy unit blown up.

I think it would be nice if Oolite did something similar. I also think that hull damage should be possible. It would be cool if you could get a split hull and spill some cargo, and/or get some of your cargo destroyed. You'd need to have a shipyard option to pay for maintainance and repairs.

This brings me to a few other ideas... My ship has guns all round, but I only ever use my forward laser. If my laser could get destroyed then I'd have a reason to try using the others. (Damage could of course also downgrade a laser to a lower level.) Another reason to use them would be if the laser temperature was separated for each laser.

An old complaint of mine with Oolite was the speed that the laser cooled down at, since it used to be much much slower than it is now - thankfully this was addressed quite a while back. I still run the temperature right up fairly often during battle, and so still get slightly frustrated by this, but it's acceptable. Still, a "laser cooling fins" upgrade option would be great. I'd happily see the base cooling rate slowed back down a bit if this upgrade was introduced. You could of course have four different upgrades, one for each laser, and a separate upgrade to link the fins and share the heat load. Of course they'd be quite likely to get destroyed or damaged in battle.

Another reason why I rarely use my other weapons is I find navigating the ship from the other views very difficult. An equipment upgrade option that fixes the controls so that they match the forward view would be nice.

So what does everyone else thing?

[jonnycuba]

Another reason why I rarely use my other weapons is I find navigating the ship from the other views very difficult. An equipment upgrade option that fixes the controls so that they match the forward view would be nice.

So what does everyone else thing?

I feel that the directional 'Fix' would make things too easy (although never met anyone who could use the side lasers). The cooling fin idea
is good, I feel that if these extra options are to be introduced then they should be sold at a prohibitively high cost due to the advantage they provide.

[capnhack]

perhaps having some of this equipment as prototype only would be good too. it would certainly provide a storyline for some missions and would make it more interesting to acquire the items.
hmm.. maybe even having some alien items pickups from destroyed ships turn into equipment would be good.

[CWolf]

Hmmm, the chance to collect a Thargoid Laser from a Thargoid Carrier (OXP) maybe... Not just any old Thargoid as too easy but a carrier.