Phoenix Space Combat For Dummies - Part Ten Internal Damage

Bet they wished they had fitted that armoured bridge before this point.

In the last post we dealt with what happened when an attack finally did the stuff it was intended to do and damage the opposing ship. That post dealt with the split of the attack between hulls and internals and more specifically dealt with damage to the hulls. This post covers what happens with the damage that strikes internals.

Internal damage is very much a double edged sword. As a plus any damage that hits internals is not potentially making your ship explode (with some notable exceptions) 1 but equally is wiping out what makes your ship a combat ship instead 2

When damage is apportioned internally it randomly hits an internal item and that random choice is based on three things. 

Targeting - If the initial attack hit with one of the permitted targeting types then it will hit something belonging to that target group i.e target weapons and something in the weapon group will be hit

Location - Some items are obviously not nestled deep in the hull so actually have a factor that makes them more likely to be hit. Sensors are an example. I personally think scintillators and combat navigators are as well ( I haven't seen the list or worked out how to tell this).

Area - Quite reasonably what is hit depends on how much of that internal space it takes up.

Let's provide a visual example.

Let us make a pretend ship that would not actually be able to move about

It has

10 ISR 4 engines (10 mus in size so 100mus in total)
1 Jump Drive (50 mus)
10 thrust engine mark 1s (20 mus so 200 in total)
10 photon Cannon 120 mus 1200 mus)
50 crew (1 mu each so 50 mus)

Now it has 1,600 mus of internal 'space' so the chances of hitting any single item type are as follows (we don’t know the 'outside the ship' items so just remember this makes some items 'more' likely to be hit)

ISR Engines  6.75%
Jump Drive 3.125%
Thrust Engines 12.5%
Photon Cannons 75%
Crew 3.125%

Let us look at this visually with just the ISR and Thrust engines.

Every shot against this ship has a very high chance to hit the guns as the guns comprise 75% of the contents of the warship. 

As a practical example if a hit strikes the Thrust Engines then that damage is randomly assigned to a Thrust Engine in the group (let us say the third Thrust Engine takes 2 damage with the first shot). With this approach when another shot hits that damage might not hit the third Thrust Engine  but the fifth Thrust Engine  instead. 

Individual Damage

Next we shall carry on our rolling example. 

Round One Hit One - Of our two hits the first eventually passed 3 damage to the internals. The random location chosen happened to be 'Quarters'. Now quarters have a defence of 15 which needs to be breached to destroy the item automatically. Since this item has not been hit yet the code will check to see if it gets destroyed and adds 3 to the items damage total. As 3 is not close it will provide an instant % chance to destroy the item.

 For normal/light/xlight this is a simple percentage so 3 damage gives a 20% chance of destroying the quarters. 

For heavy hulls we see the next big military advantage which lies in the added protection internal items get. Items with defense in heavy hulls get 3 * the defence as protection so the quarters defence in a heavy hulled ship is calculated as 45 so that 3 damage only provides a 6.6% chance of destroying the item.3

If the not destroyed then 3 damage is 'added' to the item in case it gets hit again.4

Round One Hit Two - Our second hit passed 11 damage to the internals and the random location chosen this time is one of the Photon Cannons (number 4) this Photon Cannon has not been hit yet

And if defence is not listed then its actual defence matches its size (so larger items are harder to destroy). A Photon Cannon takes up 120 MUS so 11 damage is only an 9.16% chance of  destroying the gun .5

Crew members can be killed by hits as well. Hard to do as they are only a small part of the area of a ship but it can happen (and some weapons aim to do this more than others)

Complex Damage Types

The above covers simple fairly narrowly targeted damage. There are some interesting variations that exist 

Overflow Damage - If the damage caused is greater than the defence of the item then the damage that remains can carry over to other items. As an example presume a Photon Gun (50 Mus) has taken 80 damage. The weapon is instantly destroyed because its base defence is its MU size of 50 and that has been exceeded. That leaves 30 damage. The attacking weapon now influences things again as some weapons have a blast radius assigned. If 1 then 30 damage will be moved to another item (this is chosen randomly based on the amount of each item in the Ship in exactly the same way as the initial shot. It does not hit another item of the same type). But if it is less than 1 then it indicates that this weapon has a very small target zone so less damage will get carried over.

Let's look at an example of this. 

The Nova Cannon Mark I has a blast radius of 0.5 so if its hits and destroys a Photon Gun with 50 defence with 90 damage hitting the internals then instead of 40 damage being carried

Over only 20 damage would hit another item (and so on. i.e that 20 damage hits a sensor with 10 defence destroying it. Instead of 10 moving on only 5 damage would then get carried over)

Explosive Damage - To give a practical example if a warship was armed with missile launchers and missiles but the player in question had decided to not bother with Magazines (magazines are a ship item that 'holds' missiles/torpedoes safely) then there is a chance that one of the defending ships missiles would be 'hit' by the attack. If this occurs then that missile would not only be destroyed it would also explode and that explosive damage would be added to the carry over damage and hit the ship again.

This is why it is highly dangerous to carry more ammunition than you have Magazines for. If you do carry magazines then the magazine absorbs the hit and if destroyed the explosive damage. If you have say 1 magazine (carrying 20 missiles) and 40  missiles aboard then there is a 50% chance of the shot hitting the magazine and a 50% chance of it hitting an unprotected missile.

Damage Resistance- Some items have damage resistance so they are designed to potentially auto fix in case of damage. If an item does then the damage is reduced according to the 3d random number and this is deduced from the damage total before a check is made against the items defence to check for destruction. This is rarely a high number though. As an example the Battle Bridge II has a Damage Reduction of 5 (and a defence of 500) so at best 5 would get deducted from the damage before looking at the defence so if the damage was 5 or less it would basically ignore it.

Overview

Just to conclude we can take one of the Photon Gun example shots (the second) and provide a visual of what we have discussed through the last seven or so posts.

Phew. So there we have a complete work through from hit to damage. Next up we will start looking at battle reports to see all this in action. After a 'full' battle these shall start covering individual weapons to show their potential effectiveness.

1 Ships also explode when ALL internal items are gone. Usually ships are destroyed on hulls before this point .

2 To use one of my sailing navy analogies destroying a warships internals can lead a warship to be a floating hulk. Okay it still 'floats' but it can no longer carry out its task and is no longer a threat to the enemy. 

3. This is the factor impacted by Officer Damage Control training. If the officer is at level 1 then the item defense is multiplied by 3.25 and at level 4 is multiplied by 4.

4 Items only increase damage and check for destruction if the damage from this attack is greater than the damage already caused. So if an item takes 10 damage and does not get destroyed then it is hit again with 5 damage since 5 is less than the existing 10 damage no destruction check will be made. Assume another later attack hits the same item doing 20 damage then a destruction check will occur using '20' damage (NOT 30) and if it again survives then the items 'new' running damage total will be 20 (NOT 30). Any future hit will now need to do greater than 20 damage to cause a further check. Think of this as when a smaller damage total occurs then it is occurring against an area of the item already damaged/broken.

5. Items with defence listed are either 'easier' to destroy  - perhaps the defence is less than the MU so indicating it is delicate and perhaps a hole in a circuit board would easily break or the item would be made unusable with damage. The Quarters hit in the first shot take up 25MUs of space but their defence is only 15. Since there are no electronics or moving parts this simply indicates that if a rail gun has forced a big hole through your quarters then they are unusable until it is sealed Equally a higher defence than MU indicates it is harder to to destroy - some items are designed with armour protection for example Armoured Jump Drives and Battle Bridges