More detailed and varied damage and destruction

[LORDPrometheus]

After playing KSP for more than a year. I have decided that my favorite activity is building and then destroying anything I can think of. But while disintigrating ships and debries upon impact is fun it's not the most realistic. I would like to see my caft get scratched scored dented bent punctured cracked split and ruptured not just disappear in a puff. Parts could have fracture points coded in where they can split into smaller pieces that create clouds of debries that can shred other craft too.

As craft get damaged they would become ineffecient or even stop responding. Batteries would weaken and die and rcs thrusters may be broken or even stuck on! Tanks could be punctured and even capsules could be breached killing those onboard. This would create a more lifelike and exciting destruction dynamic that would calyx late damage based on debris velocity, mass, and composition. And the composition and structure of what is hit.

Comment what you think and until next time

Experiri non ad mortem!

(Try not to die!)

[Bilfr3d]

I think that a more realistic damage engine like this would probably be a good addition, but I don't think the devs would add this into the game until later versions, but it could be released soon as some sort of plugin I guess.

[Beeman]

I'm fairly certain that they've already got some plans in mind for damage and such. At least, you're going to be able to EVA your kerbonauts, open up a toolbox part and use tools from it to...do things to your stuff >_>

I would guess that that involves repairing or replacing things. Maybe it'll come into play when you're building orbital structures as well, who knows?

Either way, I'd love to see dust, debris or micrometeorites breaking things a little bit, giving you need to EVA and repair stuff or maintain things(like cleaning solar panels). Just makes for good busywork.

[LeadMagnet]

I know what you mean, kinda like what happens in the BeamRG Drive tech preview that was released a couple weeks ago.

A couple dents, scrapes and scratches would make things funnier! AND the big booms!!!

[rkman]

Squad has said they want something like that. Though it probably won't be as detailed as BeamRG.

[Kimberly]

I think you're trying to play the game as something it's not, LordPrometheus, namely an explosion simulator. So don't be surprised if there's not much technical support for your playstyle! But the game would benefit from a bit more detail in that regard, e.g. it would be nice if trussed and whatnot could be bent instead of exploding.

[Dunbaratu]

Do keep in mind though, that anything that's done for this needs to be done in a fashion that is deterministic and also rather course-grain (i.e. a part has maybe just 3 states: destroyed, damaged, and unscathed) rather than having some sort of slow continuous degradation of hit points.

This is because one of the developers' design goals is absolute determinism. If it was humanly possible to exactly duplicate your own inputs with ultimate precision, then you'd get the exact same flight results each time you re-attempt the same flight the same way from the same starting circumstances. (in other words the only variation should come from the fact that it's not humanly possible to exactly duplicate your circumstances . The only sort of thing similar to randomness that's allowed is the sort of near-randomness that can come from a deterministic yet chaotic mathematical system. i.e. when you roll a die, it's technically deterministic rather than random but it only seems random because there's too many sensitive variables for you to humanly track or control.)

[Morrigi]

Might not have to be on BeamNG's level, but I would like to see a system that doesn't involve things ceasing to exist when they get wrecked.