Destruction of your craft

[Hanoj]

In real life, when something explodes on a rocket, everything explodes. However, in game, parts are only destroyed if they collide with something or overheat. This is not realistic, but makes the game easier. How do you think it should be done?

[sal_vager]

I think all parts should have a "broken" state, which a Kerbal can repair, possibly with tools.

Break something too much though and yeah it should go boom, so you may have a part of your craft overheat and explode, damaging the parts around it.

[Hanoj]

I think all parts should have a "broken" state, which a Kerbal can repair, possibly with tools.

Break something too much though and yeah it should go boom, so you may have a part of your craft overheat and explode, damaging the parts around it.

And if, say one fuel tank explodes in stack of fuel tanks, they will all explode in a chain reaction.

[pa1983]

And if, say one fuel tank explodes in stack of fuel tanks, they will all explode in a chain reaction.

I kind of like this trade off. If its not a structural part to then the craft can be wounded only. After all not all rockets explode because if a failure. if so Apollo 13 would have had a different ending when its O2 tank blew.

But maybe the final game will have some proximity calculations done to take explosions in to account and if that would trigger a secondary explosion on other parts.

[Grumman]

Perhaps when a fuel-carrying part is destroyed, subject all adjacent parts to an impact of 1 m/s for every ten units of liquid fuel and oxidiser. Fuel tanks have an impact tolerance of 6 m/s, so anything with more than 60 units of liquid fuel and 60 units of oxidiser could cause a chain reaction. Small tanks, empty tanks and non-tank components could not.

[Whirligig Girl]

I just thibnk that if something does explode in rapid succession, it should be a slower, more dramatic explosion.

[Tank Buddy]

I think a part should have (for lack of better words) a health %, for example, if an engine was blowing exhaust on a fuel tank, that fuel tank would take damage until it reaches 0%, where it is destroyed. This would be applicable to wheels, landing legs, (impacts) and when re-entry damage is implemented, parts could withstand exposure until they reached 0%.

I would very much like parts to be destroyed in a different way that a generic explosion. I think it would be cool if when jet engines overheated, they caught on fire.

As sal_vager said, kerbals could repair all parts to full functionality.

[Whirligig Girl]

Yes Tank Buddy, I was playing with Take On Mars and I saw how the probe never exploded when it impacted the surface, it just committed rapid unplanned disassembly. The parts all were still there, just broken up.

[Jordanpumah]

might be because 'splosions don't happen in space, just gas expansion and invisible stuff

[Nuke]

give parts a shrapnel radius. when a part is destroyed, other parts in that radius will get a damage call based on the strength of the explosion, and distance from the part that exploded. parts dont have hitpoints but thresholds, so if they are hit by shrapnel but a threshold is not exceeded, then the part remains fully operational, but if the threshold is crossed, then that part is also destroyed. you end up with chain reactions of secondary, tertiary, etc explostions as the result of an explosion and generally results in awesome explosions.

you could also have multiple levels of destroyed. you might have working, inoperable, heavily damaged, destroyed, each with their own threshold. the threshold of a working part would be much higher than a heavily damaged part. so you can have an explosion weaken a part and have a smaller secondary explosion destroy it. this makes chain reactions more interesting and provides the opportunity for repair.

[peadar1987]

I'd like a more in-depth damage system too. You overheat an engine a little, and you damage it and lose some thrust. Do a bit of damage to a fuel tank, and it springs a leak, losing you fuel, do a lot of damage to the same fuel tank (or subject it to an explosion), and it blows up, damaging everything around it, possibly setting off a chain reaction (and forcing you to hit that abort handle pretty quickly!)

[Avanti]

there should be more realistic explosions/effects. but adding on to the health percentage, there should be local areas to parts medium and larger that can fail but the whole doesn't, like a piece of shrapnel penetrates a fuel tank and it starts leaking fuel into space,but that penetration wasn't enough to cause the whole tank to structurally fail, rather than just the option of exploding/not exploding.

with fuel tanks, part of our scientific research should improve these parts so we can increase the number of sections in the tank for redundancy against penetration (with oxidizer and liquid fuel in separate sections), so one hole won't cause the tank to empty, just the compromised section. the tank section leaks based on the size of the whole, sometimes giving Kerbolnauts time to EVA and patch the hole. the cost of redundancy is added weight for that part.

of course for you pyromaniacs, if shrapnel had enough energy to penetrate multiple sections, it could allow fuel and oxidizer to mix and ignite from the sparks of the impact. causing it to go boom.