Damage

Damage is inflicted by weapons to enemy (or friendly) ships. Collisions with ships and other objects will also inflict damage.

Damage done to a ship's shield will raise its flux, while damage to armor and hull will deplete their values. A ship reaching maximum flux will overload, briefly disabling most of its functions, while dropping to zero hull results in the ship exploding.

Ship weapons and engines also have health and can be temporarily disabled by taking damage. This can happen even through armor, although the damage dealt is mitigated accordingly. EMP damage can disable weapons and engines while completely ignoring armor.

Damage types

Damage types are properties of weapons that determine how effective they are against armor and shields. All weapons do full damage to the hull.

Type	Shields	Armor	Hull
High Explosive	50%	200%	100%
Kinetic	200%	50%	100%
Energy	100%	100%	100%
Fragmentation	25%	25%	100%

Note that damage against armor is further reduced by up to 85%, depending on the weapon's per-shot damage and the target's armor strength.

High Explosive

High Explosive weapons do 200% damage to armor and 50% damage to shields. They are thus most effective at destroying the armor of targets with shields down. High Explosive damage is used by most missiles, many ballistic weapons and the High Intensity Laser.

Kinetic

Kinetic weapons do 200% damage to shields and 50% damage to armor. They are best used to overload enemy shields but can also be used to target the hull once armor has been dealt with. Kinetic damage is used by many ballistic weapons, the Sabot SRM and Graviton Beam.

Energy

Energy damage is equally effective against all targets, doing 100% damage to shields, armor and hull. It is used by almost all energy mount weapons and the ballistic Mjolnir Cannon. Many energy weapons also have advantages such as being constant damage beam weapons or secondary effects, however, beam-type energy weapons only apply soft flux when dealing damage to shields, unlike other damage types.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation weapons do 25% damage to both shields and armor, and are thus ineffective against protected targets. However, they generally have very high DPS and are thus extremely dangerous to thinly armored, unshielded targets such as missiles and fighters, as well as (some) ships which have had their armor stripped away by damage. The Vulcan Cannon, Thumper, Salamander MRM and Stinger-class Proximity Mine do Fragmentation damage.

EMP

EMP is a secondary damage effect that disables weapon & engine components without harming shields, armor or hull. It is mostly found on certain energy damage weapons such as the Ion Cannon, Mjolnir Cannon and Tachyon Lance, although the Hypervelocity Driver and the Salamander MRM series of missiles also do EMP damage.

Certain weapons additionally have the ability to send ion arcs across ships they hit, disabling weapons and engines that were not directly hit. The Ion Cannon & Ion Pulser can only create arcs when hitting hull, but not shields. This means that the weapon has a chance of affecting other parts of the ship via arcing. The Ion Beam, Pilum & Tachyon Lance can uniquely create EMP arcs even when hitting shields, with a greater chance of piercing the shield if the target has high hard flux. Other weapons with EMP damage components do not create EMP arcs, such as the Mjolnir Cannon, Salamander MRM & Hypervelocity Driver (thus they can only inflict EMP close to the impact zone and when hitting hull/armor only).

Missiles hit by EMP ship systems such as the EMP Emitter will possibly flame out if hit enough times, as a scripted effect. Flaming out missiles is not an intrinsic property of EMP damage. Missiles that have flamed out will potentially detonate or ricochet against any target, friend or foe.

The actual effect is somewhat inexact as the EMP damage is proportional to the distance between point of impact and the weapon or engine, believed to be similar to the damage pattern for armor cells, except it does half-damage to the primary/secondary cells and quarter damage to tertiary cells.

This means that broadly speaking weapons set further into the hull will take less EMP damage as they will likely be further from the point of impact. Some niche cases exist where the point of impact may be in the middle of the ship, such as an Ion Cannon armed Claw or Thunder fighter firing during overflight.

Disabling weapons and armor

Weapon durability is 250/500/800 for small/medium/large turrets. If the weapon is mounted in a Hardpoint, rather than a turret, this durability is doubled. Potentially doubled by Armored Weapon Mounts. Mounts defined as Hidden cannot be disabled. Engine durability is based on hull size and size of the engine plume, with bigger engines on bigger ships being more durable.

Exact engine durability is a baseHP of 100/200/400/600/800 for fighter/frigate/destroyer/cruiser/capital and the following formula, where "size" is engine glow width + height, clamped to [0, 100]:
maxHp = baseHP * (0.75 + (size/100 * 0.5))

The base repair time for weapons depend on whether the weapon is turret-mounted or hard-mounted, and does not depend the weapon type or what the individual weapon itself is. Turreted weapons repair in approximately 8-9/14/18-20 seconds, while hardpoint mounted weapons repair in approximately 15/20/25 seconds. Note that though hardpoints are more durable, they also take about 5-7 seconds longer to repair when they do break.

The base repair time of engines depend primarily on the size of the ship. Frigates/Destroyers/Cruisers/Capitals require approximately 9/13/16/20 second to repair their engines, respectively.

Repair time does not depend on the type of weapon that dealt the disabling blow: a Reaper to the back of an Onslaught that causes a flame-out will take the same 20 seconds to repair as a lone Ion Cannon.