Damage

Up to date for latest version, 0.98a.

Damage is generally inflicted by weapons against any ship. Damage can also be inflicted by other sources, such as ship explosions or object collisions.

Damage done to a ship's shield raises the ship's flux, whereas damage to armor and hull will deplete their values. If the damage exceeds the ship's maximum flux capacity, the ship will overload, briefly disabling most of its functions. When a ship loses all hull points due to damage, the ship will become disabled or destroyed, creating an explosion that damages most nearby objects, including other ships.

Ship weapons and engines also have health and can be temporarily disabled by taking damage. This can happen even through intact armor, though this damage remains affected by armor damage reduction. However, EMP damage bypasses this armor damage reduction, dealing full damage to ship weapons and engines.

Damage types

Damage types determine the effectiveness of the damage against armor and shields. All weapons deal full damage to the hull, though multipliers to armor damage will continue to affect the damage reduction due to residual armor in bare 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% (or 90% if the target has Polarized Armor), 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 a few energy weapons such as 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, as well as a handful of missiles and energy weapons such as 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 having secondary effects. Beam weapons only apply soft flux when dealing damage to shields, regardless of their damage type.

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, IR Autolance, and Salamander MRM are common fragmentation-type weapons.

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, Salamander, and 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.

Advanced information

The actual effect is somewhat inexact, as the EMP damage is proportional to the distance between the 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.

Other damage sources

Ship explosions

Upon being disabled or destroyed, a ship produces an explosion that deals high explosive damage equivalent to 50% to 100% of the ship's maximum flux capacity. The explosion radius scales on the ship's hidden collision radius, with the maximum explosion radius being at most 200 units away from the ship collision radius.

Collisions with objects

Collisions with another object, like a ship, asteroid, or wreck, deals kinetic damage based on the mass and speed of the two objects, with the higher-mass/higher-speed object dealing more damage to the lower-mass/lower-speed object.

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. A Turret's repair from their disabled state takes 10/15/20 seconds, hardpoints having their time extended by another +5 seconds.

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 of engines depends primarily on the size of the ship. Frigates/destroyers/cruisers/capitals require approximately 9/13/16/20 seconds 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.

Damage bonuses

Damage bonuses and reductions can interact with each other in various ways. The information below lists the available damage bonuses and reductions and how they are grouped:

Weapon damage modifiers - everything inside is additive, the group itself is multiplicative with others:

• Combat readiness (if above 70%)
• Ballistic Mastery (regular and elite)
• Tactical Drills
• Energy Weapon Mastery
• Cybernetic Augmentation
• High Energy Focus
• High Scatter Amplifier (regular and s-mod)
• Missile Specialization (elite)

Target-dependent modifiers - everything inside is additive, the group itself is multiplicative with others:

• Target Analysis (regular and elite; part that scales with target size)
• Wolfpack Tactics
• Advanced Turret Gyros (s-mod)
• Point Defense
• Integrated Point Defense AI
• Defensive Targeting Array
• Terminator Core (hullmod on Terminator Drones)

Special modifiers - multiplicative with each other and everything else:

• Targeting Feed
• Target Analysis (bonus damage to engines/weapons part; technically a flat bonus, but it is the only one in its group in vanilla)

Damage taken modifiers - multiplicative with each other and everything else:

• Graviton Beam effect
• Entropy Amplifier, Damper Field, Fortress Shield, etc.
• Impact Mitigation, Damage Control, Field Modulation
• Resistant Flux Conduits or any other hullmod that modifies damage taken

Bonus damage from weapon listeners (Mining Blaster, Breach SRM, etc.): Despite being worded similarly, these are implemented dramatically differently from one another, which may result in some of the above multipliers not applying to them.