01-20-2020, 07:59 PM
When ships are destroyed, they kinda just go "poof" leaving nothing behind. Kinda boring eh? I've got a suggestion to make that more interesting, and add some depth while we are at it.
When a ship is destroyed, it spawns a 'wreck' object. This can just be a bunch of metal bits or something, it really doesn't need to be unique model to the specific design (as cool as that would be). This wreck object would act as a container and spawns in with some percentage of the construction materials / modules inside it. This represents the 'scrap' that's left over and salvageable from the wreck. This should also include some percentage of what is in the ship's cargo hold as well. Additionally items dropped by NPCs during their death from the ship destruction have a chance of appearing inside as well. The officer log should have a higher chance, but probably not 100% since it does contain potentially sensitive information. It would be neat if the wreck object could inherit the velocity/orbit of the ship as well. So if the ship that was destroyed was orbiting a planet, the wreck will orbit the planet. If the ship that was destroyed was headed for the star at 10,000m/s, the wreck will continue in that direction and likely collide with the star and get destroyed. Wrecks should naturally despawn after some amount of time to reduce server load, perhaps a week or two.
Why? It means salvaging from ship/fleet battles is actually possible! This adds a whole new activity for players to partake in! Big fleet battle in some system? The scavengers can roll into the system right after and try to collect some loot. Just finished pirate hunting? Salvage and loot the ships you destroyed. See a tasty freighter, but the ships captain won't stand down and let you take their cargo? Blow them up, and take whatever remains. Imagine arriving in a system and seeing some wrecks, it tells a story about the history of the system, even if that story is only a week old!
Example picture of how a basic 'one size fits all' wreck model could look:
![[Image: ?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgames.chruker.dk%2Feve_o...f=1&nofb=1]](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fgames.chruker.dk%2Feve_online%2Fgraphics%2Fids%2F2048%2F3117_2009.jpg&f=1&nofb=1)
When a ship is destroyed, it spawns a 'wreck' object. This can just be a bunch of metal bits or something, it really doesn't need to be unique model to the specific design (as cool as that would be). This wreck object would act as a container and spawns in with some percentage of the construction materials / modules inside it. This represents the 'scrap' that's left over and salvageable from the wreck. This should also include some percentage of what is in the ship's cargo hold as well. Additionally items dropped by NPCs during their death from the ship destruction have a chance of appearing inside as well. The officer log should have a higher chance, but probably not 100% since it does contain potentially sensitive information. It would be neat if the wreck object could inherit the velocity/orbit of the ship as well. So if the ship that was destroyed was orbiting a planet, the wreck will orbit the planet. If the ship that was destroyed was headed for the star at 10,000m/s, the wreck will continue in that direction and likely collide with the star and get destroyed. Wrecks should naturally despawn after some amount of time to reduce server load, perhaps a week or two.
Why? It means salvaging from ship/fleet battles is actually possible! This adds a whole new activity for players to partake in! Big fleet battle in some system? The scavengers can roll into the system right after and try to collect some loot. Just finished pirate hunting? Salvage and loot the ships you destroyed. See a tasty freighter, but the ships captain won't stand down and let you take their cargo? Blow them up, and take whatever remains. Imagine arriving in a system and seeing some wrecks, it tells a story about the history of the system, even if that story is only a week old!
Example picture of how a basic 'one size fits all' wreck model could look: