Ship Wrecks

[martianant]

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:

[Vooker525]

Some ship wrecks could spawn randomly in explored but abandoned systems if player enters them. Frequency is based on pirate/broker trading activity or pvp city combat in 3x3 sector size

[Vectorus]

Very cool idea, I hope it happens in some form! Perhaps there should be only a certain percentage chance to spawn a wreck so it remains an exciting and unusual opportunity, and some incentive still exists for boarding and plunder without just shooting everything to death on sight.

Having wrecks inherit the parent ship's momentum would lead to automatic cleanup in quite a short timescale in most cases, as they would be destroyed by dark matter. Would help server load.

Why not apply the same idea to buildings; when they die they have an X% chance to create rubble?

[Neils Iyssada]

What a nice idea !

[Deantwo]

Yeah loot from spacecraft and buildings would indeed be nice. We have talked about this topic before.
See: http://hazeron.com/mybb/showthread.php?t...65#pid2665

[Norm49]

Yes but I think we should need a salvage laser to salvage it so we need a specialize ship do to so.

[Deantwo]

Alternatively we could have space stations automatically disassemble wrecks in their service range, sending recovered materials to cities in the system. That way we just need to tow the wreck to a space station with a tractor beam.

I do however still like the idea of the cargo containers and lifepods also being ejected when a spacecraft is destroyed. Could do both really, have the wreck keep trajectory of the spacecraft, but have it eject lifepods and cargo containers towards the nearest solid celestial body.

I also really like the idea of offline avatars then appearing at a safely landed lifepod when they login, rather than in space where the ship was.