Forgive me if this question has been answered before. I did try searching for it but I couldn't come up with something to search for that gave the results I'm looking for. How is damage applied to structure blocks. If there are multiple layers of armor, once the damage is applied to a block, does any remaining damage get applied to blocks behind it? For example, which would be better, a wall 4 blocks thick of regular steel (500HP x 4 = 2000) or a single layer of combat steel (2000HP x 1 = 2000)?? In the above example, if you hit the steel wall with a railgun round that does 800 damage, would the first layer take off just 500 damage and the remaining 300 applied to the second block or does the first block ecsorb all the damage leaving the second block untouched?
I did a test back in 2020, so things may have changed now. have a look at my post below. https://empyriononline.com/threads/explosions-and-fuel-tank-placement.95434/#post-415700
That's some good info Spoon, but other than explosive damage, it didn't completely answer my question.
I don't remember checking the hit points of the other blocks back then but seeing that an artillery shell being shot at a Carbon Composite wall just destroyed the first 2 layers then I'd say that no damage was done to the 3rd layer. I'd do the test yourself now, to see if there has been any changes since 2020.
As far as I know, the "PenetrationDepth" property does exactly that. It is not enabled by default on any items. You can add it to the "Child" section of a weapon item (should in the same section as damage). If I'm remembering right, it is an int value dictating top number of blocks it can destroy in a row. As such, in default vanilla, the second block would be unharmed.
The explosion system was overhauled around 1.4-1.5, so explosions no longer affect all blocks around the impact site. If you use the commands "di expr" and "di expv" the explosion calculations become visible; showing exactly what blocks are being hit by an explosive weapon and how the damage is distributed. Damage does not penetrate to underlying layers.
Following Spoon's suggestion, I decided to conduct my own testing. To be clear, my only goal was to determine as best I can how damage is applied. There appears to be two types of damage allocation. Impact damage and explosive damage. I decided to test both. For starters, I needed a target to shoot at. So in creative mode, I spawned in one of my CVs, the Ariadne, removed the hanger bay from the rear and replaced it with targets. Each of the targets is one of either combat steel, hardened steel, common steel and carbon composite. Then I renamed it Bikini Atoll. History buffs will no doubt recognize the name and it's significance. Next I needed a gun platform to shoot at the targets. I decided to use a CV over an SV and chose my largest CV, Odyssey, as it is the most versatile. I removed all of the main battery weapons except for one rocket launcher and one pulse laser. I also added a projectile turret and pulse laser turret to the top to round out my arsenal. I chose not to test plasma as it appears to be just another low-yield explosive damage. I then spawned in my repair platform, Hephaestus, and the first of the Bikini Atoll targets. I then did a series of test firings with rockets and then artillery to get an idea of what the damage would look like and determine the best way to measure the damage. Below is a shot of the initial rocket tests from the main battery rocket launcher fired on the common steel targets. FYI: if you didn't know it already, the artillery turret does way more damage than the rocket launchers! The size of the area of effect is plainly visible to be the stated radius of 4 blocks giving the damage area a 7 x 7 square. At this point, I decided I needed crosshairs on the target to allow me to center the shots. I also noticed early on that the damage was not symmetrical. One side had more damage than the other. Part of my testing was to determine why this was. This was an early test in common steel with the artillery turret. As you can see, one shot is very symmetrical while the other is not. The asymmetrical shot was fired at the right side of the target block, close to the edge. You can clearly see that the damage distribution was effected, leading to the conclusion that damage distribution is based on actual distance and not just counting blocks. The side of each CV/Base sized block is 2 meters so the radius is not exactly 4 blocks but 8 meters. This was my first clue as to how sophisticated the algorithm for explosive damage calculation truly is. With that mystery solved, the next step was to set up some tests to measure the damage distribution. After having tested both rockets and artillery, I decided that the two were similar enough in behavior that I could just choose one for testing purposes. The artillery turret does considerably more damage and being a turret is was easier to aim precisely so I chose that as my test gun. I started out shooting at the flat combat steel wall. Earlier tests indicated that I was easier to visualize damage distribution as almost no blocks were destroyed. So color-coding the blocks by damage made it easy to see. Green = 0 Damage, Yellow <= 25%, Orange <= 50%, Red <= 75%, Dark Red >75%. Note the green block in the center. The actual block that was struck was completely destroyed. But, notably, the block behind it took no damage. Keep this in mind. Next I decided to repeat the test on hardened steel. Since hardened steel has half the hit points of combat steel, when compared to the combat steel will give us a good idea about damage carryover. Also, the surface blocks at a 3 block radius took much heavier damage than even the second layer blocks at 1 radius. So this is a pretty clear indication that block are absorbing and limited carryover damage though I haven't determined the math behind it. The target block and one block behind it were destroyed. Also, all surface blocks were destroyed out to a 2 block radius. BUT the next layer below that the block two blocks from center had no damage. Because of this, I decided to create an irregular surface to get a feel for how they would react to damage. I created the above surfaces on both combat and hardened steel. From these tests, clearly blocks hidden behind other blocks take little or no damage. This is what complicates the math. In RL, an explosion is basically a massive over-pressure. Normal air pressure is about 14psi. An explosion can create an over-pressure of thousands of psi. But over-pressure diminishes rapidly as it expands. If we look at damage as pressure, then the pressure inside the target block is 2000 within a volume of 8 cubic meters. That volume increased to 72 cubic meters at a 1 block radius. That means, under RL condition, that 2000 pressure would be reduced to 222 pressure or damage if not blocked by some structure. Keep this in mind while we go to the next test. The previous test made me wonder if the damage formed a sphere or cube meaning that the area in front of the target was just as effected as the area behind and to the sides. So I created a new target. Basically, I created a box that is 11 x 11 x 8 with 8 being the thickness. Then I bored a hole 4 deep into it, allowing an artillery shell to penetrate to the center block. As you can see, the damage is actually forming a sphere or cube. I added some lights to make it easier to see the inside area. What is notable here is that a large area was damaged. This means that to some degree damage also carries over to blocks behind them. If it didn't carry over at all, then only the center 8 blocks would have been destroyed. After this, I decided to test impact damage. For this I used both a projectile cannon turret and a pulse laser turret. I was curious if laser damage was applied differently than projectile damage. For this test, I created a different target as I wanted to test not just single shots but follow-up shots as well. The top section was testing the pulse laser. This test was carried out at a range of about 50 meters. The black blocks were the targets and each target was shot the number of times indicated by the number directly above it. Each shot did exactly 70 damage to the block meaning the 1 block had 70 damage, 2 block had 140 damage, the three block had 210 damage and so on. The eighth shot destroyed the target block. There should have been 60 damage (8 x 70 = 560 - 500 = 60) carried over to the block behind it but that block had 0 damage. So in this case, the damage did not carry over. I also conducted the same test with the projectile cannon with identical results except that the projectile cannon only did 42 damage per shot. It took 12 shots for the target block to be destroyed and like the pulse laser, the remaining damage did not carry over to the block behind it. Also of note, in both tests, there was no damage to surrounding blocks. To see if the damage was effected by range, I conducted a second test at 600 meters. The results were identical, including the amount of damage per shot, indicating that range was not a factor for either the projectile cannon nor the pulse laser. I didn't want to replicate all my tests on SVs but I did want to do couple of quick tests just to see if the results were comparable. This is the rocket test. The radius increased to 5 blocks rather than 4. But given that SV hardened steel blocks are 200HP rather than 1000HP, there was considerably greater damage. But note that only the center target block was destroyed. The block behind the center block took 154 damage. In my rocket test on CV hardened steel, the rocket did 822 damage to the target block. This means that roughly half of the carryover damage was applied to the block behind it. (822 - 500 = 322 / 2 = 161) I don't know if this is consistent with CV block or not. The number isn't exact so I can't say for sure but it's close enough to make an educated guess. This is the same target but fired on by the artillery. The 50% carryover rule does not seem to be confirmed by this target as if it had, there should have been 3 layers destroyed rather than 2. (2000 - 200 = 1800 / 2 = 900 - 200 = 700 / 2 = 350) The remaining 350 should have destroyed the block behind it with 75 damage carryover. Finally I tested the impact weapons with pretty much the same results. Obviously, blocks destroyed faster due to 1/5 of the hitpoints. This is my test. In conclusion, it does appear that 4 layers of common steel does provide better protection that one layer of combat steel even though they have the same hitpoints. It also proves there is value in having a sacrificial layer of low CPU blocks (i.e. carbon composite) as a shell around your ship.
As I understand it: There's two types of damage: impact and explosion. Projectiles can do both. Hitscan weapons can only do impact (not quite sure about that). Impact damage applies all damage to the block or device it hits. Hitscan turrets can now have a "penetration depth" value on them where if the impact damage exceeds the block HP the remaining damage will be passed onto the next block along the hitscan line, up to "penetration depth" number of blocks. Currently, no weapons in vanilla use this value, though it is used in several weapons in Reforged/Eden. Explosion damage gets tricky, and this is where the 'di expv' and 'di expr' modes come in handy. Basically, at CV scale each exposed face of a voxel has a 4x4 grid of markers on it. When a projectile or device explodes, the game calculates some number of hits to those, I believe based on the distance from the explosion to the block (unclear about this). Each marker is processed one-at-a-time, and the damage accumulates on the block. The closer the marker is to the explosion point, the more damage it does. In the image below I shot an artillery shell at a combat steel block and tracked damage to two adjacent blocks at different distances. The impact damage did not kill the first block, but you can see yellow rays that indicate accumulating damage on the markers, and if you look closely you can see one red ray indicating that it was a "killing blow" that destroyed the entire block (rendering all markers red at that point). The block on the right gets the same number of damage hits against it, but since it did not have the impact damage and the distance is further the block survives. The block on the left gets even fewer hits against it, I believe due to its distance. This is the part I'm not clear about: why there's only four hits, and how powerful each hit is. Shooting at the center of a steel target shows how explosive damage can "penetrate": Because the red block is recessed the orange ring of blocks soaks up the full radius of blast damage. You can see yellow rays accumulating damage against the faces of removed blocks, plus the "killing blow" red rays that destroyed them. Once the block is destroyed and another is exposed, the system takes the remaining damage and projects it onto the block on the next layer. This proceeds until the full damage in that direction is applied. There's still a lot I don't understand, like when a block is destroyed and exposes two additional blocks behind it (say, top of one and bottom of another) how the remaining damage is split between those blocks. Would love to step through this one ray at a time, but this is all we get. But further understanding this may allow you to optimize your armor layering to eat up as many rays as possible on a single hit.
