Warfare & Tactics

I've seen the idea of ramming damage in a sort of vague way floating around, and I've thought it too. Watching one of the EVE trailers where a Nyx smashes through some sort of station wall reminded me of it just now...

Wouldn't it be awesome/OP (depending on your opinion) if capitals could, if under enough pressure, ram other capitals for damage? I gave it some thought, and came up with this:

Skill - Kamikaze
If a capital pilot has reached a critically low level of hitpoints (e.g. 10% armor remaining, or just into structure), the skill would give them a right-click option to "kamikaze" into a target. The rightclick would align them to a target, start a 15s warmup period of the engines, after which all locks on it would be broken, and then fly at a velocity determined by the pilot's skill (135% of max velocity for level 1, 160% for level 2, 200% for level 3, 245% for level 4, 275% for level 5) into the target. The damage would be determined by the momentum of the object (mass * velocity) divided by the kinetic resistance of the enemy's shield and, if breached, the enemy's armor. However, due to my calculations showing that a capital hitting another capital creates billions of damage, the damage will be determined by 1/20,000th of mass * velocity.

Take, for example, a Thanatos.

The Thanatos pilot is going down, his tank has failed and there's an enemy Nyx flying directly ahead of him. The Thanatos has a mass of 1,163,250,000 kg, which divided by 20,000 makes it 58,162kg, and this pilot has Kamikaze at level 3. Therefore, his base velocity of 75m/s becomes 150m/s. This amounts to a momentum of 17,448,750,000 kgm/s. Theoretically, the enemy nyx pilot has an 80% kinetic resist on his shield. This would cause 1,744,860 damage to the Nyx's shield and would destroy the Thanatos. Furthermore, in order to stop gratuitous suicide capitals, the impact would also kill the capsuleer, resulting in no chance of escape.

This is just a theory that went through my head earlier. I'd like suggestions on either how to improve/balance it further, or rational explanations as to why it's complete bollocks.

(P.S. It's capitals only, but not for supercaps. 'Cause that'd make them even more retardedly OP.)

While dreads DO need something like this, it's not the fix they need to make them feasible again.

Ramming other ships would be extremely awesome and I've been waiting for it since the first day I played Eve.

But why only capitals? Wouldn't it be much more fun if you could equip warheads on frig-sized hulls and crash wave after wave of kamikazes into a supercap?

I liked it right up to here



nonono. Webs should still work on it as normal, and it should be able to be shot down before it hits it's target. Kamikazes didn't suddenly become invulnerable as they started their dives, after all.

The point of this ramming technique is a short-range suicide, not a freakin' sniper...



Yes, but on the other hand, this would cause wave upon wave of inexpensive suicide rifters, which would cause stupidly large amounts of pod deaths and probably do negligible damage. Although, it's an interesting idea...



Interesting point, but kamikazes weren't locked, were they? :P Besides, even if the engine or wings took severe damage while diving towards a target, it would probably hit (or get extremely close to) the target. However, thanks for the input. I can see why you'd want to see webifiers stop ships, but if you consider the point of this is to jam open the throttles and smash into another ship, it'd be painful to see, say, a moros being stopped doing this by a Rifter...

No. Kamikazes were actually vastly unsuccessful, especially when the US became wise to the tactics. The horrible reality is this: How do you fly wooden (Zeros had no armor, or 'bulletproof' glass) loaded down with very explodable fuel+bombs into a ship that is firing every gun it happens to have one hand at you? The reality is, the vast majority of kamikazes either fell too short, went too low, or were killed in their dive, smashing into the ocean.

Even if your suicide pilot managed to impact ships, very few larger ships were sunk by this tactic. Capital class vessels (like carriers) could, and did absorb multiple hits from kamikaze pilots without sinking or even being so damaged as to be towed back to port.Destroyer sized vessels had problems with kamikazes, but were also harder to hit, due to being signifcantly lower in the water, and their loss was no real big loss - destroyers were figuratively a dime a dozen to the US and British naval fleets.

Great idea. If i remember correctly they did have collision damage when eve first came out, not sure on that though.

Unfortunately though, i think that with the scope of warfare in eve, that although collision damage would be realistic, it just wouldn't be practical. Just think of all the calculations for the server to make on one ship alone let alone thousands. We would end up with an eve where we would have a "line" of ships vs. another "line" of ships old civil war musket style and you would lose a lot of dynamic in the battlefield.

I don't like this idea. I would hate for myself, or my fleet, to outplay an opponent, then have them use this and score some easy, undeserved kills.

I apologize. I re-read your post and noticed that I missed that you said it was for capitals only. I honestly couldn't offer a valid opinion on how something like this would work with capitals.

level 5 should let you ram someone with warp speed.