Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With shields constantly regenerating, even in the absence of a booster, they never actually are zero long enough to coincide with an actual collision.

Lets say, and this would be an exaggeration that favors the chances of this happening, that a ship low on shields and taking armor damage, is actually at true zero for one moment out of ten.
Now, lets say two ships, both needing to meet this detail, are experiencing the same chances, one in ten.
The chances of both being true zero with shields at the same time would be one in one hundred.

Now, lets take it another step, and say they are running at each other. The timing for this intersection can be exaggerated to be 10% of the time.

That still equates to a one in ten chance for that, but added to the chances of intersecting while both ships are at zero shields? Well, three coinciding one in ten probabilities is the same as saying one in one thousand.

Unless the shields can be manually dropped on both ships, or ignored, they are too improbable to be considered non-existent at the moment of impact.

Ok, taking the last point first.
This is NOT a collision mechanic. I don't know how often I can point this out. Speed is not a factor in damage application once contact is established.
This is a module that uses a ships inertial dampeners as a weapon, rather than simply cushioning out g-forces on fragile structures, like a human body. The ships in EVE need these by default, as even indestructible ships bouncing off each other are changing direction in a manner that would stress a living body into pulp.

Point two, in order to balance something you already are suggesting as being overpowered, a ship using this device cannot fit any other primary direct weapon system.
Your complaint that it does too much damage with "kamikaze" attacks seems at odds with the complaint that a ship cannot fit even more DPS.

Your characterization of the attacks as being kamikaze to begin with. Only a fail fit ship would even be severely incapacitated by the use of this. And at no point would this be able to destroy the ship mounting it. Kamikaze is pretty specific to suicidal, while at worst this makes the pilot more vulnerable to counter attack.

As to staging the circumstances, this seems confused. If you mean by fitting a ship, everyone should do so with deliberation.
If you mean needing multiple additional pilots to support you, no, not at all. Your examples where a tackle held down a battleship so two of these mounted on cruisers would insta gank it was rather contrived, but also went in the wrong direction, tactically.

If you want to gank something, you do so across or down a size category, not up. The web is there along with the prop mods to make it possible. And like any other gank, you won't be bringing something new into EVE with a non consensual kill mail, but you have a higher than typical chance of being countered attempting it.

Cheers!

Multiple station undock points, undock queues, and a mandatory collision avoidance active in high sec have all been suggested already. Add to that the inability to manually pilot toward any station undock point, and that should fix any undock collision concerns. I also suggest station undock cameras so that docked players can see where any congestion points are locked in space just outside the station.

So it's a ship bear hug? What is flash damage btw? Why not simply put this "resonant frequency changer" on a missile warhead and make it go straight to armor too?

EDIT: And Merry Christmas for you, whoever you are behind this virtual persona.

Have we gotten past the point of the whole "you can only ram when you're in armor"?

If we haven't, then I hope you all know that the shields of our ships are made out of pure energy. If something small (a frigate) were to collide into something substantially larger than it (a battleship), the smaller ship would be destroyed since the larger ships shields are stronger than the smaller ships total HP. Of course, if something like a frigate were to ram a cruiser, both of them would take substantial damage since they don't differ much in size.

Tl;dr version: Any small ship would not be able to handle a larger ships shields, and would be killed. I.e: Rifters crashing into an Obelisk. Legions crashing into Leviathans. Also, if a ship crashes into something not much larger then it, both would take significant damage.

Now, onto the high sec crashing problem.

All of our ships are equipped with crash prevention systems, which is why our ships do not take damage on contact when we bump another ship. Same way safety works in game. The ship turns off the weapons system to anything neutral to it, preventing harm to your ship, or the other players ship. The crash prevention systems would be online at all times in high-sec, and could be turned off when you reach low or null sec.

Tl:dr version: Crash prevention systems protect our ships as of this moment. We can turn them off when we reach low/null sec.

Yeah, right now I believe the best format for a ramming module is a cruiser exclusive propulsion module, similar to the MJD, that does EM/Kin damage on impact. This damage is based on speed and ship mass at the time of the impact and it damages whatever it hits, be it shield or armor. It could damage the ship using it too, but I didn't gave much tought to how this damage could be applied.

A global collision mechanic, even if it works only in low/nullsec, still has the problem of how to determine who gets an aggression timer when it happens.

Merry Christmas to you too, Nag'o, and anyone else reading this who enjoys the holiday as well.

Ok, I will clarify these terms, as I sometimes make the mistake of assuming others can read minds.

Bear hug? A bit vague, but in a way, yes. It applies physical damage using leverage, like a bear does when attacking this way.

The flash aspect is a reference to the speed at which the damage is delivered.
In order to avoid being canceled, the way it would normally be, the inertial dampeners of the attacking ship are instead reversing their normal role to prevent damage.
Explanation:
Inertial dampeners are insanely fast, bordering on being perfectly instantaneous in their reaction time. This permits ships to change directions without making any crew into omelettes and the pod pilot into a large paintball.
Because of this speed, only another set of inertial dampeners have any chance of outperforming them, as is necessary for this type of attack to work.
Because of the speed required, the effect being isolated to the target ship would require additional time, which would also allow the target ship's inertial dampeners to compensate and negate the damage entirely.
This speed requirement also requires every possible contact component to be used as a focused transmission point for the energy, so it can be directed as much as possible towards the target ship's structure.

(The armor is NOT the intended target, but the designers believe it is impossible to bypass solid physical objects the way they did with the shields, since matter is more resistant to being passed through. So the armor still absorbs impact as normal)

IF missiles had shields, and a CPU capable of spoofing a target into believing that it's shields were also the missiles shields, then yes, the missile could bypass a target's shields as well.

While developers have considered a missile with the shield bypassing aspect, the weapon cost was considered prohibitive as the same result and more effective direction was found to be simply increasing the raw yield of the missile itself.

Bonus answer:
The damage being inflicted relies on the physical armor and hull structure of the host ship, to act as a kind of leverage. Missiles lack this leveraging structure, so cannot use this inertial attack type.
Oh, they obviously already make bigger missiles, and the idea that frigate size torpedoes will exist is simply waiting on the demand for them first.

Change it to coalition damage when shields are under 5% then. Fixes the issue right there.

But 5% of what?

If an interceptor hit's a super capital, the shields on the inty aren't even 1% by comparison. They are negligible.
Should the inty pop like a soap bubble?

It might even be realistic, but good game play?

The real question perhaps, for collision, is should big ships be automatically overwhelming to smaller ones?

DOES EVE have brick walls, which can smash things, or can the shields of any ship always insulate it from any regular form of direct contact?

Oh, thanks for the lesson. I take it we are all at the same time teachers and students in the world, although pride sometimes prevents some from recognizing their own ignorance.

If there is no internal ship mechanism to dampen the inertial effects from the ship's movement, then a simple AB activation from a full stop will kill all the crew. It could be an artificial gravitational field, that is sci fi material though, not real world physics.

EDIT: If it is an internal mechanism it cannot be used to prevent collisions, only to soften the impact suffered inside the ship. The only way to prevent a collision is through propulsion to a safe direction. That's something EVE's ships don't do, they just absorv all the kinect energy from the collision.