Player Features and Ideas Discussion

But, what if you have those 200 people firing rifles at a car? Wouldn't that be a fairer example? Our ships are not small. Sure, we might be firing car sized rounds, but when we're shooting something over a kilometre in length?

The analogy fails. Much too simple and lacking in common elements.

With the exception of kinetic weapons, these damage types have an energy effect that does the actual damage.
The weapon may have guided it to the target, but once there this energy effect does not limit it's effects, it was designed to output a blast or thermal or EMP effect. This effect partially blocks successive effects for the duration of it's existence.
Explosion "A" may only last a moment, but for that moment it is blasting outward in all directions, including potential approaching ordinance meant to deliver similar damage. Between the damage to the incoming weapon, and the buffer effect with explosion "A"'s blast, explosion "B" does not have complete access to affect the intended target.
It should reduce the damage of the second blast, if only by a small amount.

Kinetic weapons being possibly the least effected over the short term, would in exchange have more persistent penalties to future damage due to the simple fact you would be hitting the same spot twice with growing probability. Yes, you would still do damage, but a kinetic round remains behind too, perversely getting in the way of successive rounds like an obstacle.

Even if a thermal round, for example, super-heated a spot on the ships armor, a second round with the same effect would have less impact if it hit the same spot too soon. The armor is still hot from the first round, and while it will still cause damage, their is overlap to the effect where the second round was simply breaking something already broken by the first.

Key word theorized. Like I said earlier, we don't KNOW. I never said that black holes are not, in fact, a point volume. I said that you can't say they are as if it is a fact, because it is not a fact.


No, THIS one is just plain wrong. Volume of a celestial spherical body has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly it attracts things. You will get pulled toward a gas planet just as quickly as you get pulled toward a rocky planet, if they are the same mass. Doesn't matter if the gas planet is 40 times larger in volume. That will only start mattering if and when you enter the atmosphere of that gas planet (because the mass that is now behind you will pull you backward a little bit).

This is because there is X amount of mass that's actually closer to you than the center of mass, and the exact same amount of mass is further away from you than the center of mass, and they cancel each other out, so it doesn't matter.

NASA ALREADY calculates orbits and such from the center of mas of celestial bodies, and they do NOT take volume into account (unless its a satellite or something and you need to make sure you aren't telling it to orbit underground, etc.) This is not a shortcut. They do it because it volume is in fact irrelevant to gravitational force for spherical objects.


(Note: this assumes things like mass being equally distributed throughout the celestial body, but since we have no idea what the distribution would be in a black hole, this is the most neutral assumption you can make anyway.)