can a ship kill ?

Hello everyone,
call me crazy, i didn't search for this idea, but please do read my question, i beg ye.

I was washing the dishes, when a weird idea came to my forehead. What if a ship was his own weapon ?
To make myself clear : What if you buy and ship, with no weapons, and to destroy another ship you have to run above or under the target ? It would force you to dodge every single ship of the game if you don't want them to hate you, that would be awesome !

I thought it could be done with an ever-firing weapon with no blast and 0 range, with big damage to rip a little shield each it hit the ennemy ship, but isn't there another way ?

You would be talking about having ships ram each other, aren't you?

I suppose it would be possible (given enough time), but I really don't know. I think a discussion about this earlier occurred, but I'm too lazy to search for it. It would add another level of complexity, though; possibly an unecessary one.

I'd assume point-defense weapons. Could be interesting – I've been planning something similar myself.

I don't see how you could make an 'ever-firing weapon'. Weapons only fire when the player chooses to use them, except point-defence, which fire at eligible hostile targets. If you make all ships hostile, this has implications far beyond ramming!

Even if you could get it to work for the player ship in some way, the player would be (rightly!) confused when he saw AI ships flying under and over each other, but found he caused damage when he did it himself.

Even if you could get it to work (somehow) for AI ship vs AI ship too, the AI is not smart enough to dodge ships round one another - they would crash and blow each other up routinely.

(Note that I can't see any obvious way of doing either of those things in any case.)

All this being said, you could certainly make a 'ramming weapon' which the player could choose to use if he wanted to (a little experimentation with the weapon resources will soon give you a method). However, I don't think it would ultimately be that satisfying, as the game is not really built for it.

My advice? Try the Ares engine instead.

I made a weapon like that for my EV Enhancer plug. I used a short-range beam with corona glow, making it look like the front of the player's ship was covered in some sort of energy field to allow ramming. I also gave it high impact so you could actually push the other ship around. It was pretty fun, but it had a habit of launching fighters across the system if you rammed them.

Check the link in my sig for Asteroid Collision Damage. It can work against ships too if you change a flag but there were some problems with that such as requesting assistance from AI ships when you're disabled.

@pac, on Jan 7 2007, 12:18 PM, said in on the death ship ?:

I don't see how you could make an 'ever-firing weapon'. Weapons only fire when the player chooses to use them, except point-defence, which fire at eligible hostile targets. If you make all ships hostile, this has implications far beyond ramming!

Hmm. I am thinking poorly.

@guy, on Jan 7 2007, 07:08 PM, said in on the death ship ?:

Check the link in my sig for Asteroid Collision Damage. It can work against ships too if you change a flag but there were some problems with that such as requesting assistance from AI ships when you're disabled.

Interesting. Very interesting indeed.