I have been reading a lot of posts all over, in patch forums etc, about engineering changes. I figured I would post a real life type situation in which this stuff was real. I.E., I served on a modern US Warship that took catastrophic combat damage for real. We did not suddenly just die and go boom. In fact, we survived badly damaged but we survived. Ships do not just "blow up" on a whim so I agree with everyone arguing that this needs to be tamped down huge. That being said, they DO blow up under certain circumstances. Armory strike/pen. Even if detonation of munitions does not occur, if a fire starts you better put it out before you get detonation. In modern warships we have auto fire suppression of course but the fire can still spread due to bulkhead damage and reignition can occur if not handled. A second form of a ship blowing up catastrophically, would be a rare strike in volatile fuels or fuel cells. In modern times, this is not common. Even nuke reactors on warships are so heavily armored and safer that any major shock will scram the reactor before it can ever melt down. Fuel locations have their own heavy armor shell. Even a meltdown though, would not cause catastrophic detonation. BUT 900 years in the future, we are using hydrogen and whatever other exotics CIG puts in the game, so I feel there should be that chance with a strike to those storage locations, 'could' occur for game play reasons. etc. In real combat, you might be lucky enough to literally see the holes appear in your hull.. from the inside, as rounds pass through. I say lucky for two reasons... you did not get hit by the rounds AND if H.E. or other ammo types, they did not detonate or fragment where you were standing or sitting and thus the round kept going, AP rounds for example. Today we have technology to protect against shrapnel etc under these conditions.. and it works. Ships can take a LOT of hits and have a LOT of holes and keep fighting and survive. In reality, you can literally fill a ship full of holes and it keep fighting as if you missed completely. Putting holes in a ship in space should do NOTHING more than let the air out. Smart captains will go into battle already having vented the ship for battle for this very reason. We should be able to shoot each other until you actually HIT something that matters. Something that breaks a turret or kills the bridge crew or hits a component or yea, even that rare thing that CAN cause sympathetic explosion to cause a full on detonation of the ship. There is no reason we should have an 'armor' value or even a hull value that once it goes to 0, the ship blows up. Armor and ships hull SHOULD have a factor of protection. That is common sense. ARMOR should be in addition TO that hull strength. That strength should be based on TYPE of armor and thickness that ship can actually handle. Once that armor is pen, the hull takes the damage until it too is pen. THAT's when you start taking internal damages depending on where and what the rounds hit. Unless that one in a million spot is hit, with enough penetration hits, a ship should just go dead under most circumstances.. fire, smoke billowing, backup power engaged if not destroyed... dead in space unless the crew can repair enough to bring power back online. What should happen. Ships in SC should battle it out. As power circuits, turrets, hatches, and other things are impacted once penetration does happen, it should matter and have impact on the ships functions. As the battle progresses, damage continues until one ship has so much damage to too many components or support functions that it just goes dead in space. Battery power kicks in (and let me tell you when that happens for real, it is freaking scary as hell on a warship because you now know this shits for real.. and there are no do overs). From there if the battle still rages, damage control teams will try to get the ships main power back online, weapons back on line and depending, the captain may decide to egress from the battle due to crew injuries or continue in the fight once main engines come back online. Of course in the real world, if the hull BELOW the water line is impacted, seals blow, seawater pipes break, you have another worry of flooding. In space that is not relevant of course. If the ship goes dead and just cannot be brought back, the enemy can decide to finish you or board you or tow you someplace than force surrender or whatever. THIS is how the game should be, in my opinion. Catastrophic ship explosions should be a RARE, and I mean RARE occurrence. That 1 in a million shot that caused a cascading power plant failure that would lead eventually to detonation which of course would cause sympathetic explosions to move through out the ship as it finds fuel, munitions etc to feed on until the final devastating blast that turns the ship into small pieces. CIG wants players to engage, to have FUN, to think and enjoy the decisions that we have made. They want groups to work together and may the best ship win, regardless what you are fighting in. Even a corvette that has a top notch crew and gunnery team, should have a 'chance' of killing a larger ship, for example. NOT because of its guns or armor but because its designed bought the crew the time to use their expertise, their above and beyond skills to defeat the CREW of the bigger ship they were fighting. Under all conditions equal, that corvette would be toast against that bigger ship... BUT with what I described and whether by using accuracy in gunfire, spatial tactical maneuvers or boarding and outstanding Marines, it should still have that chance of winning. That means you need to pull WAY back from this ship blowing up stuff. It is not realistic and it removes entire HUGE game play possibilities... as I said, to include boarding, salvage, emergency repair services, and so much more. We WANT that in game. When something goes so wrong the ship is going to detonate, then abandon ship should happen with the life boats. The ships automated systems, AND the captain, should immediately start blaring out, "Power systems compromised, time to cascade detonation is now 6 minutes and counting. Abandon Ship, power systems have been compromised, cascade detonation in 5 minutes.... " and so on. Red lights, whooping horns, the whole nine yards. Crew should check for others to insure they get off the ship, anything you can save, you need to grab and go and you need to get safe distance before that ship gives a light show and the shock wave hits you in a way you won't ever forget. One last point. On US Warships, critical locations like CIC, engineering and some others (armories for example), are the most heavily armored areas of a ship. They are critical to a ships survival and crew. Thus why they have the heaviest armor. THIS is why over the last 3 decades, our ships that have taken massive battle damage, have never sunk. CIG needs to also take this approach. Because of how combat is so damn close up in space which I wish was not the case, many of us can EASILY concentrate on specific parts and sections of larger ships, bringing them down really fast. You need to make some changes in how you think about armor so that it takes a LOT more effort to penetrate those areas internally. Taking out a ships turrets or its engines is even a real life tactic. It should be the same in game. but no one should be able to just sit there and pound easily on one specific spot in a battle. People should not be flitting around in fighters aiming at one small point because they KNOW EXACTLY WHERE a component is located. Just armor on its own is not going to balance that against expert flyers. Armor around those critical areas, needs to have round mitigation functions. I.E. the armor is much more robust so instead of taking 500 rounds to penetrate that protective cell, it takes 1500 rounds. All around it is standard armor, but around the critical things, they should have their own pen box armor, i.e. their own armored shell, separate from the ship itself that must be also penetrated to have any chance of damaging a component outright. Basically, you attack a ship. The defense around that ship is shield, armor, hull. If you hit where a component is behind that hull, it would be shield, armor, hull, component armor box and penetration of component. in that order. I look forward to engineering but I also hope some of what I wrote will be considered because we want it to also be FUN. Not, where someone pounds on a spot until that pool number is gone and the whole ship is now impacted and your ship goes boom. THAT IS NOT FUN. Especially with larger ships, battles should last for a while. It should not be a couple minute event. Battles should be a decision, not just a whim. Battles need to also allow for both offensive fun but also defensive fun. One last note.. with fighters, armor is NOT a thing except in one way, in reality. Around components and critical systems. However this is a game so they too would have both some light armor and an armor box/shell around the component, so to speak, that you would have to get through to even hit on the component. Shield, hull, light armor maybe, component armor box and component, in that order. Oh I forgot to mention one thing about that armored box or shell around critical ships systems. Just because a round hits that 'box' but does not penetrate, does not mean nothing happens. Depending on the round, a heavy round could cause the component to trip offline due to shock. Or could hit so hard, shock damage could literally do damage that required repair.. OR cause a SHORT that starts a fire.... something to consider.