It makes no sense that alien ships have no outward damage.

[MrFrustrated]

It makes no sense that alien ships have no outward damage. The only damage you ever see is from exploding power sources, but nothing from the cannonfire, laser cannonfire, plasma cannonfire, missles or fusion launchers.

The soldiers only carry one weapon strong enough to peirce the outerhull, the blaster launcher. I would assume the craft weapons do more. At the very least, a single shot from the starting interceptor cannon (10 craft damage) has to do as much damage as a heavy cannon ap round  (56 personnel damage) your soldier carry. That's roughly 1 to 5.5 ratio. Which means that even the crappy weak crasft missles should be tearing holes in alien ships since 70 craft damage would equal almost 400 player damage.

So yes, I wish thier was a mob that including random damage (a few holes, a few fires, a few dead aliens) done to shot down ufos.

[Solarius Scorch]

I'm not sure how it would affect tactics and the general feel of the game, but yes, I think it's worth considering.

[LeBashar]

With a close thinking, I have made no change in UFOs, but in some humans weapons :
- heavy explosive able to make one square hole in UFO wall, but with reduced radius blast and weight enought big to not be used like a grenade. If we can make missile with explosive as powerful to pierce UFO, why soldier can't bring them ? warhead of a missile isn't so big when you delete all propulsion system.
- HWP weapon power raised to match craft weapons. Laser has 140 power, so it can make hole in UFOs wall (not each time). canon HWP can't : craft cannon gain much power by the craft speed. Plams HWP also have much power to heavy plasma of soldiers. (hey, why the hell naming that "Heavy" weapon plateform if they can't carry heaviest weapons than soldiers ?)
- Rocket don't change. They are really smaller than a missile.

There is also a mod with plasma torch.

Maybe these not exactly what you want but can give the feeling you search by making hole in UFOs ?

[moriarty]

I think the intention was more like "hey, I shot down that UFO, I hit it several times, why does it not show any hull damage?"

I posted a similar suggestion a while ago... since the battlescape engine is capable of setting off explosions pre-battle (Power Sources!), it would totally make sense to keep track of the damage the UFO took during the interception and setting off some additional small explosions to simulate weapon impact damage.

(also, additional explosions could be used to create a fake "crash path" in the surrounding terrain...)

[Arpia]

to be honest it seems a lot less like a 'crash' and more like being 'forced to land'.
what happens when you knock something out the sky? it plummets headlong to the floor. It does not land neatly down as if it leisurely landed. it'd be cool if there was a crashed tileset for each ufo. I suppose you could also add in a hole somewhere in the hull to artificially simulate the killing blow from the interceptor.

[moriarty]

to be honest it seems a lot less like a 'crash' and more like being 'forced to land'.
what happens when you knock something out the sky? it plummets headlong to the floor. It does not land neatly down as if it leisurely landed. it'd be cool if there was a crashed tileset for each ufo. I suppose you could also add in a hole somewhere in the hull to artificially simulate the killing blow from the interceptor.

I guess that depends heavily on the type of damage that forced the... let's say... "unintentional deviation from planned flight path".

hull badly damaged
 --> emergency landing (UFO does not need lift surfaces, but if the wind blows through and the aliens can't take it anymore, they land)

navigation systems blown
 --> probably emergency vertical landing: Power Source goes into "safe mode", no more horizontal movement, controlled vertical descent

navigator(s) incapacitated
 --> see "navigation systems blown"

power source(s) inactivated
 --> all-out crash. I assume the UFOs do feature some kind of dampening system / energy shield / whatever, so even an impact from high altitude can be survived by aliens on board. depending on the angle of impact, additional damage may ensue.


that's why I'd like to see some kind of (Geoscape-)damage-dependent system of applying (Battlescape-)damage to the UFO...

[LeBashar]

to be honest it seems a lot less like a 'crash' and more like being 'forced to land'.
what happens when you knock something out the sky? it plummets headlong to the floor. It does not land neatly down as if it leisurely landed. it'd be cool if there was a crashed tileset for each ufo.

Maybe that's why UFOs "crash" far before damage we done to them reach their real hull resistance. And why other are just blow in pieces, not even recoverable in crash site.

[Solarius Scorch]

Excellent ideas, Arpia! Now if only we had the option of targeting specific vital systems...

I also found this: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=654.msg6198#msg6198 - still viable.

But I was actually looking for this conversation: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=2120.msg21137#msg21137

This subject really is as immortal as Jason.

[moriarty]

Excellent ideas, Arpia! Now if only we had the option of targeting specific vital systems...

nah, targeting them shouldn't be possible... although, that would be a way to include "EMP" weapons: they would simply temporarily disable the navigation systems. otherwise, I'd say it's a random thing.

and yes, the subject is immortal. probably because good ideas die hard

[RSSwizard]

Considering that Explosion Size in vanilla xcom is directly proportional to explosion damage . . .
And in real life the size of an explosion increases by the Cube Root (3rd power) of its firepower this dictates . . .

The relationship between Damage and Firepower is of the 3rd power.

If we consider that a Hand Grenade has 1/2 Kilo of High Explosive in it (which does 50 damage) . . . then a Blaster Launcher (200 damage) has as much firepower as (200/50)^3 divided by two kilograms of high explosive.

Handheld Blaster Launcher warheads have a conventional explosive power equal to about 30 Kilograms of plastic explosive.


Considering the officially stated yields of various kinds of air-to-air missiles most of them have between 10 and 50 Kilograms of high explosive. The Hellfire air-to-ground missile itself has like 30 pounds (15 kilograms) so even it does a little less damage than a Blaster Warhead (about 160 damage).

So that means conventional air-to-air missiles actually explode for a Battlescape equivalent of 140 to 240 Explosive Damage depending on the kind of missile.
Stingray Missiles are pretty small in the base inventory (0.4 each) so that means they're probably in this range.

Avalanche Missiles are more like the Phoenix Missile, legendary for both its range (100 miles) and its firepower (650 pounds, or 300 kilogram warhead). But who knows maybe it does less because its range is also alot less too. Its probably still doing the equivalent of 300 Explosive Damage in battlescape though.

So how much you think a Fusion Ball striking for 230 air-combat damage is gonna do on the battlefield? If its nearest equivalent only does 100 points.

===

However Air Combat takes a bunch of other things into consideration too, and sometimes less things into consideration than battlescape. This is the overall Effectiveness of the weapons, firing at an evasive aircraft which an indirect shot will probably bounce off of like D&D Armor Class.

Air to Air missiles typically rely on Fragmentation damage to blow up enemy aircraft via a proximity blast. This is useless against alien UFOs though because shrapnel is peanuts to alien alloys, it takes dierct hit shaped charge explosives to damage them.

The cannon rounds probably have their efefct because they would be Depleted Uranium.

[Solarius Scorch]

A very interesting analysis, but:

If we consider that a Hand Grenade has 1/2 Kilo of High Explosive in it (which does 50 damage) . . .

I think it's way too much. I'd say 0,2 kg at most. (Unless I'm misunderstanding something.)

[RSSwizard]

I think it's way too much. I'd say 0,2 kg at most. (Unless I'm misunderstanding something.)

Inventory weight of Grenades is 3 pounds.
One pound of explosive and double as much for the casing seems appropriate.

If I recall a typical real-world grenade of the suggested shape of the xcom grenade only weighs near about 1 pound and would have about 0.2Kg of explosive in it. So these grenades are darn-tootin-big like the Mills Bomb and similar defensive grenades from earlier wars (tv trope:they dont build them like they used to).

Another basis for measuring it would be the High Explosive device (110 damage, weight 6 pounds), which is basically a chunk of explosive with a detonator stuck in it.

But in that case id say its a more advanced mix of military grade explosives with a force multiplier on par with nitroglycerin (TNT x 1.5). Otherwise it wouldnt cost so much.
(is there really a game balance associated with such low inventory store costs, I mean when you cant even buy a few demolition packs at $1500 a pop how can you fight a war).

That would bring its firepower up to 9 pounds. And while that's 4Kg not 5Kg (as the prior calculation suggested), the ballpark figures are about the same. Since a difference of (4/5)^1/3 is less than 10% adjustment on the damage itself.

Blaster Launcher Warheads are still on par with being a Hellfire Missile, an Aim-9, and most other air-to-air missiles all by itself.

[Solarius Scorch]

OK, makes sense...

[Dioxine]

Does not. No matter how sound is your logic, your assumption that 1 xcom weight unit = 1 pound is completely baseless. Not to even mention that we're talking about a game where people can see 20m away and the accurate range of personal arms seems to be little more. Trying to apply mathematical formulas here, while being, I admit, fun, is bound to lead us into coockoo land. Or simply prove whatever the poster wants to be proven. For example: I ASSUME that the sight range of a soldier is about 200 metres (typical effective sight range in a diverse environment), and the blaster bomb has 11 tile blast radius, so the blast bomb explosion radius is 110 metres, which puts its yield in multiple-ton-TNT range. Logical? Logical. Proven? Not really. No offense meant, but if you're trying to use science to prove something, you must be measured by scientific standards.

[Solarius Scorch]

Prove something...? I thought this was purely fun/academic. If there was something the author wanted to prove, I forgot about it long ago.