Damage type specific damage mechanics

It always felt weird to me that you can't look at a wrecked ship and identify how and why it was wrecked, just that it took damage at a specific point. I thought it would be really cool if space engineers changed that!

The basic idea is that armour gets damaged in slightly different ways depending on the type of damage. For now, I've thought of 3 different damage types, grouped by what their damage would look like, and I want to talk about them here.

Ballistic:

The first and most basic damage type is ballistic and is the damage type that should behave the most differently from the way it works now. Deformation from ballistics should be relatively minimal if it happens at all. Instead small bullet hole decals should appear on the armour that becomes denser and more common the more the armour gets shot at. Mechanically ballistic damage should vary rarely actually destroy an armor block. A ballistic shot has a small chance of not dealing damage to the armour block and instead, just travelling right through that armour block unimpeded to hit whatever is behind it. This chance increases the closer that the shot gets to the normal of the armour you are shooting at, and from the hp of the armour being lower (and from it being a smaller armour block). (Ideally, a dead-on shot should have a 0% chance to penetrate until 50%hp then it has a 100% chance to penetrate even when at an angle from the armour at 2%hp and a smooth transition between the two in between them.)

Gameplay-wise for big ships this would lead to interesting situations where, without being structurally compromised you can get bullets passing through the armour and peppering the inside of a ship, which would look really cool from inside that ship. For smaller ships, it would lead to bullet-based battle damage looking less like a wing got sheared off and more like what actual bullet damage looks like in a real-life fighter! Like that one diagram for survivorship bias that shows where surviving fighters got hit but were still able to make it back to base.

Thermal Damage:

This would cover thruster damage, explosives, and if they get added, lasers. The way thermal damage would work is it would use the subtractive parts of armour deformation but not the additive parts, so instead of pushing the armour back it would push a hole in the armour. The parts of the metal that are deformed would be textured and coloured like melted metal. The deformation would be slower here than with current deformation with the idea being that when the deformation reaches the back of the armour it can now be shot through, and when the entirety of an armour block is pushed to its own back then the armour actually gets destroyed.

For big ships, this will lead to cooler-looking holes in the armour where it doesn't look like a hole was just punched through it, but instead, like an actual explosion blasted a hole in the armour. For smaller ships, this would lead to cleaner damage, where a smaller ship taken down by a missile would look like half of it got blown clean off in a single clear line, rather than looking like just a twisted hunk of jagged metal from the additive armor deformation!

Bullet damage would cause thermal damage to make the armour deform faster because it already has less HP, and you want it to scale so that the deformation completely consumes the block when it hits 0hp. In-game this would be because the bullet holes have reduced the mass and made the armour less structurally sound and therefore easier to melt through with heat. In the other direction armor that has been partially melted through would have lost some HP because of the deformation damage and that lower HP would make bullets more likely to penetrate because of in-lore there being less material for it to penetrate through.

Impact Damage:

The final form of damage would be deformation as it currently works for grid-on-grid impacts and grid-on-voxel impacts because that has always been the best at making damage look like it came from something big and heavy hitting your ship, or making it look like your ship hit something big and unmoving. You already know how this would look and feel because it's what's already in the game! I could see missiles doing this kind of damage as well.

For combined damage, ballistic damage works the same with impact damage as ballistic damage does with thermal damage, where bullets penetrate easier from less HP and the deformation happens faster when there is less HP from lots of bullet holes. For combined damage with thermal, however, the way it works is that a dent on a thermal impact is liable to flatten out the thermal hole a bit making it less deep and spreading the melted metal decal over a wider area while it pushes the whole hole further back. Thermal damage on a dent however would start melting holes in the already deformed shape of the armour without pushing the pack of the armour at all, so the hole might actually form slower than on non-deformed armour since 0hp=when the hole is burned all the way through for the hole block.