Large grids take almost no collision damage possible Safe-Speed timing issue

Hey Engineers,

I've been testing collision behavior on planet surfaces and I think I've isolated a specific mechanism behind the well-known "large grids barely take damage on impact" issue. This is not the destruction-disabled bug (the world still produces destruction on every contact) — it's something more structural, and I want to walk through how I got to my current best guess.

When a large grid impacts a planet surface, the grid itself briefly freezes for a few milliseconds at the point of contact, while the rest of the game continues running normally. This micro-freeze appears to be the damage/fracture calculation working through the contact event — the heavier the grid, the more noticeable the freeze. After the freeze, the grid continues with its reflected motion.

I suspect that during the visible micro-freezes on large grids at the moment of impact, the damage calculation is attempted on parts of the grid that are effectively read as 0 m/s. The Safe-Speed threshold (no damage below 20 m/s) then triggers, suppressing damage on those parts. Before the grid's actual motion can be fully resolved, the next position update kicks in and creates a new micro-freeze on the next contact point — and the same thing happens again.

The result is that only isolated blocks take damage per contact event, instead of the full impact energy being applied to the grid. Large ships effectively survive crashes that should shred them.

Reproduction:

1. Take a mid-sized grid (a few hundred blocks).
2. Drop it from high altitude onto a planet surface, both as a bouncing impact and as a direct high-speed vertical impact.
3. Observe: per contact, the affected grid briefly freezes (the rest of the game does not), only a few blocks take damage, and the grid retains most of its kinetic energy. Repeats per bounce. Final state: grid largely intact despite cumulative impact energy that should have destroyed it.

Possible fix direction:

Capture the pre-impact velocity at the onset of the contact event and utilize this recorded value for the "Safe-Speed" check throughout the entire damage processing sequence, rather than reading the grid's current velocity (which may be reduced by braking or be nearly zero). Alternatively, ensure that—during the damage calculation following a high-speed impact—the safety speed factor does not interfere with the computation.

System Specs:

• OS: Windows 11 Pro (Build 10.0.26200)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
• RAM: 32 GB
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti (driver 32.0.15.9186)
• Storage: 2x 1 TB SSD

Hopefully my System is good enough, lol.