Make vehicle plating work

[An0n3]

So after kitting out some of my vehicles tender locations with plates adourned with menacing spikes I noticed…

…they don’t do shit. Well, not absolutely shit, but approximately shit. It seems like they absorb impact from objects as randomly as anything else in the location, so when I was covering my vehicle’s front bumper with armor plating I wasn’t so much affecting a killbumper to my vehicle as giving a sort of slight chance that a zombie might get caught on a spike instead of slamming into my headlights (again) or my windshields (again). I was hoping adding steel plating to my solar panel locations might protect them from the random zombie wack, but alas they all shattered while said plating seemed to be competely unscathed.

Can this change? It seems prettymuch useless to armor locations, then, when the armor doesn’t actually protect the stuff there. Maybe leaving some window of chance for a location OTHER than the plating to get damaged on impact, but I feel like adding plating to a location should draw at least 75%+ of the impacts to that spot onto the armor’s durability and not breaking through all the other stuff leaving a mint condition spiked plate and a giant gaping hole through the rest of my truck.

Otherwise…what’s the point?

[EkarusRyndren]

Having worked with vehicles considerably myself I can give a list of what I’ve come to understand:

A handful of components cannot be armored, presumably because they’re parts that armor would interfere with:
Headlights
Windshields
Solar Panels
RV Kitchen Units
Welding Rigs
Doors of any kind (Though this may be because of the "You cannot install any parts here"
spikes
blades
turrets

There may be others but those are the ones I’ve noticed. Everything else I’ve seen noticeable additional resistance. That said, some damage transfers, best I can do is call it a critical hit. Armor takes the bulk of the hit, some of it gets though. I’ve also noticed that if you hit something at high speed it does more damage to your vehicle than at lower speeds. As well as if you ‘kill’ something on the hit but have damage left over.

[An0n3]

Most of those things I just envision the armor covering up with some slits or grills to allow light or your vision to pass through unimpeded. I know we talked about adding new stuff to provide this functionality in another thread, but in hindsight it seems kinda silly to create a new thing to do something an item we already have is implied to do. You could create a specialized window covering, sure, but it seems like a lot simpler to just improve the plating we have so that you would want to use it to protect those windows instead.

It just seems weird to me when I have a tired sheered off in a location where an armored plate is present and has taken no damage at all.

I need to practice breaking more of my vehicles to get a feel for how this damage system works. I just realized my heavily modified RV’s kitchen unit exploded from damage incurred by running over zombies, as well as one of my internal storage batteries and some other bits nowhere near the exterior of my ride. I must’ve slammed into a building or some cars and not noticed it? Does colliding with mobs have a chance to transfer damage to random internal components? What the heck?

I just imagine running over a zombie and suddenly there’s pots and pans flying around in the back, and then noticed my steering wheel was starting to come off in my hands from bowling over some shocker zombies.

[EkarusRyndren]

Best guess is something to the effect of double criticals, one critical hit penetrates the armor, another penetrates the ‘frame’ and it gets transferred to another component. In earlier builds I had occasions where I’d hit a zombie at a couple hundred miles an hour, it hit a part which shattered the frame, and transferred the “leftover” damage to other parts, and just cascaded, destroying the whole damn vehicle in a matter of seconds. In the more recent builds it seems cascade damage only seems to happen when you drive through buildings, lots of zombies at once, or play bumper-cars.

…It’s a huge pain in the ass.

[An0n3]

Honestly at this point most of my “questing” is spent finding replacement parts for my vehicle because it’s always falling apart. It gives me something to do instead of just hording up all this crap while I cruise around the wastes, so I’m not mad about it. Just wish the damage system wasn’t so dicey on what gets broken.

I’ve gone through so many solar panels. So many. Three vehicle welders have exploded from random bumps and collisions. This is the first time I’ve had to replace the kitchen unit. My 60% full water tank exploded all over the highway after I triggered a landmine. Quite a few batteries, flashlights. Thankfully not so many windshields and I’ve only lost the one wheel so far (knock on wood).

I get drunk, light up a cigar, and whistle a little work tune out in a field while wrenching away on stuff and stopping to pick off anything that wanders to close. It’s a nice distraction from the road.

[Miloch]

Is it just me or does overall weight of your vehicle seem to have something to do with the damage it takes? When I had a retardedly large vehicle with a huge ram plate with steel plating on the front it ignored all damage most of the time it seemed.

[kevin.granade]

First I’ll assume you’re running relatively recent versions, otherwise you’d probably be ranting about invincible solar-panel seeking bushes.

Currently collisions only directly hit “external” parts, which I think boils down to frames and wheels, this is problematic in that that means plating is specifically NOT included
Everything else is hit by secondary “shock”, the frequency and intensity of which falls off exponentially with distance* from the impact.

Making it prefer to hit plating** if installed at that location is totally reasonable, and probably also reducing the shock effect if it does hit plating.

Ninja’ed: Yes vehicle mass makes a BIG difference, as the impact on you and your target are calculated in part based on relative masses. The bigger your vehicle is, the more impact on the target and the less impact on your vehicle.

*coordinate distance, not “through the network of parts” distance.
**By “plating” I mean “a part with a “reinforced” flag” or similar.

[EkarusRyndren]

Is it just me or does overall weight of your vehicle seem to have something to do with the damage it takes? When I had a retardedly large vehicle with a huge ram plate with steel plating on the front it ignored all damage most of the time it seemed.

Most of my vehicles are as you put it “Retardedly large” so I don’t know XD Though it seems like it.

[An0n3]

-snip-

Those goddamn solar panels

I honk my horn and they all explode

[kevin.granade]

Don’t tempt me, that sounds hilarious.
Also there’s a reinforced solar panel you can craft now…