Will there be times when a ship will be destroyed where it is not the result of an explosion? Basically, will ship disablement be more likely than destruction?asked by Brianeth

I mean, that ties back into what we're talking about. The goal is to have it so that these behaviors, again, are driven by the system. But that also means that if you're able to make intentional decisions about what you're targeting, you're able to drive specific kinds of behaviors. So if you're up against somebody who runs a hot power plant and you want them to just explode, that's a pretty good choice. If you want them to not explode, you're going to be wanting to avoid shooting that spot. And I think that's actually one of the things that's really cool about it, is that what your goal is in this conflict has a lot to do with how you're going about it, because the systems are just going to react to what you do.

Yeah, but it'll be the skilled player who can disable a ship and take the ship and cargo intact.

Well, even then, even with disabling a ship, what a lot of this new system will allow for is a much more hard disable, where it's not a temporary disable, but also something where it's not just going to be rampant ship inflation of, oh cool, I stopped your power plant for five minutes, boarded you, killed these guys, and now I'm just taking your ship outright. It'd be more like, well, no, we can fry that power plant and the ship is still just a dead husk ready to be salvaged, but the people inside, some of the other components inside, some of the other systems inside could still be up and running. And so you can get some nice intact parts out of that, but it won't always just be a free ship haul for disabling someone.

But it will be sometimes, but not always. That's where it gets really tricky to describe, because if you go at it with the lightest possible touch, then it's potentially possible to put that power plant, even the one that can explode, into a position where it is disabled, not destroyed, and within range of being field repaired back into working condition. Depending on the situation, that could be a really, really narrow window. Perfectly possible to happen, and given the way that things are going on the PU, anything possible will happen.