Hybrids - I really do now know how in theory things would look with superheated magnetic contained blobs of death flying at you

On the idea of ship deaths yes, I would like to see a variety of possible animations unique to each ship depending on what gets the final blow. Maybe even some variety in each individual category to add some variation; say a pool of 5 possible death animations for each ship of which one is randomly picked, maybe even not equal likelihood with something like a 1/100 chance of a "critical" failure.

Also wrecks resembling the ship would be nice; again perhaps being based on how they die, with a critical animation leaving no wreck at all.

They are after all currently working on new models and effects so now would seem like the time to work on these.

I like the idea of ship death animations, especially like a critical making it have a massive explosion. Would make it cool when you get big flashes in a big fleet fight.

Also, larger explosions should leave less salvage. Some damage types (higher damage) should have a higher likelihood of causing a catastrophic cascading failure explosion, so salvagers would have a reason to do less explosive, more precise damage.

I also think that structure damage should do damage to modules as well, randomly, so that once you take structure damage, you might get a lucky shot that takes out your tank mod, maybe even allow things like engines and navigation, so if you take a lucky hit, you go all stop, lose control of your ship, etc. Remote structure repair would be able to repair that, giving a reason to use it.

I think there is room here for some cool stuff.

Also, agree, the Torp explosion animation is pretty weak.

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As for Torpedoes, after extensive testing with Mimi (read: shooting asteroids for half an hour), the Kinetic torpedo has a really pretty, but tiny, shockwave. It'd be nice if it were bigger.

To be fair to them it does make sense that kinetic missiles have a smaller explosion since it's essentially an armour piercing round. A physically stronger warhead to allow it to punch through the armour before exploding means a lesser payload.

Isn't this already on CCP's to do list? Thought they said something about it at fan fest, they're gonna be slowly working toward these kind of ship destruction things, as well as updating to dx11 etc.

They were maybe going to do ship shield impacts, and armor damage, and hull breaches on ship models. I cannot remember hearing them saying anything about upgrading wrecks and ship deaths. Also the torpedo opinion still stands.

The explosion from atom bombs isn't caused by the impact. It's caused by the reaction of the materials inside. Asteroids have a huge mass whish is why they are so destructive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ARjuTKdiIk demonstrates an anti-tank round. The small explosion is the actual impact of the round.

EMP isn't actual electricity. EM waves are actually invisible so be thankful for the effects at all ^^

It's like "ex wife" missile from iron man 2.

It's the Hammertech "bunker buster". The one that doesn't work.

but the question remains as to why torpedoes look so weak now? before it was huge shockwaves, and now its like a firecracker that farts and burns out. I love the new sounds but really, why would cruise missiles get bigger and better effects than something as heavy and badass as a torpedo?

I love mining lasers more.. the are kind of whimpy now.. but they used to be big and crazy loud.

Ideally, I'd like to see particle spawn effects with weapon impacts, according to the type of weapon, as well as the layer damaged (shield, armor, structure). Weapons hitting the shield, for example, should end in blue shield fizzle effects.

Armor would be a bit more complex, and should leave weapon-dependent hit effects. Ballistic weapons would send shards of ship flying out into space. Lasers would burn glowing marks and craters into the armor. Hybrids would be (not surprisingly) a hybrid of the two, leaving red-hot scorch marks and sending molten pieces of armor flying.

Missiles already have their own very nice impact effects, especially the kinetic ones. While I am glad that the stupidly, cartoonishly massive torpedo shockwaves are gone, all the new missile effects could use a bit of graphical scaling up, by about 30%. Battleship torpedoes and cruise missiles just don't look intimidating.

Once a ship gets into structure, that is when death animations should begin. I'm talking about multiple ship fires and tons of secondary explosions ripping through the hull. Lasers should melt straight through with every hit. Ballistic weapons should blast and tear flaming debris out through the entry and exit wounds. Hybrids need to rip out masses of red-hot, molten slag with each shot. Missiles need to crash through the shredded armor and explode inside the hull, and blast out damage-type-appropriate particles of starship guts.

Also, on the note of turrets, the mapping system for determining what impact points the turrets actually hit seems a little...odd. I recall fighting a battleship rat with a cruiser at long range, and my artillery kept hitting the exact same point on the nose, over and over again. How about spreading out the effects of weapon impacts across the hull? Randomizing the impact points for weapon effects wouldn't work, because the impact effect would occasionally show up on a point on the opposite side of the hull. The client really needs a line-of-sight finder for determining which impact points the firing ship has a line of sight to, and to treat the model as a collidable solid instead of transparent when doing this calculation. This way, shots don't clip through the ship model.

Instead of converging on a single point, weapons fire would be spread out across the surface of the ship, in an attempt to hit as much of the ship as possible. It is blazingly idiotic to design a ship so that it can theoretically explode if a single point on it is attacked. Building with multiply redundant critical components is the only sensible design strategy for a warship, since it means that the enemy must destroy a sizable internal volume of the ship before it is destroyed.

Blanketing the entire side of the ship with laser fire or plasma bolts would look amazingly cool, especially when the ship gets into structure and starts visually disintegrating with each hit.

In a perfect world, we'd have ship models and submodels optimized to reflect missing/damaged armor and structure, with textures to match. The level of missing armor and structure would be congruent with how heavily damaged the ship is - and a ship with heavy structural damage and repaired armor would have intact armor plating on top of shredded and burning structure.