Which components get hit first?

[geoschmo]

The prevailing wisdom is that larger internal components and smaller armor components get damaged first during combat. I finally got an answer from Malfador about this. It's not precisly true. There is no intentional bias towards larger internals or smaller armor, but the way the damage is assigned can cause it to tend towards this, especially for the first few hits during a particular combat round.

What happens is that the total structure (not size) of the components is totaled up and the damage is applied randomly to some component in that total. So you can see that a component with a larger structure is going to have a larger percentage of the total and will tend to get hit more frequently. Of course the component will not be destroyed until the total damage applied is equal to it's structure, and unapplied damage goes back into an unassigned damage pool until the next shot lands.

Armor is done the same way, except that only the total structure of the armor components is addded together. All armor is totalled together, they are not damaged separatly.

I believe the reason it appears that smaller armor is destroyed first is that the same shot can destroy more of the lower structure armor components than it can larger armor components. This would cause a ship with both lighter and heavier armor to lose it's lighter armor faster even if the hits were applied randomly to either.

This also explains why the zero structure components aren't destroyed until everything else on the ship is gone. They don't show up in the matrix to be selected randomly when applying damage. In effect they are never destroyed, they just go when the hull finally does, which happens when a hit takes the total structure to zero.

Geoschmo