Do Ships Have Tougher Hulls From Certain Angles?

[CMDR Dreamstate]

If that's the case, I think they missed an opportunity there!

Location based damage or atleast damage resistance opens up a lot in terms of gameplay.

While the shield shunting feature got hit on the head due to control issues (I guess?), a passive armour/hull toughness based on location, would work really well, because you can't just shunt armour around mid flight. That'd be done in outfitting, so something you need to think about in advance...
For example "I'm a trader, I'm likely to be legging it, I'll put the maximum amount of armour to the rear, keep those engines safe!"... or "I'm going to be face tanking most of my targets, so I'll need my armour points army the front"..., etc.

I keep using MechWarrior's armour and structure system as example, because it allowed smaller, more agile Mechs to get behind and peck at the larger slower ones to death. Lol
It's a fun system, IMHO.

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

It would only lead to one type of gameplay - gank the weakest part. Not fun.

 

[Sylow]

By "half MRP protection" do you mean half the damage bypasses MRP, or the resistance of MRPs is halved?

i.e. do four D rated MRPs offer 1-(1-0.6/2)^4 = 76% protection OR 0.5*(1-(1-0.6)^4) = 49% protection?

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Yay! I missed that. Good find, it's one of the few postings where TS was numerically wrong. [It's clear what he wanted to say, but the numbers are actually more extreme than what he expressed. ]
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MRPs absorb 25% of damage on external modules and 75% of damage on internal modules.
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So we define:
RawDamage = The damage of the weapon hitting the target.
Resists = The ships damage resistance, based on which armour is installed and which Engineering mods were done to armour and hull reinforcement packages. Use it as value between 0 (no resist) and 1 (100% resist)
nMRP = Number of installed Module Reinforcement Packages
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We then have:
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DamageToHardpoint = RawDamage * (1-Resists) * 0.75^nMRP
DamageToInternal = RawDamage * (1-Resists) * 0.25^nMRP
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So yes, with 4 MRPs hardpoints only take 32% of the normal damage and internals take less than 4% of the normal damage. That's of course if you can afford to drag around 4 MRPs and all the damage they absorb sure wears them down. Also note that they don't wear down evenly but according to their order. As a result they will fail not at the same time but in succession.
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In case of doubt, i'd rather only have one or two MRPs and get more HRPs with resistance engineering on them. Only in extreme setups, where you already reached the cap for resistance and still have internals free, more MRPs are worth considering.
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[JetsonRING]

Just curious.
I always figured the underbelly and rear would be weaker than the front and top of a ship (in general).
I posted an idea a while back about being able to manually adjust and add the hitpoints to various sections of your ship. But I never actually stopped to think that the ship was just 1 section. Lol
My original idea is here if you're interested.
The idea is overly complex, but could be simplified quite a bit, and still have a similar result.
CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

Unknown, but I do not believe so. More accurate I think, to say that certain ships present much larger target silhouettes from different angles and so absorb much more fire when presented to the shooter at certain aspects. The Asp-X is, I think a good example. Fairly slim when viewed from the side the Asp-X turns into a great, big bulls-eye when viewed from the top or bottom. Since the top and bottom sides of the Asp-X absorb more firepower than the sides, the top and bottom of the hull probably appear weaker than the side of the hull. o7

 

[Truesilver]

Really??

By "half MRP protection" do you mean half the damage bypasses MRP, or the resistance of MRPs is halved?

i.e. do four D rated MRPs offer 1-(1-0.6/2)^4 = 76% protection OR 0.5*(1-(1-0.6)^4) = 49% protection?

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Yay! I missed that. Good find, it's one of the few postings where TS was numerically wrong. [It's clear what he wanted to say, but the numbers are actually more extreme than what he expressed. ]
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MRPs absorb 25% of damage on external modules and 75% of damage on internal modules.

Really??

I thought a single D-rank MRP absorbed 60% of damage to an internal and 30% to an external.

60% is the Outfitting value and the Devs have stated that externals receive half the protection.

Am I missing something...?

 

[ExoForce]

In MWO, if I have a free slot and weight I will mount some light weapon without ammo (e.g. MG) just for additonal 10 HP to absorb the damage and decrease crit chance.
Ive seen some E : D video where some user stacked a lot of obscene modules (cargo scanners?, cannot recall). Attackers were laughing at him but he was absorbing ridiculous amount of damage and laughed back. Integrity boost, exploit, hack, lucky uber-noob???

 

[Sylow]

Really??

I thought a single D-rank MRP absorbed 60% of damage to an internal and 30% to an external.

60% is the Outfitting value and the Devs have stated that externals receive half the protection.

Am I missing something...?

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Hmm. I am rather certain that the numbers at some time were 25% and 75%. But if the outfitting by now states 60%, then i guess my numbers are outdated here.
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In this case, please take my apology, i thought the numbers still were correct.
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[Sylow]

In MWO, if I have a free slot and weight I will mount some light weapon without ammo (e.g. MG) just for additonal 10 HP to absorb the damage and decrease crit chance.
Ive seen some E : D video where some user stacked a lot of obscene modules (cargo scanners?, cannot recall). Attackers were laughing at him but he was absorbing ridiculous amount of damage and laughed back. Integrity boost, exploit, hack, lucky uber-noob???

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Crit buffering in MWO style doesn't work here. The logic behind crit buffering is that when the game rolls for a critical, it also rolls which item in the mechs section is being hit with the damage.
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In ED the mechanics are different. TS already explained it well above. The short version: a weapon hits the ship, then draws a line of a certain length into the ship from the impact point. (In case of explosive weapons, it instead draws a bubble around the impact point. ) If the line/bubble finds any internal, the game rolls if the internal takes the damage, else the damage is applied to the hull.
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So yes, any damage applied to an internal module means it's not applied to the hull. If you fill up your ship with a lot of targetable modules, you could in theory get some additional damage absorbed on them. That being said, i consider that an unlikely scenario. It's much better to bring more HRPs (engineered) and MPRs.
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For a video "proving" that random stuff allows you to absorb much more damage, i'd rather take a look at the games history, especially the P2P infrastructure and how this opens up the game for a number of rather easy cheats. With no central server to do damage calculations, it's not that hard to manipulate memory values. There's been a lot of videos in the history of this game, where ships just ignored damage when they went below a certain limit.
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Mind you, i am not saying that the video you refer to is based upon a cheat. I wouldn't even know which video it is. But HRPs, MRPs and proper engineering give so much more of survivability that "random stuff" just can't compete. So if it does in that video, i would mostly ponder if something shady was going on.
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[Truesilver]

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Hmm. I am rather certain that the numbers at some time were 25% and 75%. But if the outfitting by now states 60%, then i guess my numbers are outdated here.
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In this case, please take my apology, i thought the numbers still were correct.
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No problem!

That being so it seems to follow that the multiplier for damage received is, for externals, 0.7 and internals, 0.4.

So if an FAS hull tank has 2 x D-rank MRP's, it should begin a fight taking 49% damage to externals and 16% damage to internals.

 

[Sylow]

Really??

I thought a single D-rank MRP absorbed 60% of damage to an internal and 30% to an external.

60% is the Outfitting value and the Devs have stated that externals receive half the protection.

Am I missing something...?

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Yea. Did some Google-fu. My numbers were still beta-values and you are right. The current numbers are 60% and 30%. So the forumlas change to:
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DamageToHardpoint = RawDamage * (1-Resists) * 0.7^nMRP
DamageToInternal = RawDamage * (1-Resists) * 0.4^nMRP
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No problem!

That being so it seems to follow that the multiplier for damage received is, for externals, 0.7 and internals, 0.4.

So if an FAS hull tank has 2 x D-rank MRP's, it should begin a fight taking 49% damage to externals and 16% damage to internals.

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You were too fast.. But yes...
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[Ralph Vargr]

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So? I can imagine that a number of internals of a fighter plane are more fragile than its cannon. I see no problem of logic here.

Access Panel 1211 R is where you want to shoot. Main electrical busses, plus a hydrazine APU.