Rams occurring at distances they should not is definitely a problem, but that's more of an issue with changes to networking and latency compensation, as well as ship closing velocities having gotten out of hand (relative to what the former two could handle..there is no way to make ~1km/s closing velocities with a 400ms ping always look good from both perspectives). The collision damage reductions were made well before these were so prominent and helped turn collisions from something to be avoided into something to either be ignored, or actively sought out, even if there was only a small advantage in ship mass.
Ships apparent locations should more accurately reflect their actual locations
and high speed collisions should be something to be avoided, even for the larger/tougher object.
For the record, I've listed the major changes to collision damage that I recall below:
Beta 3.00 (the pre-release one)
- Dropping collision damage to about 3/8ths of what it currently is - Should deal with a lot of problems of insta-death collisions (90% sure they did this largely in response to collisions with Federal Fighters in CZs that were using a bugged fuel mass calculation making them weigh millions of tons for collision purposes...if anyone recalls the specific changelog/version they addressed that issue in, please remind me).
1.1.0 & 1.1.01
- Collision damage update:
- Damage is now calculated at both ends and each apply half, it should no longer be possible for one party to miraculously escape undamaged from a collision
- Changed the mass/velocity to damage calculation, it should now be more consistent and harder to damage large ships with small ones, even at high speed
1.1.02
- Collision damage tweak - Restore the check that prevented multiple lumps of damage from the same collision. Also make the damage split based on mass slightly more exaggerated
I'm pretty sure they also messed up glancing blow collisions at some point, probably in 1.1.0. Collision damage should be more significantly affected by relative change to momentum than just mass/velocity...it's not how much energy something has, but how much is absorbed by the impact. I know the game takes this into account to some extent, but I still see plenty of collisions where ships slide past each other, losing almost no energy, and still take damage comparable to them colliding dead on.