[Fionn]

I'd hoped somebody more knowledgable would respond as I've been asking the same questions to myself, especially about syncronized troop drops.

I have noticed one thing about ramming. I prefer for my badly damaged vessels to do whatever they can in their Last moments, plus I'm a naturally vengeful SOB, so I tend to ram a lot.

Based purely on what I've been seeing, remaining movement ability, size of the ramming ship, and the amount of damage it has already taken (modelling, I suppose, that damage components may have been blown completely off already or will at least crumple easier, absorbing some of the impact) all seem to affect the damage. I'm sure there's a random componet too, so I can't really tell you if what I'm seeing is accurate or is just seeming that way because of random flucuations.

I haven't yet had a ramming ship survive but I put that down to the fact I'm always using ships that are already on their Last legs to ram with. Because of that, I can't tell if the size of the ship being rammed has an effect on the damage taken by the ship doing the ramming.

I hadn't thought about a specialized ramming ship, aside from the cobalt warheads. Since it *seems* like remaining damage capacity has an effect and armor has a (fairly) high DC, the armored ramming ship might just work. Since the armor would be damaged first, it would even have a better-than-average chance of surviving.

I can even postulate new components (a Ramming Prow, perhaps, and a Reinforced Structure which might act as extremely cheap armor for absorbing only ramming damage) that'd flesh out the design. I'm not sure you can add a totally new component like that, with effects not already coded in, from editing the text files . . . or am I wrong? Even so, MM might consider adding it someday.

Hmm, I'm going to have to go play with ramming so more, I think.