This discussion of cap ship damage and my comments in the turret thread has raised some questions: How detailed will the damage model and ballistics model be? Since day 1 of the public announcement of Pioneer, it was stated that weapons will be individually destructible and you can have your guns shot off. What other parts of the ship will be individually destructible and will there be a detailed damage model to show visible weapons effects? How will the ballistics of the various guns/missiles be handled? Will each shot be tracked individually, a la Max Payne or a hardcore sim like Il-2?
I ask these questions because I just finished playing a session of Il-2. In a given round in Il-2, you will see everything from leaking fuel to smoking, dead engines, to complete fuselage and wing structural failures. In terms of Pioneer, I think it would be a little ridiculous for you to completely vaporize a Kilrathi corvette in a lightly armed transport. But it would be cool to get in a lucky shot to the cockpit or engines and be able to make your escape.
Thinking about the way WC1 handled cap ship combat, it seems to me that cap ships were essentially boss characters - more HP and more ways to shoot at you. All you have to do is shoot them more for them to blow up. Certainly, a lot of that has to do with the technology limitations at the time, so I think we can do better now.
I suppose that the point of this long winded post is that I would like to see more than a massive explosion when I destroy a ship. In fact, I would like to see disabling ships in interesting ways (destroy an engine and send them spinning off into space, etc.) as often as complete destructions, especially when only using guns.
On a related note, and as you can tell by the rest of this post, I would be very interested in the "sim" aspect of the game being played up a bit. Stuff from the books and Claw Marks about power settings, sensor readings, etc. would be very cool to see. I'm not saying that you should need to read a thick manual to be able to take off or anything, but we've been hitting L and blasting away with guns for years now, so some added depth would be a welcome addition in my mind.
That said, being a programmer myself, I realize that some of these things would be quite a challenge to implement. I respect any decision you guys may or may not make about suggestions like these. But this is the suggestion thread, so I thought I would throw them out there.