battering ram vs planks

[Tishlin]

Originally Posted by ChaseSpeculaas You want a lesson in physics? Yeah, you'd screw up his ship pretty bad ramming his side like that, but he'd still come out on top, IRL. Your bowsprit would be caught between his two masts, rigging tangled... you'd be pinned. He could fire away at you all day and you couldn't fire back. So even in RL, you really don't want to do that, though for different reasons.

Not to mention, in all likelihood, your masts going by the board and your bow stove in.

[Tishlin]

Originally Posted by jayfe This is way overboard. Between two ships of relatively equivalent sizes, it should be rigging damage on both and a bit of armor damage on the target. Maybe a few crew. However, they should look at size - a 3-deck SOL should cream a tiny sloop if the sloop is dumb enough to get in the way.

No, in all likelihood the SOL's underside planking would be stove in as it rides over the sloop, leading to flooding and an eventual foundering.

[Aeiedil]

Going with a lot of what has been said already I know but my 2c

In beta when ramming would cause damage I was tending to suicide charge when up against multiple NPC's, firing off broadsides at other targets and then ramming into another enemy, was a bit silly really so I prefer it when ramming doesn't cause damage

One solution could be a minor cooldown on boarding after you ram or are rammed to simulate the crew of each ship being thrown about from the impact, possibly with a general upgrade that allows crews to brace for impact and so reduces the cooldown by a % or something, make it so that if you plan to include bumpercars/ramming in your tactic that you have to equip for it

On a note about ramming demolishing the rammed ships structure/armour/sails etc due to realism, as has been said in reality the ship ramming would likely come off as bad or worse than the rammed ship and it would be a suicide tactic used.

[metus]

Sounds like the transfer of momentum is already there. i think they should just increase the effect to avoid the full-stop as described by the OP.

in regards to damage, i'd say keep no-damage to sidestep all exploits.

[P. Pete]

You generally don't stop dead when your in a ship with any decent momentum.

Obviously a larger ship will tend to stop a smaller ship more rapidly then a smaller ship will stop a larger one.

eg: a 1st rate SOL will push a Hercules frigate quite some distance if he had some speed up.