Wiki / Ship sections

Ship sections

A ship in Nova Protocol is not a monolithic model - it is a root entity with a handful of section children. Each section is mounted to the hull, carries its own mass and health, and contributes exactly one behavior to the whole ship. Knock a section off and the ship loses that capability but keeps flying on whatever is left, which is what makes damage feel local: shoot the turret off and it stops shooting; take out the controller and it can no longer steer.

Taking a ship apart

You do not have to shoot every last section off a ship. A hull carrying less than a twentieth of the structure it was built with collapses: it tears itself apart, and you watch it go. The outermost sections blow off first, each bursting its own debris; the ones they were holding follow, and the wreck peels inward frame by frame until nothing is left and the ship is gone. A scenario can author a tougher ship to hold together further down, so a capital takes more dismantling than a fighter.

A ship coming apart is still a ship for those moments. Its guns keep firing until the sections carrying them blow off, so a kill you have already earned can shoot back on the way down.

That is a different thing from being out of the fight. A ship that has lost every weapon, or the flight computer that aims and flies it, stops fighting but keeps its hull - it drifts as a derelict until someone finishes it, or does not.

The health bar on your combat lock's readout measures a target against the hull it was BUILT with, so it only ever falls as you work through the sections.

What damage looks like

A ship never changes shape from being shot. Sections keep the shape they were built in right up to the moment they die; then the whole part comes off the ship, tumbles away, and the wreckage clears after a while. Nothing on a hull is eaten away, and nothing turns red.

What you read instead is two different things at once.

How far gone a part is. Every section fractures as its own health falls: dark veins first, then a glow through the cracks when it is about to go, then cold and burnt when it is dead. Each part is graded on its OWN health, so a stripped skin plate reads as wrecked while the hull it was bolted to still looks untouched. Past about a third gone, the parts that carry machinery start throwing sparks, and a damaged drive's exhaust runs short and unsteady - guttering, never quite out. A hurt thruster still pushes exactly as hard as a fresh one; the plume is telling you what happened to it, not what it can do.

Where it was hit. Every hit is remembered where it landed, and that is what throws material off the spot you actually shot rather than off the middle of the part.

Which looks a part wears is decided by whoever built it, so a modded section can crack, spark, gutter, or show nothing at all.

Cladding is the exception to "nothing changes shape". A clad ship wears plates over its structure, and the plate that stops a round dies and comes off, leaving a hole onto the bare hull underneath. That is a piece leaving, not a part being eroded.

Rocks are the other exception, and they carve for real - see Shooting rock.

The sections

Pick a section for the details - what it does, why it matters, and how it ties into the rest of the ship.

Variants

The standard unit-cell catalog at a glance - every child page carries the full per-kind stats, plus the per-craft semantic parts (noses, wings, pods, fuselages). A section weighs the space it fills, so the unit cells all weigh the same and health and the kind stat are what separate them.