Wiki / Ship sections / Torpedo bay

Torpedo bay

The torpedo bay fires guided torpedoes: they home on the combat lock and deal blast (area-of-effect) damage on detonation, so where turret fire is precise and pointed, torpedoes are about zoning and catching clustered or fragile targets. A torpedo is a section like any other, so it inherits the same physics and mounting rules as the rest of the build. The bay itself cracks and sparks as it is worn down, and keeps launching until it dies.

Shut until it fires

The tube fills two cells of the build - twice a unit section's volume, and twice the mass - and its muzzle is sealed by a six-petal iris that opens for a launch and for nothing else. Holding the trigger folds the petals out and the ejection waits for them: a quarter second on the first shot, then the rest of the salvo leaves on cadence through the held-open door. Release the trigger and it winks shut again.

The iris is honest. A safed bay keeps it shut and so does an empty one, so an open iris on another hull is never decoration - something is about to come out of it.

How a torpedo runs in

A torpedo is dropped, not fired. The bay kicks it clear on a cold charge and the drive catches about six tenths of a second later, a few body lengths out - lighting a torch inside the hull that launched it is how a ship kills itself. For that window the torpedo is cargo: no thrust, no guidance, no fuze, and nothing that can be hit. It cannot be shot down, and it cannot touch the ship it is leaving.

Then it homes. Once the drive catches, the torpedo steers on the combat lock with proportional-navigation guidance - turning toward where the target will be - after an arming gate clears. It curves through gravity wells like everything else, and from that moment it is a body the other side can shoot at. Not cheaply: a warhead carries more hit points than the hardest single PDC round can deliver, so an intercept costs a short burst rather than one lucky tap. A scripted battery may author far tougher ordnance, which then takes sustained fire across the whole closing window. How a defending battery picks and holds its torpedoes is on the Turret page.

The warhead will not go live in your lap. Two conditions, and the torpedo needs both. The first is the ordnance's own: half a second lived, or fifty meters off the muzzle. The second is your ship's, and no bay can author its way out of it - the torpedo has to be clear of the hull it left plus the warhead's full blast radius. A standard 300 m warhead leaving a small boat arms about 324 m out; leaving the 194 m development carrier fixture, about 494 m. Below that distance a torpedo is inert: it will fly into the target and bounce off as a dud. That distance is the shortest shot the bay has. It is why a torpedo is a standoff weapon and a turret is not, and it is why an AI hull opens its bays a kilometer out rather than knife-fighting with them.

The warhead bursts just before contact. Against a locked ship or rock the fuze fires about thirty meters from the nearest part of that body's skin. That near-contact margin keeps the physical torpedo from becoming a dud on the hull, while the warhead still delivers almost all its rated pressure and puts the crater on the target. Fire one at a bare point in space instead - a scripted volley, or a torpedo whose target dies mid-flight - and it bursts a half-radius short, because there is no surface left to reach.

The two run-ins

A bay is loaded with a torpedo type. The two shipped bays are Torpedo Bay (Serpent) and Torpedo Bay (Lance). They share the same tube, warhead, blast, and six-round rack; only the run-in differs.

Serpent - the assault torpedo. Once armed it runs in on a terminal weave: a slow corkscrew laid over the guidance solution rather than instead of it. Point defense fires on a lead solution - where the torpedo will be when the round gets there - and a weaving torpedo is never quite there, so the defender spends roughly three times the ammunition on the same intercept and only kills it on the doorstep. The weave fades out on the final approach, and the torpedo arrives dead on the aim point - which is also the defender's cleanest shot at it. It pays for that with speed: the Serpent cruises slower, so it takes noticeably longer to arrive and gains ground on a fleeing target far more slowly.

Lance - the bombardment torpedo. No weave at all: the bare intercept, flown straight, and the faster cruise of the two. It is the cheaper one to shoot down and does not pretend otherwise, which is exactly why it is what you fire at something that cannot answer: it gets there sooner, and against a ship running away it closes half again as fast as a Serpent. A defender meeting Lances is a defender whose point defense works.

So the Serpent is what you fire at something that shoots back, and the Lance at something that cannot - against a target running at 150 m/s the Lance closes half again as fast. Which type is in the tubes is the difference between a salvo that costs a defender a magazine and one that costs it four. The campaign uses that on purpose: the first gunship that fires torpedoes at you fires Lances, and the flagship at the end fires Serpents.

What a warhead does to a hull

A torpedo blast reaches every collider inside its visible radius. Distance from the blast to that collider's centre sets the free pressure: full at the centre, falling linearly to zero at the edge.

Ship structure then gives that pressure something to travel through. For each section, the game traces a line from the blast centre. A section that survives its incoming pressure stops the wave and shields every section behind it. A section the wave destroys lets 65 percent continue. Existing holes cost nothing, so repeated hits drive a breach deeper into the same place rather than spreading damage evenly over the hull.

A warhead is charged for the material it really destroys, and it marks the hull once however many sections it reached. Two torpedoes on one flank are two wounds; one torpedo over forty sections is still one.

Only actual ship sections consume penetration. Cladding and fixtures still take pressure, and sections can shield them, but a thin decorative plate does not attenuate pressure travelling toward something behind it. Several warheads detonating in one fixed tick see the same initial structure: they can combine to remove the outer layer, but cannot use the new hole until the next tick.

The scope spaces its layers out so you can read the falloff. A real torpedo goes off against the skin, so the outer sections of the ship it hits sit at the sharp end of that curve, not out at 100 m.

The result scales through geometry rather than a ship-size bonus. A thin small craft can still be gutted by one direct hit. A deep capital loses a local bite - the sections around the impact, not the ship - and keeps fighting until later hits open it farther or push it below structural collapse. A section destroyed at any structural depth leaves a real hole. If that cut disconnects the graph, the controller-bearing hull keeps ship identity and healthy detached components drift away as inert, damageable wrecks.

Variants

Both bays share every number but the torpedo type. Ordnance hp is what point defense has to shoot through per torpedo.