Hull damage
Hull damage is structural damage to a ship, distinct from damage to its equipment. A ship can have a disabled system while its hull is sound, or working equipment while close to destruction. REPORT SYS describes both conditions, but reports hull damage in words rather than showing the exact 0-100 internal value.
Taking damage
Weapons, mines, wormholes, ion cannons, the Enforcer Planet, and collisions with planets or the galactic barrier use different calculations. Some weapon damage is scaled by the target ship's damage factor (DAMF), and raised shields can absorb or reduce some hits. The resulting structural damage accumulates on the ship. A hit can also cause a separate system failure; structural damage by itself does not mean that every system has failed.
At 100 or more structural damage, the ship is destroyed on the next ship-state update. The brief interval between the fatal hit and destruction can matter to kill attribution, but ordinary repair cannot save the ship: the destruction check runs first. Maintenance explains how damage below this threshold heals during normal play or with a planetary crew.
Describing damage
REPORT SYS and eligible ship scans describe a ship's current hull damage in words rather than displaying its exact value. The hull value is stored as a floating-point number. For these displays, both classic GE and ge-next first calculate (int)(damage + 0.5): the fractional value is rounded to the nearest whole number, with half values rounded upward, and that integer is passed to damstr().
For a nonnegative stored hull-damage value, the actual ranges are:
| Stored hull damage | Classic GE | ge-next 0.3 onward |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to less than 0.5 | no | no |
| 0.5 to less than 1.5 | no | negligible |
| 1.5 to less than 11.5 | very light | very light |
| 11.5 to less than 24.5 | light | light |
| 24.5 to less than 49.5 | moderate | moderate |
| 49.5 to less than 74.5 | heavy | heavy |
| 74.5 or more | severe | severe |
ge-next 0.3 added negligible for a rounded damage value of 1; classic calls both rounded 0 and rounded 1 "no" damage. For example, stored damage of 1.4 is negligible in ge-next, while 1.5 is very light. Damage below 0.5 still displays as "no" in both versions. These words describe a ship's total hull damage in reports and scans. The same formatter is used for many individual hit messages, but those callers sometimes truncate a calculated hit amount instead of rounding stored hull damage; their word boundaries can therefore differ. "Severe" has no upper limit in the formatter, but a ship reaching 100 hull damage is destroyed on its next ship-state update.
Fatal damage before destruction
In ge-next, a ship that reaches 100 or more structural damage is treated as already doomed. New IMPULSE and WARP requests, phaser and hyper-phaser shots, torpedo and missile launches, scanning, shield and cloak commands, and several countermeasure launches are refused. Automatic shield, cloak, and recharge processing is also skipped. This prevents the ship from fighting or escaping during the interval before its destruction update.
These refusals generally reuse damaged-system messages: for example, a phaser shot reports phaser damage and a scan reports damaged tactical equipment. They do not set those systems' stored damage states. The messages mean a ship in the process of destruction cannot operate its equipment, not that every system was separately struck. Reports and some helm input can still be used before the destruction update, but cannot prevent the ship's loss.
See also
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