Implode or Explode?

[Time]

Anyone have an idea about how the game determines if a given ship will implode (and just destroy itself) or explode (damaging everything in a radius around it), when it does that?

Does the ordinance matter? more missiles or more beams?
or is it mean the engine was hit (causing the explosion),
instead of a cumulative amount of damage done to the armor and hull?
I think it's this last part (engine hit), but, I wasn't sure if the weapons on the ship, mattered.
Also, is there a way to reduce the likely-hood of an expolsion by, for example, not having so many missles?

An in game example would be: a missle Dest launching its missles, only to be destroyed by whatever means (beams, gyro, torp, etc) and exploding in a radius, destroying its own missles and damaging friendly ships and fighters.

[on_FiRe]

i have the felling that destroying the ship drives has a higher probability that it explodes, but ive also seen raids and incoming emg-missiles destroying a target without an explosion.

in the end i think it is all random, just like raids.

[Gusset]

My understanding has always been that if the engines are taken to zero, whether it's via raid, system damage (AP weapons or Ion Pulse Cannons), or they are taken to zero by the same hit that took a ship's structure to zero, then the result is a "big boom". If the structure is taken to zero and the engines were still above zero after the hit, you get a "little boom".

In support of this hypothesis is the observation that I've never seen an ion pulse cannon cause a "little boom", just a "big boom". Same goes for an armor-piercing hit that does not finish off a ship's structure but gets the engine. You can see this in the fraction of a second after the shot hits, when the damage bars for the ship are changed to reflect the hit: the component damage bar is reduced, and so is the structure damage bar...the structure is still above zero, yet the ship is blowing up.

Working against this hypothesis: I believe I have, once or twice in 10 years, seen a raid destroy a ship via a little boom. I chalk it up to a bug, as it was something that happened literally at a rate of about 1 in a thousand. (Yes, I've seen thousands of ships blow up due to raids. Pathetic, but true.)

[Time]

Since this appears to be the case, then the only way to reduce the likelyhood of an explosion, would be to just upgrade your engines (Larger engines taking more hits to destroy).
And of course, increasing beam defense.
Thanks.

[Tifi]

The amount of damage an engine can take is dependant upon two factors only:

• The size of the hull the ship is based on.
  If the ship in question has the 'Reinforced Hull' special.

That being said.
A ship can be destroyed outright simply by destroying its drive by any means.
The result of this 'death' does depend on how the damage landed to a certain extent, but also has some degree of random variation so any kind of damage *can* in theory produce any kind of 'death', its just that certain outcomes are more probable for certain events than others.
Although you must also remember that no particular 'death' is a given 100% certainty for any given situation (hence raids, EMG or Ion Beams producing 'Implosions' - albeit rarely.)