As of right now, fighting against other ships in Star Citizen generally ends when a ship either side of the conflict explodes in a blossom of fire. But sometime in the future, that metric is going to change according to the devs in the MMO’s latest video digest, which is less about burning a ship down until it splinters and instead focusing on simulating general damage that can cripple a spacecraft, or “time to disable” in other words.
There are a few moving parts to this new ship-to-ship combat style, including rendering physicalized damage with the game’s Maelstrom tech and the deepening of ship component interplay that’s planned later, but the overall idea is that ships will be taking direct physical damage that can render it wounded but not quite dead, meaning players will have to consider whether to break away and attempt to repair later. The system can also grant players the ability to render a ship inert in …