Station Compartments

[Kourtious]

Stations are giant floating structures with multiple barricades to keep the station structurally sound. Now I am going to talk about enemy stations in particular. All stations have internal health, but is weak when compared to a ship with internal health. In fact, most destroyer or higher class ships have higher survival rate while standing still than a station. Why? Because ships have armor+movement+internal health. I'm not saying that ships should nerf their internal health, but I'm thinking stations should have higher survival rate than a ship.

To make stations more durable, I suggest splitting medium-large stations into compartments/sections. Afterall, stations are made of compartments and bulkheads. In addition, each station has at least one core section. Upon losing all of its cores, a station would self destruct, so make sure you know where the cores are. The information can be gathered from many sources. You just have to look for them or learn from experiences(and cheat when starting the next game).

A-hum!
A station may not necessarily be split into a pie, or circles, or etc. This is for creativity's sake. However, I believe all sections of the station should be target-able. It also logical that if a compartment has weapons(more than one), then the weapons should be active as long as the compartment is functional.
(these numbers are made up for demonstration purposes)
A small station. Ex: Centauri Warlord Camp: 1 Section Only/1 Core.
A medium station could have 3 sections.
A large station could have 5 sections.
A massive station could have 12 sections.

Rotation, stations need to rotate or these sections would be utterly useless. Why? Because Internal damage would be split per compartment(though most likely buffed by 25-50%) and making a station much easier to destroy.

Lastly, stations should be able to be destroyed in many ways. Because if you can't destroy it one way, there has to be another way to do it. For example, a station could have a stability health bar that can be damaged, if a player attacks an already destroyed section. This is similar to the internal health system we have currently. Or a station would be destroyed once 75% of the compartments are annihilated(this should only apply to large+ stations).

[shanejfilomena]

I like this..

the weapon / compartment relation is great - but it could also apply to ships : tarhget the engines / weapons : if your not strong enough to survive the fight you could disable the enemy and escape ( enemy has to dock to repair before hunting you again or resuming it's patrol if you ran away)

taking on a disabled ship is difficult, active ships are not dockable : but it could be added that they become dockable when disabled .. then you have the Boarding Parties - like idea
(http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod&id=723 ).

Damaged stations should also be Boarding - capable / dockable after 70% damage so you could fight for loot, or simply gain kills .. and the station repair itself ( StationRepairRate ) so you still have something to play with later if you did not destroy it completely

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Cores/sections should do different things. For example, a big station could get a subspace tracker sectionthat improves its guards' and turrets' rate of fire within a certain range of it. Take out this section and the station can't fight back as well.

There should be reasons to damage but not destroy stations, either because they are too strong to destroy entirely or for other reasons. This is already sort-of present in the game with sung slave colonies, where you want to destroy the turrets and central core but avoid the slave habitats.

Destroying an antenna cluster could prevent a station for calling in reinforcements. Ares shipyards could get a hangar core that spawns ships; destroy this core and it stops spawning ships or only spawns damaged ships. Destroying a Marauder station's hangar could decrease the frequency of pirate/marauder patrols in a system. Destroying Penitent stations could make Oracus curse you and force all your Domina powers onto cooldown, which would be an incentive to only destroy the HARASS emitter if you're escorting ships past the station. You could raid Ferian ore depots without destroying the entire station; destroying a depot would give less ore and still spawn a warrior, but it wouldn't pursue you beyond a certain radius.