Sub-Systems

Basics
There are several sub systems, which may be specifically targeted in order to achieve an aim (like disabling your opponents engines to allow the rest of the fleet to catch up), or to be more tactically apt then firing at the enemies general hull, by say, taking out shields first if the ship regenerates shields very fast.

Eligibility
Most larger ships have sub systems, and by large ships as in ship size of 15,000 plus is typically needed to have targetable sub systems. The most basic ships have four sub systems - power, weapons, engines, bridge - but there are several more different types. Weapon or shields sub systems are known as hard points as they directly determine combat effectiveness of the vessel. Any ship with a sub system is either a special ship or a capital ship.

Manual Targeting
Manual targeting of sub systems includes you choosing which sub systems of a particular ship to attack,

Automatic Targeting
If you do not choose which targeting of sub systems to shoot, yet you have a default order of attack on that ship class, your automatic targeting will follow you default order of attack.

No Targeting
You can set your ship to not target a specific ships sub systems; you can also set this as a default order of attack.

Engines  - Health: 35% of hull
The reason for the creation of sub systems, engine disability adds a whole new layer to DSOTG. The percentage health of the engines determines how slower the ship becomes - above 50% damage, any 1% damage reduces the ships engine power by 0.5%, after 50% damage, this is increased to 2% damage. This leads towards an ending of 0% engine power with 0% engine health. If you had 10% engine health you will still have 20% speed, if you have 80% engine health, you will still have 90% engine speed.

Shields - Health: 30% of hull
You can target the enemies shield sub systems - systems, because larger ships may have back up shields. Because shields regenerate faster when deactivated, a ship may recharge its main shields faster then actviating them in combat by having secondary shields. This is known as Shared Shielding and a hypothetically infinite amount of shields can be installed on ships, but with smaller and smaller damage absorbant capacity over the highering number of shields. Taking the enemies shield health to 50% disables them, they will no longer regenerate, but keep working until at 25%, when they deactivate fully reducing shield capacity to 0, then at, at 0%, the shields are destroyed and must be fully repaired at the generator.

Weapons - Health: 30% of hull
Your weapon sub system contains all of your weapons. This is each of your weapons types amount, times that weapon types damage, added together into a big collection of overall damage, x 7.4, to get the damage of the weapons. Since weapons are already devalued by 0.5% by each 1% hull lost, damaging the weapon sub system adds on to this affect by the same amount, possibly neutralising all weapons by the time the hull is only 25% health.

How the system works: Each percentage of weapons reduces the weapon effectiveness of the ship by 0.5%. This damage is then split and 50% done against the main hull, leading to another 0.25% weapon effectiveness decrease, so in effect, each % damage done to weapons system, reduces weapon effectiveness by 0.75%. It is important to note that this only affects the main, default weapon effectiveness.

[Removed Feature] Power Generation
Arguably the most important system, power generation includes the generation of power onboard vessels. If destroyed, or severely damaged, it can lead towards the fate of death for a ship. When no ME, or power, is generated, other systems eventually run out of juice, and the ship is defenceless. Think suffocation in the human body. Power generators often have high health. For each % of damage done to the generator, 0.5% damage, statically, is done to the amount of energy is generates. This effects all systems - and the addition of the 50% transferred hull damage means weapons systems are particuarly effected. For example, if the generator of 1000 health is reduces to 50% health, the weapons only function at 75% of maximum, and then 500 damage is transferred to the 2000 hull of the ship, reducing it to 1500. This reduction of 25% of health, leads to another 12.5% loss, ending up with weapon on 62.5% working rate. This shows the extreme importance of the generator. At 10% health, the generator goes into critical mode and is forced to deactivate, at 0% health, the system is destroyed and must be fully repaired to function again.

Bridge - 50% of Hull
Your bridge defines who controls the ships ordering ability. The bridge is important because the bridge, upon destruction, leaves nobody with control of the vessel and nobody any ability to give orders until it is repaired. Capturing the bridge will give you ownership of the ship if the ship does not have a second bridge (aka engineering), or has one, but which you have captured, or destroyed. To capture the bridge you must beam crew over to the bridge which defeat any security resistance and the bridge crew themselves and have atleast one survivor. Destroying the bridge will not give you control of the ship and will instead mean you have to send across repair crews to repair it before you may take control.

Your bridge health is subsequently quite high and its protection must be the main aim of your crew to prevent enemy capture.

Engineering - 20% of Hull
Engineering manufactures special weapons as well as serving as a second bridge. Engineering can manufacture:

Missiles - up to X damage as shown by the sub-system details.

Anti-Plantary Nuke - requiring expensive materials.

Engineering can help you maintain control of the ship even if your bridge is destroyed or captured, because you were the initial owner of the vessel in question.

Advantages:

 * 1) Doubled armour effect means that many enemy weapons cannot concentrate attack on your sub-systems easily
 * 2) Sub systems inflate the overall health of the ship (but at the cost of lowered effectiveness)
 * 3) [1.8]Sub systems are repaired 2x faster then hull, so you can recover from enemy damage quicker.
 * 4) [1.8]Sub systems are cheaper to repair then the hull.
 * 5) [1.9]You can further fortify sub systems by the addition of sub system shields, at the price of ship size. This can further increase the effect of 1 and 2. These shields are not very effective.
 * 6) [1.8]You can choose where your energy goes; and therefore you can increase energy when needed, like to increase weapons & engines to catch up and destroy an enemy ship before it leaves range; smaller vessels have static speed, damage, protection.

Disadvantages:

 * 1) You can be tactically exploited by your enemy, like targeting of engines and then bird-of-prey assaults.
 * 2) You can effectively lose a vessel just by not being able to fire back.
 * 3) [1.9]The cost of shielded sub systems is largely unfeasible for most players and requires a engineering and shield sub system.

Maintaining Sub Systems
You can maintain your sub systems directly from ship control, including:

How much crew to have at each sub system, and how many crew to assign to 'Crew/Other [Security]', and 'Repair Team'. Changing a crews occupation will require 1 day of training. Repair crew will be able be assigned to a sub-system to repair that sub system at version [1.8], else they will repair the hull until it is fully repaired then move to the most damaged sub system % wise and repair it to full then repeat.

With engineering hardpoint will come dictating where to put energy on ships.

Transferred damage to hull through damage to sub systems
The hull will take 50% of the damage sub systems will. This means if you do a sub system 1000 damage, the ships hull drops by 500.

Armour difference & protection via hull
Because sub systems are deeply embeded within the ship, they have twice the armour that the ship has.

Sub systems can therefore not be shot by most light weapons and some medium weapons.