Sabres were extremely weak to explosives as well... but I think 4.85 has proved it's possible to have destructable components without the explosive damage weakness. It may very well be possible to have only one or two spots weak to explosive damage, I remember Vanilla Battleships had weak spots in their engines.
Most ships go 79/80 on speed thats slow enought in a fight, The thruster gives speed and in a pvp fight you cant go faster than a thruster anyways. Destroy the thruster and poof 80 is max speed.
Sounds like we already have a destructable hardpoint. Maybe have it effect the cruise, but thats what cds are for.
My issue is if a component like engines are going to be a target, it really defeats the point to have armor and shields. Pew, pew, engines down, pew pew turrets are gone, ok 4 mill now. I anticipate that is what will happen. It will defeat the point of armor all together. Then you are dead in the water, call a tow, cause thats all you can do.
It sounds good. Just not for Freelancer at its current stage.
It can be done but currently there's no-one willing to devote his time to that, as far as I know. Myself included.
You can do a new ship with destructible parts, you can disable the engine that way so that thruster is all you have, and you can keep the ship alive when it happens.
Check the starport resources (or the old TLR archive) for details, if you want, it's all in there for you to read and make your first try.
Destroyable engines is definetely possible, I played a mod some time ago where if you shot a cap ships engines enough, they would explode, and be forced to go at 10-15-ish speed.
Also did a fair bit of damage, making them softer targets.
That mod also added a kick-ass timer explosion to the rhino. Took like 10 seconds to die.
Well for startesrs, as my Kusari Battlehsip blows up, I also seem to notice that when exploding while cruising, as the engines blow apart from the main body, the engines keeps cruising moving while the body stays behind...