The damage model, end to end, read off the authentic surviving RP source
(VTV.cpp, WEAPSYS.cpp, RIVET.cpp, DEMOPACK.cpp, RPPLAYER.cpp) rather than
inferred. Companion to the BT doc of the same name; the shared engine
layers are the same and only summarised here.
The finding it is built around: RP's damage model is a physics and score
economy, not a subsystem-failure simulation. One armor pool at zone 0, no
criticals, no per-zone cascade. Collision armor is not authored at all -
it is calibrated from the vehicle's own mass and MaxImpactSpeed so that a
full-speed hit spends exactly the whole budget - and deathConstant
converts damage to score at that same exchange rate. Every point of
damage is simultaneously a transaction between two players, through a
two-second revenge window. Martian football, not a mech duel.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
