Space Combat Warfare, pt 1: damage mechanics

I started another space combat game project in an attempt to create an even more detailed simulation of the various effects found in space warfare. This time I had no intentions to ever finish the project, its goal was more just testing my hand at writing a high-quality real-time simulation. Ships are assembled from blocks, which in turn consist of a grid of mass elements that run a detailed temperature and ballistic simulation. Source code for the project can be found here: https://vollikainen.visualstudio.com/_git/space%20combat%20warfare

A video demonstrating hypervelocity (10 km/s) rounds impacting a ship's steel  armor. The projectile is so fast that it essentially explodes on contact with the armor, scattering shrapnel in all directions.

Here is a test of a whipple shield design, where thin Aluminium plates separated by vacuum are able to stop a large projectile impacting the armor at a massive velocity. The projectile is vaporized on impact with the first plate, and the following plates are able to stop the resulting high-velocity shrapnel due to the projectile's energy spreading over a large surface area thanks to spacing between armor plates.

Here's a video demonstrating the lasing and heat mechanics. On the left a transparent armor plate made out of diamond is able to resist ablation from the laser due to its excellent heat conduction and transparency spreading absorbed energy over a large area. The larger block is made out of aluminium and has no such advantages, so it is quickly ablated despite part of the beam's energy being absorbed by the diamond plate. The mass grid's temperature is visualized in false color to better display the heat transport mechanics in action.

Finally here's a full ship model being impacted repeatedly by railgun projectiles. The armor is again a whipple shield layout, with an outer aluminium plate backed by a pressure plate made out of tungsten. The ship's hull is made out of softer polyethylene plastic, so it is very weak to direct hits from the projectiles. Even though the armor can't stop the impacts completely, it is strong enough to vaporize the projectile and therefore limit and spread the damage to the ship's hull over a larger area. You can see a drastic difference when a projectile hits the hull directly, creating a huge crater in it.