Weapons

Weapons are objects, that players can set up to deal damage to other objects or players. Every block in Space Engineers has a total integrity or “health”, this is integrity is determined by the sum of its parts so if a block is filled with Steel Plates and Metal Grids it’s fairly robust compared to Interior Plate. It’s important to note that most weapons have a maximum range, this maximum range is often 800 meters – if the weapon’s round or missile has traveled past that distance it will no longer damage anything. Although it is possible to construct specialized guided torpedoes that can travel well beyond 800 meters, since they are technically ships themselves.

Damage Mechanics

The amount of damage a block can sustain is entirely dependent on the total integrity of all components that went into its construction. This functions as its health/durability. In addition, the type of damage received is also a factor, bullets usually cause no deformation, while kinetic collisions and explosions do. Certain components like Steel Plates have high integrity, others are weaker such as Interior Plates. For example, a Light Armor Block’s integrity can be found using the following:

100 (the base integrity of a Steel Plate) x 25 (the amount of steel plates the a Light Armor Block has at full strength) == 2500 HP

With this we can work out how much damage a single block can sustain before it’s destroyed, let’s say it’s being shot with a Gatling Gun. The amount of rounds it will take to fully destroy a given block can be determined using the information provided in the following table. A Gatling Gun round uses 25x184mm NATO Ammo Containers which are powerful rounds, at least compared to 5.56x45mm NATO Magazines. A simple division is needed to figure out the exact amount of rounds before the block is destroyed.

2500 (integrity of the Light Armor Block) ————————————————- == 41.667 rounds 60 (per round damage to blocks from 25x184mm NATO)

From this we can see it will take at least 42 rounds to completely destroy a light armor block, while doing this calculation for 5.56x45mm NATO it would seem it takes 209 rounds for it to fully destroy the block (or about 7 magazines).