Hi folks, long time player with Kobayashi Maru and NanoFXv2 mods. This has been a regular graphics glitch I've had with the game for as long as I can remember, where once a ship has taken visible damage, whole sections of it just disappear. While not game-breaking, it certainly spoils the flavour and breaks the immersion.

Does anyone know what causes this and how to stop it from happening?

Does it happen only with specific ships or for all ships?

Basically for individual ships the amount of visible damage is controlled by the file under ships/
For example for the Ambassador class is file scripts/ships/Ambassador.py:
[i]"DamageRadMod" : 0.75,
"DamageStrMod" : 0.75,[/i]

You can tune these values, 0 disables visible damage which was done for e.g. the borg cube.

I'm afraid we have not done much work on the damage in kobmaru. Also I always played with visible damage=off.

Have you tried deleting the .vox files under data/models/ships/*specific ship*?

I have seen quite a bit of Z fighting on the ships, this is due to problems with newer graphics cards vs older cards. This was written for DirectX 8 I think. This means the skins of the ships tear away and show the damage texture underneath. Its because the card can't decide which texture is closer to the viewpoint as they use hidden line algorithms, so it thinks the surface of the ship is nearest then the internals are nearests all in sub-seconds so it renders the textures in-out-in-out- so you get flashing and tearing effects. There is no cure apart from running a 2000s graphics card and drivers.