Ship Fire Mechanic

For 0.8.7 I'm now almost done with implementing the ship fire mechanic.  Primarily fires are started by shooting ships with the Heated Shot ammunition type, which was added in the current 0.8.6 build.  Similar to creating a leak on impact or injuring crew, the chance of creating a fire is based on the stats of the ammunition fired.  Larger heated shot have a higher chance of causing a fire, but even the smallest has a pretty good chance.  Some other ammunition types also have a very small chance of starting a fire as well.

A ship can have up to 3 fires at the same time.  A fire at the bow, midship, or the stern.  To fight fires you assign crew to the firefighting role, which functions similarly to the other damage control roles.  work is applied to fighting a fire every few seconds automatically.  Similar to fixing leaks, your crew focuses on fighting 1 fire at a time, working on them in the order that they appear.  Fire pumps can be installed in your ship's equipment slots to improve the efficiency of your crew fighting fires (competing currently with the bilge pump equipment, which is used for improving efficiency of pumping out water from leaks)

While leaks start at a specific size, where larger leaks take more crew effort to fix than smaller ones, fires instead all start off small.  Fires though grow in size, requiring more crew effort to put them out.  This means that while your crew is fighting the first fire, if a second fire is started it will grow in size unchecked until the first fire is put out.  You will find it is important to quickly put out fires. 

Fires randomly spawn additional damage to your ship, with worse damage the larger the fire.  At launch of the feature with 0.8.7 this will be limited to spawning new ship leaks, but it is planned to also destroy equipment and cannons installed in the ship when that feature is eventually implemented.  It is not yet decided if fires will result in crew injuries, but that is a possibility as well in the future.

Your ship will only have up to 1 fire for each of the 3 locations, so unlike leaks you can't get inundated with large numbers of fires (beyond the 3).  The player will be able to see the fire and smoke at the correct location of the fire, both for your own ship and other ships in the game.  These fire and smoke effects grow in size with the intensity and seriousness of the fire, so will be a good visual indicator.

So this should look cool and add a bit more depth to the combat in Broadside: Perilous Waters.  Have fun with it.