Hi AcePalarum,
In answer to your question - I personally have not determined the relationship of X power = Y shockwave damage
The Uni-T Doomsday Generators were created using Imperial Methods. (i.e. put a DoomGen on a ship and launch it at an Imperial Ship, rinse repeat.)
But I would be rather curious to see the results of your research - it would help me tweak the different Doom gens
" . . wheres the KaBoom ? There was supose to be an Earth shattering, KaBoom . . "
Thanks!
I’m looking forward to trying the other mods too, just scanning the posts here the ships are beautiful. When I first got the game I started thinking how cool the Yamato would look in it, and now I know.
Bummer- But thanks for the tests. I tried one very simple test by throwing the rockwall.fx shader into a Crusader-class cruiser hull config file, but nothing happened. I think I have a substitute that may work using the pulseglows, but I’d rather do more tests to see if the shaders will work. I look forward to your results! 
Simple testing on hull size-to-shockwave size ratio has been completed:
Results seem to indicate that the shockwave radius is equal to the exploding hull length.
And remember that A) the distance is measure outward from the center of the exploding ship; and B) the opposing ship will only be damaged if its center is within the appropriate area. So tiny suicide ships - regardless of how much power they produce - are unlikely to destroy monstrous enemies unless the hull designs bring some exterior part of the big ship relatively close to its center (this would appear to be the one place where the Empire might actually have an advantage).
Tests have not yet been performed on the power-to-damage ratio, since as stated before, the proper amount of power for a suicide ship is P = Plenty.
An additional bit of interesting - I know the notion of visible fighter turrets has been bandied about and as I recall it was determined you can’t do it (aw poo). But a brief test of this theory provided an intriguing result.
Here are my test fighters. (I have a “Testing…” race to try out stuff that may or may not work.) These happen to be equipped with rockets, and they appear normally, as simple white ellipses:
Now here is the same fighter loadout with the rocket removed and replaced with a test weapon with turret size = 10 (same as the fighter size):
Rather odd, wouldn’t you say? But interesting enough that I thought I’d share. Who knows, maybe someone will use this effect to do … something nifty. 
Ace, thanks for sharing that. It’s quite a surprise to see how the pseudo-turrets retained their full length but had their height compressed by approx. 50%. Curious, indeed.
It’s a good thing this was not widely known back in 2009, or the modding history of GSB would have likely been radically different… 
Yeah, imagine Randy knowing this…
…oh man, so many huge explosions… lol
But nice finding, i was wanting to know this some time ago 
Multi-Hardpoint Turret limit/flaw:
In case this hasn’t been covered previously, check here. There is a problem with multi-hardpoint turrets when you try to put one with too many “gratuitous” hardpoints (i.e., fakes) onto a ship hull.
If a review of this guide shows that this tip is redundant, I’ll delete it. In the meantime, enjoy.
Wonder if you could make a torpedo out of a ship…
Obviously they’d start out “in flight” not launched.
It would be possible using high damage area of effect weapons, though I’m not sure if there’s a way to force it to ram other ships…
Maybe if the weapons had 1 range it would move into range and then explode?
If you check Praetorian Industries v1.2a you will find your answer. You need two main components a DETONATOR and EXPLOSIVES:
How To Make a Selfdestructive hull:
1- Detonators:
The role of the detonator is to self destruct the ship as fast as it enters in firing range, or in other words, ship shockwave range. To do this you must use a modded Parasite Flak Cannon. Use the Minefield detonator module as example:
-Operative range: The shockwave radius must be a little bit higher than the maximun firing range, this will guarantee the self damage effect.
-Damage: Always higher than the kamikaze ship combined Armour and Hitpoints, ALWAYS. There are two ways to do this; the first one and potentially OP is to use ships with standard HP values (150-300) but this would result on the complete obliteration of ANY kind of ship inside the detonator range, wich is BAD.
The second one and most realistic is to make a ship with EXTREMELY low Hitpoints… The detonator will have a damage never higher than the highest vainilla fighter HP, then, when the detonator hits a fighter scuad, you MIGHT (not WILL) destroy them, and then your kamikaze ship will explode, causing a larger Shockwave that should take out or damage (may vary depending the EXPLOSIVES specs) any ship inside the detonator max range, or in other words, the ship shockwave range. The armour and shield penetration of the detonator is 100% always.
As i’ve said, the detonator main role is to kill your ship, generating a high damage shockwave, wich is explained below, its secondary role is to damage fighters.
Remember to make the detonator (flak cannon) bullet/bolt FX invisible (veeeeeery small or unexistent at all)
2- Explosives:
Their role is simple, they are the main frigate/cruiser damaging component, composed by a powerful power generator. The power that it generates will be the exact ammount of damage that will deal the shockwave on its strongest moment. The “power generator” will be our explosive, with a power generation value AND a power consumption value, the first one ALWAYS sightly higher than the second one, making it work as a standard power generator but giving an increased shockwave damage to the destroyed hull.
Remember that the total ammount of HP of your hull must be lower than the weakest moment of your DETONATOR shockwave damage, if that doesnt happens, there will be no kamikaze ilusion!
My Praetorian Minefields work exactly in that way, as fast as any ship enters in firing range (or proximity detection range) it “detonates” itself to death, killing or damaging everything around it. You can get different results from using different hull classes.
Remember to use large sprite sized hulls (ie, tiny ship inside a giant sprite of empty space, and compensate it giving to the ship a larger hull size) (this is the reason of why my minefields consume so much pc requeriments, wich is its main flaw…)
I hope you liked this small guide 
what programming languages would i have to know, and what files hold the info for how the status bars work?
to mod the emp shield to have a status indicator like the weapons do, displaying the health and the amount of emp weapons that keep hitting it, along with emp shield stability
I am sorry to say that the code status bars are built into the executable and hence can not be edited by modders.
Forum maintenance.
For anyone out there on the Interwebtron™ who has just discovered (or even RE-discovered!) this gem of a game from 2009, the information in this guide is simply so vital to the process of mod-creation for it to be lost to the ravages of space and time.
I wish for it to endure…hence this re-pinning at the top of the “Gratuitous Modding” sub-forum for GSB_1_.