Just come across some code which has made my life a lot easier! It checks the magnitude of collisions, so if a ship hits anything I can see how 'hard' the collision was (ships, walls...anything!!). My weapons scripts automatically deplete the energy property of the target object hit so that is handled too. The only problem I have is that only the parent object registers hits, so children act as ghosts.

zero3growlithe> sounds cool! I take it the other ships lose energy too in the collision? Get a shield power up and slam into them!