I have recently been playing around with purchasable Power Plants using Adoxa's EngClass plugin. My goal was to add a power plant booster of sorts that could be destroyed by killing a ship CollisionGroup, so I parented the hardpoint to the ship part. This turned out to not work, as the power plant would remain on my ship, although it disappears from my equipment window as the hardpoint does go missing.

I asked someone with a slightly better understanding of the game's inner workings to have a look, and he concluded that EngClass actually attaches the extra powerplant to the ship's Bay, or root, and the hardpoint it is placed on is basically purely cosmetic. This means that it's impossible to use conventional 'hardpoint destruction' methods like collision groups and fuses to destroy one.

Could Engines/Power Plants be attached to the hardpoint specified, allowing them to be 'conventionally' destroyed?

I can't say I'm incredibly surprised, thanks for answering.

I believe HpEngine01 is the only one that matters, but I might be wrong. But yeah, I'm aware. It's the power plants I am interested in unfortunately.

My solution - attach shieldgen with constant power draw to your collision group. Power effect of this shieldgen will be deactivated after loosing of collision group.

Main problem for me - it's working for ship at once. You need to buy shieldgen again after repair of collision group.

I did this trick in my survival mission. At the start of mission you have limited power. After N seconds you'll got full power of your ship.

We're currently using a negative power draw shield generator as a workaround, yes. It's not elegant and a little bit unintuitive for players, as they'll get the audio notification "Shield Destroyed" when the collision group bites the dust. Doesn't help that a major other collision group governs the actual shield of these ships, making it so players may get confused and think they lost their actual shield when instead they lost a portion of their powercore recharge.