Ship chassis

When your shields and armour have been breached, your chassis and components will take damage simultaneously.

Once your chassis gets to 0 your ship will explode.

Ship chassis decays just like any other component. Therefore, once you've died lots of times and your maximum hitpoints get to a low level, you will find your ship explodes almost as soon as you lose shields and armour!

When creating a chassis the Shipwright is able to experiment on hitpoints and mass. Typically they will be experimented for maximum mass; the exception being the POB ships (YT-1300 etc) which currently have just under 5m mass (not sure if this is a bug or not).