For a recent project I needed fractured rigid body objects to interact with each other without shattering all at once.

As there is no built in solution for this sort of behaviour as of now, I added the possibility to access the "ghost" physics-option (Bullet). This allows to work with seperate collision objects without interfering with the physics calculation.

When recording the physics simulations to IPOs it's also necessary to take care of child objects so I added that as well.

A patch for Blender 2.49b and the test file for the example below can be downloaded here.

_{(hover over the image to see animation)}