How to make emissive armor useful again

[Ed Kolis]

OK, since I don't seem to have the energy to actually work on my own mod, I'll just sit around and throw out ideas to anyone who wants to incorporate them into their mod:

You know how emissive armor becomes useless because of weapon mounts, and that it can't be fixed by emissive armor mounts that increase the armor's emissive rating because mounts can't do that? Well, we can fix that! How? Well, just do what you did before you had mounts to mess with - make up more components! Take a look at this:

20 kT Emissive Armor, 30/40/50 HP, 10/20/30 emissive
80 kT Heavy Emissive Armor, 120/160/200 HP, 20/40/60 emissive
320 kT Ultra Emissive Armor, 480/640/800 HP, 30/60/90 emissive

Fiddle with the numbers however you want, of course, but the idea is simple - if you want lots of emissive ability to block those Heavy Mount weapons, you'll have to sacrifice a lot of space in your ship to get it!

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, this is another (messy) possible solution. But since mounts cause other balance problems as well the best approach would be to scale mounts back first. And make more tech levels for Emissive Armor with increasing ability.

You can make armor mounts that affect the total damage resistance of the armor, you know. Just use the family restriction. It makes pretty good sense to have the Emissive ability controlled by tech level (materials science) and the armor strength controlled by the ship size (engineering scale) anyway.

[Krsqk]

I think something modders would die for (and maybe have asked for) is a generic Ability X Val 1 Percent and Ability X Val 2 Percent lines for mounts. Then, we could upscale emissive armor and its emissive ability for larger ships (just an example, not necessarily a great idea).

[Pax]

My vote is with Krsqk.

[Thermodyne]

“How to make emissive armor useful again?”

Was it good at some time in the past?

[Andrés]

Just like the "shield mount" works now, but a millon times more powerful, I like it.

[Krsqk]

"Was it good at some time in the past?"

Well, in the past of SE3, it was. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

[PvK]

This won't surprise anyone, but personally, I like the way Emissive and other armors work in Proportions 2.5.1.

One of the types is armor plate, which requires a mount that scales the component to the hull size. This component is not given the "always hit first" armor ability, but it is given a fairly high structure (based on tech/expenditure level) and it has a moderate level of emissive ability. Thus, it both blocks some hits with a "leaky" effect, and also absorbs some damage from every hit. Combined with the other armor types in Proportions (EA, armored structure, etc), and the fact that small ships remain useful in the late game in Proportions, I think it works out rather well.

PvK