[Suicide Junkie]

You really have only 2 types of armor.

Basic "Inert" armor, and the advanced armors (plus the racial-based super armors.

The inert armor has 3 variants. Light, medium and heavy. Light is for cannon fodder ships. Heavy is for ships you want to Last and be easy to repair. Medium is in the middle.

Physics and manufacturing do NOT get you new components, they merely upgrade your existing ones to have another hitpoint or two each, or be a few bucks cheaper.

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The advanced armors; each name change brings more damage reduction.
The other two techs simply provide cheaper/more hp as above.

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Look at it from the research POV, not the component POV.

You NEVER need a Heavy Armor IIIC.
You just need Heavy Armor. Period.

Once you have the base component, you're set. The manufacturing bonuses are completely optional, though handy if you're building a lot of that type of armor and/or have some research points to burn.

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To summarize:
There are only 5 armor components, in two categories.
Inert armor
Structural supports: Admittedly not very useful. Bottom of the barrel tech.
Light Armor: Hard to repair, very leaky, lots of hitpoints.
Medium armor: Average
Heavy armor: Easier to repair, less leaky, less hitpoints.

advanced/passive armor
Pretty much one Category under different names for B5 flavour.
Each name change is +5 ability or so.

Primary: You can only install one.
Secondary: You can only install one, but it stacks with the primary.
Additional: You can add as many as you like, stacking with each other and the primary. (obsoletes the secondary component)

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I'd be happy to go through and set the tech descriptions to be more technical if you like.

I can also edit the names of the armors to simple roman numerals if the Roman-alpha scheme is confusing. That will mean that your Heavy armor VI may have different stats from the enemy's Heavy armor VI, but to both players it will be the 6th level researched (although likely in different tech areas).