Armor Thoughts

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

---

3) Alter Emissive Armor to work slightly differently. As it currently works, you are either completely protected -- immune to whatever weapon is being used against you -- or it doesn't help you at all. If you set the ability of the armor high enough to stop most weapons then it's too powerful. But if you don't set it high enough to stop most wepaons then it's nearly useless except against wimpy enemies with far lower tech than you have. I have proposed a change in how Emissive Armor works and I'll repeat it here: Set a TOTAL limit per combat turn on how much damage emissive armor can absorb, not just a "per hit" limit. So, even if no single hit exceeds the limit it is still possible to 'overload' the armor with a massive amount of low powered fire. The 'immunity' problem is then much less of a problem and Emissive Armor can be given a decent damage level. This can either be a second setting in the ability itself or a total of the capacity of all armor on the ship -- which would be best since this gives larger ships a reasonably scaled advantage AND provides a gradual loss of ability as armor is destroyed. When the limit is reached, armor would be damage normally. As your plates of emissive armor are lost, the total ability decays and it becomes easier to further damage the armor.

---

An alternative, is to make it like Classic SE3 Emissive armor, which negated the FIRST X points of damage.

Then a 30 point EA3 would take 10 damage from a 40 Damage meson bLaster, and would take 270 damage from a 300 damage missile salvo.

[Marty Ward]

SJ,
Found out about the repair time the hard way. I had 65 of them on a ship that survived a tough fight. Took a long time to repair that ship!
Good idea you had, glad Dev used it in his mod.

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

---

Found out about the repair time the hard way. I had 65 of them on a ship that survived a tough fight. Took a long time to repair that ship!

---

That's over a year unless you had full repair tech (or multiple repair stations)!

I've designed ships with well over 250 components, and boy are they slow. They never die though!

[Lisif Deoral]

Does anyone use emissive armor?
I think it's almost useless, since damage from fighters isn't applied with every single shot but summed up for each attack routine, and (almost) every other weapon causes more damage than its damage tolerance limit. Or does the ability to ignore damage of 20 points or less stack? (i.e., 20 points with 1 armor component, 40 with 2, 60 with 3...)

[capnq]

I use regular Armor a lot, to fill in leftover space in hulls that can't hold another shield or weapon. I think it adds more survival value than the backup control bridge. It also works against mines and unstable warp points, which shields don't. Small Armor also seems to help units survive more than Small ECM, from the little I've experimented with it. I don't use the advanced armors much, and mainly use Stealth Armor if I do research it that far.

------------------
Cap'n Q


The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft

[rdouglass]

I use armor a lot in early games, but not so much in late games. However, I still use some on EVERY Attack or Scout ship, especially ones I want to ignore the damaging Warp Points (shields do not protect). I agree With Marty W - the defensive bonuses for later armor is very attractive. IIRC it does stack so you get 30% defence with both (Scattering and Stealth).

[Suicide Junkie]

Still, that 30% bonus comes at the price of 80kT of space!

four (unmodded) shield regenerators would give you 80 regen per turn: enough to ignore dual CSM 5!