Emmisive Armor for Dummies, please...

[Spoo]

The way I see it the emmisive armor is only any good until your enemy starts using weapons that are more than 80 points per shot.

But it should also be noted that one EA on a ship grants its ability to all other armor on the ship, effectively adding 30 HP (for EA III) to ever other piece of armor until the EA is destroyed.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Spoo:

quote:

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The way I see it the emmisive armor is only any good until your enemy starts using weapons that are more than 80 points per shot.

But it should also be noted that one EA on a ship grants its ability to all other armor on the ship, effectively adding 30 HP (for EA III) to ever other piece of armor until the EA is destroyed.

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Which I did note in the very next paragraph. But even that is of limited use. Once your enemy starts hitting at much over 100 per shot (not very long) the combination of one em value and two or three emmisive armor strutures minus their em values reaches a point where the strength per KT of space used is greater for standard armor.

There is some value I admit in using a single piece of Em armor and several pieces of standarad armor, but cause you get a small reduction of each shot until the em armor is destroyed as you say, but the effect I think is negligeble and very dependant on chance. You have a percentage chance of losing your em armor on the first shot and then you have just standard armor. Which I guess is no worse than my idea, but I don't see much advantage to it either. And you pay the same cost as 5 standard armors for the same KT of that one Emmisive armor.

Geoschmo

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, the default Emissive Armor is fairly weak and becomes nearly useless once cruisers appear and all direct-fire weapons get doubled damage. But a little modding to give more levels of Emissive Armor makes it worthwile much later into the game. Given that the standard APB can become a 195 points-per-shot weapon on a battleship and a 455 points-per-shot weapon on a starbase (!!!) I think that Emissive Armor ought to go to 100 points or more. Just make it expensive enough that it's hard to research early in the game.

[Sinapus]

What would be neat is if you could add a component enhancement ability that increased the emmissive ability. Right now you can make a mount that increases the structure of the emmissive armor, but the emissive ability is going to stay the same.

[tbontob]

Lets say I had the 4 types of armor on a ship
1) Emmissive Armor III
2) Armor III
3) Scattering Armor III
4) Stealth Armor III

Lets say I am hit with a 200 or 300 damage shot.

Is the above, the order in which damage is taken by the armor?

[Baron Munchausen]

No matter which component is hit first, the emissive armor ability subtracts its level fromt he damage first. Then, the lowest damage armor tends to get destroyed first. Once you ae dealing with internal components the situation is reversed and the highest damage components tend to get hit first. These are not 'fixed' rules, though, so a clear prediction is not possible.

[PvK]

Geoschmo, your calculation of value is off. EA III is 50 structure + 30 emissive = 80 to kill, and 20kT size. Standard Armor III is 40 structure for 10kt size. You said armor was 4:1 and EM was 2.5:1, but it's really 4:1 as well, so EM III is never worse than SA III.

If you combine one or two EA with a bunch of SA III, you will probably get the EA effect for nearly all of the armor hits, most of the time. Even in mid-game cruiser combat with large-mount PPB's, that can easily get up to a 50% increase in survivability, which can be worthwhile.

Throwing an EA component in with a bunch of Crystalline or Organic armor can definitely be worthwhile.

EA is relatively expensive, but if you are trying to achieve ship design superiority for some classes, it can help tip the scales.

PvK