Emissive Armor?

[PvK]

Ok 20 megs in my example (not 2 megs - my goof), but my example was also rather too big. 10,000 ships is off of what really happens in SE4 by a factor of 10 or 20, and 1000 components per ship is also off by another factor of 10 or 20. So, realistically, the most you would generally need would be say ~1000 ships x ~100 components/ship x 2 bytes = 200,000 bytes. A drop in the bucket even of a 32MB RAM computer (about the minimum needed to reasonably run Win95). And, as I mentioned before, damage might be more efficiently stored as a list of partly-damaged components, rather than the partial-damage state of all components.

Also, it would not have to search all of the components to find the right component, because they would be part of the ship data - if a ship is hit, you know which ship it is, and will never have to search the components on other ships to find the right one to damage.

PvK