Questionable components.

[Suicide Junkie]

Not quite.

Crystalline armor more or less halves the damage you take.

If you have piles of crystalline armor, and the enemy is using small weapons, it is possible to become invulnerable.

Crystalline armored ships are only invulnerable if the enemy's weapon does less damage than it would take to destroy one unshielded crystalline armor component, and the crystalline ship must have twice the crystalline ability of the incoming damage.
Otherwise, the damage will build up and eventually destroy a crystal, starting a snowball effect, as the crystalline effect weakens.

Gritty details Example:
EG: 100 damage weapon hits a ship with 50 shield points remaining, 5 partial hull damage points, and 3 crystalline armor.
The 5 partial damage points are added to the weapon damage to get a total impact damage of 105 points.
The shields absorb 50 points, and are reduced to 0.
The remaining 55 damage hits the crystalline armor, doing 55 damage to the hull.
The crystalline effect of the 3 CA's totals 45 points. Since 55 > 45, only 45 points are channelled into the shields.

End result:
Shields are down to 45 points, and the ship has 55 points of hull damage.

Further hits by that weapon will only increase the amount of hull damage suffered, and soon one of the CA's will be destroyed.

[ August 15, 2002, 22:56: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]