armor doesn't scale as a system.
Ah. Yeah. True. But that doesn't detract from the fact that the armor scaling based on thickness would still help to mitigate it's paperiness. Just because an idea doesn't work exactly one way doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Besides. Armor being paper basically only happens at really large ship sizes with really large guns (500m+) or ships that are designed to basically just be glass cannons. So, I'm starting to rethink my stance that armor is still paper in the first place.
But, back to Nosa's system. People told the devs it needed to scale like a system and the devs said quite succinctly "No. We aren't gonna do that. Not because it's a bad idea, but because the calculations to be constantly recalculating massive amounts of armor is too much." So they came up with a linear approach. And, while the devs system currently just adds up AHP and is still rather papery if built improperly, Nosa's system allows armor to be stacked for reasonable damage mitigation without being too underwhelming or too overwhelming.
Under Nosa's system my 3-layer composite armor consisting of Basic, Advanced, and Advanced, at 9,518 damage absorption would be more than enough to stop a weak cannon shot from another ship it's size. (At around 150m). For reference, my ship is overly built for defense and has two 50:50 Cannon:Missile cannon weapons that deal 11,000 damage each at full charge. So, that 3-layer composite should stop the bullet at the first or partway through the second layer as a lot of the damage is soaked up by acid. Then, if you combine that with spaced armor it's gonna take a good few more shots to get through an enemy ship, but you could now protect decently with far less advanced armor+space armor than previously required.
TBH, I think Nosa's system might be slightly *too* good. But my ship could still be torn apart by a better designed cannon constructed as an integral part of the ship. Say, a 100:100 cannon, or larger. But that ship - assuming it's the same size - would then have to make sacrifices to armor or speed, ect.... in it's own right in a way that currently doesn't make sense. The "If armor is paper then why build armor at all, why not just stick a massive cannon in the nose and be done with it?" issue is solved if armor isn't trash. And Nosa's system solidly achieves armor not being trash anymore.
Edit/Addendum:
I'm working entirely off of dev build numbers here, because dev build numbers are the only relevant ones.