Armor system function & goal

[MacThule]

We are all seemingly in agreement that armor needs to be strengthened, and there is some extensive discussion about 'how,' I wonder if we aren't putting the cart before the horse.

We can't wisely propose means of improving armor unless we have in mind a clear function for armor. Is the goal for it to "stop" shots from penetrating ships, or to act as a damage reducer on any shots that penetrate through armor?

What is the consensus on the goal and function of armor overall? Are we generally of consensus about it's purpose, or are our ideas about the role of armor divided?
[doublepost=1525068870,1525068303][/doublepost]Personally, I feel that armor improvement should be focused on damage reduction rather than stopping shots. This is primarily in terms of larger ships, and I think that armor development should be focused on larger ships without a lot of concern for ships smaller than something that decently fills corvette/escort role in the context of its server.

First, in reality armor doesn't typically stop shots from high powered weapons. Large ships in scifi also seem to almost always take internal damage from any decent sized shot once shields are down, even if heavily armored.

Second, shields already stop shots dead. Armor for stopping shots would be a bit redundant.

So, for me, I see the goal of armor improvement as being a focus on providing significant reduction to damage from any shot that passes through armor rather than making it capable of preventing penetration of high powered shots outright.

 

[Winterhome]

Armor to me is something that should act as a damage reduction tool in all cases except for in ships where it's layered excessively thickly.

The downside of armor compared to shields IMO should be that it's always vulnerable to damage, but is potentially extremely costly to take into battle, including into battles where the armor tanked ship wins. Large ships in sci-fi always take internal damage from enemy shots when struck by enemy anti-capital weapons, whereas little dinky fighter machineguns do absolutely nothing worth mentioning, save for when they target obviously weak points like windows, or smaller turrets.

Armor on smaller ships should have its place as well, for protecting against astronaut-scale weapons or against micro-fighters and glancing shots from cannon mines or other point defense guns. Either way, armor should realistically be a damage reduction tool when fighting something same-size or larger, and if heavily armored (as-in heavily armored enough that even with extremely high thrust for its block count, it has trouble accelerating), it should act as a way to mitigate smaller, weaker weapons fire, save for from extremely heavy weapons like bombs.

 

[Mork2]

Well with the current armour system you do take damage from capital shots. And fighter shots will slowly work the armour over or medium sized rapid fire weapons. So its currently not stopping damage completely and its possible to erode the armour. It is possible to reduce the damage of smaller weapons to just eroding armour. So the current system is a bit of both just probably needs fine tuning.

My current capital build is move than 35 blocks of advanced armour from the front and a decent amount from the side. Also note that block resistances haven't been added yet and there is modifiers with the defence chambers. So its equal to 70 blocks advanced before the external sloped armour shell (mostly basic) and the block resistances. Remember under the new rules in the dev build all the armour including the rear armour counts in a straight line.

That is enough that I don't have to worry about medium sized ships unless they have sniper cannons or similar which will still do damage. But that's once every 30 seconds. But anything smaller should just be eating the outer layers of basic hull. It won't stop decent sized sniper weapons but it should slow down the destruction rate from smaller higher ROF weapons to just basic hull blocks on the outside. I have a minimum of 5 layers of basic hull equal mass to one layer of advanced but assuming there is enough armour will absorb 5 hits rather than 1.

Put most of your advanced armour around the reactor other centralised systems while my ship is over 400m long the majority of the advanced armour is protecting or internal to a 150m cube. Shields are in front of that so they can soak damage after the shields drop. Stabilisers aren't stuck up the front or back. They are to the sides, top and bottom. Hard to hit from the front but a penetrating sniper shot will kill massive amounts of blocks so I have I think around 28% extra stabilisers than I need. Use massive amounts of basic hull for the external hull shell reinforcing critical zones with advanced and use a sloped hull. Remember that 5 basic hull has the same mass as one advanced so instead of 1 layer of advanced. With a sloped hull and if you angle your ship the amount of armour a shot will have to pass through will increase a lot. It won't stop sniper weapons but you should reduce the block damage you take a lot from smaller weapons.

Critical things like chambers should be oversized to increase your reactor hit points and so the chamber can function with holes blown through them. Put systems in plate like fashion from where the shots are coming from this will result in shots poking holes through the systems but not taking out large chunks of that system.

Also note due to power usage and the regen penalty for large shields that while is possible to put large shields on a ship they will eat quite a bit of power and recharge slowly. Also those large shields end up with large shield bubbles. I have a 100mil shield but its in one bubble covering the entire ship. So your unlike to fit multiple shield bubbles so your armour is probably going to count.

If you don't have decent armour on your capital expect multiple rapid fire turrets to fill you ship full of holes quickly after the shields drop.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Well with the current armour system you do take damage from capital shots. And fighter shots will slowly work the armour over or medium sized rapid fire weapons. So its currently not stopping damage completely and its possible to erode the armour. It is possible to reduce the damage of smaller weapons to just eroding armour. So the current system is a bit of both just probably needs fine tuning.

My current capital build is move than 35 blocks of advanced armour from the front and a decent amount from the side. Also note that block resistances haven't been added yet and there is modifiers with the defence chambers. So its equal to 70 blocks advanced before the external sloped armour shell (mostly basic) and the block resistances. Remember under the new rules in the dev build all the armour including the rear armour counts in a straight line.

That is enough that I don't have to worry about medium sized ships unless they have sniper cannons or similar which will still do damage. But that's once every 30 seconds. But anything smaller should just be eating the outer layers of basic hull. It won't stop decent sized sniper weapons but it should slow down the destruction rate from smaller higher ROF weapons to just basic hull blocks on the outside. I have a minimum of 5 layers of basic hull equal mass to one layer of advanced but assuming there is enough armour will absorb 5 hits rather than 1.

Put most of your advanced armour around the reactor other centralised systems while my ship is over 400m long the majority of the advanced armour is protecting or internal to a 150m cube. Shields are in front of that so they can soak damage after the shields drop. Stabilisers aren't stuck up the front or back. They are to the sides, top and bottom. Hard to hit from the front but a penetrating sniper shot will kill massive amounts of blocks so I have I think around 28% extra stabilisers than I need. Use massive amounts of basic hull for the external hull shell reinforcing critical zones with advanced and use a sloped hull. Remember that 5 basic hull has the same mass as one advanced so instead of 1 layer of advanced. With a sloped hull and if you angle your ship the amount of armour a shot will have to pass through will increase a lot. It won't stop sniper weapons but you should reduce the block damage you take a lot from smaller weapons.

Critical things like chambers should be oversized to increase your reactor hit points and so the chamber can function with holes blown through them. Put systems in plate like fashion from where the shots are coming from this will result in shots poking holes through the systems but not taking out large chunks of that system.

Also note due to power usage and the regen penalty for large shields that while is possible to put large shields on a ship they will eat quite a bit of power and recharge slowly. Also those large shields end up with large shield bubbles. I have a 100mil shield but its in one bubble covering the entire ship. So your unlike to fit multiple shield bubbles so your armour is probably going to count.

If you don't have decent armour on your capital expect multiple rapid fire turrets to fill you ship full of holes quickly after the shields drop.

hmm.... that is quite a lot of armor. I am curious if some of my assumptions have been around how thick armor has been vs how thick it should be. Have you calculated what % of your ship's mass is dedicated to armor, your TTM, and what your total mass will be?

 

[TungstenWall]

Does armor work through spacing? Like if I have an outer layer of armor, and armored bulkheads, will the all count (Assuming the weapon can penetrate enough blocks)?

 

[Mork2]

According to the dev write up the shot will check all the armour in a line through the entire ship. It will compare the shot damage and if high enough will do acid damage on the way in and out if big enough. Otherwise all damage is limited to the first hull block hit. I have tested that it only counts with armour blocks. System blocks on the outside of the hull it will acid burn through if it can to hit the hull. So if you have enough armour only armour blocks can stop shots. Due to checking a straight line through the entire ship outer, inner and even armour on the opposite side of the ship counts. Because of this spaces in the armour don't effect the armour count of stopping acid damage but it does help against explosive radius from missiles blasts.


Total 751k mass still have to add tiny hangers, living quarters, tractor beam, missile magazine.
Reactor 80k mass 10.65% a little under 20mil power
stabilisers 137.8k mass 18.35% 4 stabilisers at 32.7% average each
9 x Chambers 94.2k mass 12.54%
Thrusters 21.9k mass 2.92% TMR 0.3 server speed 50 max speed 62
Shield rechargers 5.7k mass 0.75% 1,145mil/sec upkeep 515k/sec
shield capacitors 25.7k mass 3.42% 103mil
advanced hull 76.7k mass 10.21%
basic hull 239k mass 31.82%
Turrets 98k mass 13.05% From the statistics turrets have their own separate shields and armour.

Core area is 113 wide, 113 high and 129 long including armour 35 adv from front/rear and 9 advanced from the side.
There is a 5 adv wide slab down the centreline from the front to back and 2 adv on each side so angle shots through the centre of the core area can have a lot more armour to deal with. In theory a shot down the centre line of just the core only has to deal with 120 advanced hull before resists.

The external sloped armour belts you want to face towards the enemy is 5 basic deep and 3 advanced from the side but from the direct front it becomes 20basic and 12 advanced as best.

The worst possible shot from the sides into the core area still has to deal with 13k armour before resists so anything less than a 26k shot will take out a single block of basic hull on the outside. From the front at worst a 41k armour before resists so up to a 82k shot. At best it can absorb a far larger hit.

For a little under 50% of my mass you can almost ignore a lot of smaller lasers and cannons after your shields drop. But decent sized sniper cannons will still get through.

With reference from the original topic the armour can reduce damage if thick enough to a single block or be enough to absorb some damage as the shots punch in. The adv armour block will resist at minimum 10 x or more damage than a 100HP system block and that's before resistances.

 

[Raisinbat]

We are all seemingly in agreement that armor needs to be strengthened, and there is some extensive discussion about 'how,' I wonder if we aren't putting the cart before the horse.

We can't wisely propose means of improving armor unless we have in mind a clear function for armor. Is the goal for it to "stop" shots from penetrating ships, or to act as a damage reducer on any shots that penetrate through armor?

What is the consensus on the goal and function of armor overall? Are we generally of consensus about it's purpose, or are our ideas about the role of armor divided?

This is really what should be going on instead of half-baked solutions.

I've gotta say tho:

So, for me, I see the goal of armor improvement as being a focus on providing significant reduction to damage from any shot that passes through armor rather than making it capable of preventing penetration of high powered shots outright.

This won't work in conjunction with instaloss functions like umbilical cords and exploding systems; if a single block penetrating weapon can render a ship inoperable in one hit armor is effectively worthless. There is virtually zero benefit to extending the time between your ship no longer being able to fight and your core overheating.

I think what all the armor threads, with the exception of Nosajimiki fail to address is the imballance between penetration growth over mass (double the mass = double the penetration) vs stopping power of armor (double the mass does not double armor thickness) but it does double the HP your ship has in armor. Simply seeing things in terms of penetration depth gives a skewed image of armor's effectiveness; if it takes 8million damage to penetrate 20 blocks of armor that will be perfectly reasonable for a certain size of ship, but ships do not necessarily die simply from being hit once by a 1 block thick weapon, it takes hundreds of shots, so hundreds of times going through that armor. If you cut shielding and other unnecessary components you can get that level of armor thickness on a fighter/small corvette easily, and those ships would be able to soak up hundreds of millions of damage.

Here's a super shitty graph i made to illustrate the problem:

Simply raising the HP of armor just moves the red bar up, resulting in much higher defensive gains for fighters and just raising the point where large ships gain nothing from piling on armor. Since fighters have such low profiles they only need their front armored, have better power and thrust options relative to large ships so they can afford higher mass percentage dedicated to armor while keeping combat stats high.

There's another problem when addressing armor that gets ignored too much because it currently isn't an issue, and that's armor HP to weapon DPS. Behold, more shitty graphs:

Right now both total armor HP and total DPS of a ship are nice linear functions of a ships mass. (You can pile on more armor but at some point your ship can't move anymore so there is going to be a stable sensible point where ships have a good ballance) If we implement something like the damage reduction based on armor depth then the amount of damage armor will soak up explodes, and ships would take hours of sustained fire to kill from a similar sized ship.

The problem therefore lies entirely with penetration depth, not with damage or HP. IMO the simplest solution to this is simply to remove players option to set weapon impact width and tie it entirely to the damage of the projectile. Impact width is a detriment, you'd only want it after you have more than enough damage to penetrate armor and most of your target, let's start treating it like a detriment and use it to offset weapons penetration depth.

If doubling a weapon's damage improved it's penetration depth 50% and impact area 33% each shot would need to go through many more armor blocks in order to get the same penetration depth, essentially lowering weapons ability to penetrate to better fit the curve for armor thickness.

Of course this can all get countered simply by waffling your guns and stacking the outputs behind each other, so it would need another balancing effect. I would like to see a passive effect that lets armor reduce the damage of all incoming projectiles by a flat amount per block; something like -3 damage per block, applied only once per projectile. Like that if your ship has 2000 of these blocks it would reduce all incoming fire by 6000, which would render projectile stacking extremely inefficient. It would also open a lot more balancing options since you would longer need the flat DPS across the board since faster weapons are hurt more, you could give small weapons a large DPS boost, something that's been requested a lot, plus it would deal with a lot of the spam currently in the game (no more 1000 missiles per second swarmboats)

It also creates a clear distinction between armor and shield tanking: Shields regenerate HP, so they can mitigate incoming damage based on their regen rate, but if shield tanks get hit by multiple ships, like a 5v5 fleet battle, the incoming DPS will quickly outpace shield regen, but armor tanking reduces the incoming fire by the same amount regardless of how fast it is; if you're being hit by 100x50000 damage projectiles per second for 10 seconds, a shield tank with 100k regen will mitigate 1 mil HP over that period, but an armor tank with 20k damage reduction would mitigate 1000x20k = 20 mil HP. We'd have a much better ecosystem for ships instead of the current all-ships-must-be-equal nonsense.

 

[Nosajimiki]

This is really what should be going on instead of half-baked solutions.

I've gotta say tho:



This won't work in conjunction with instaloss functions like umbilical cords and exploding systems; if a single block penetrating weapon can render a ship inoperable in one hit armor is effectively worthless. There is virtually zero benefit to extending the time between your ship no longer being able to fight and your core overheating.

I think what all the armor threads, with the exception of Nosajimiki fail to address is the imballance between penetration growth over mass (double the mass = double the penetration) vs stopping power of armor (double the mass does not double armor thickness) but it does double the HP your ship has in armor. Simply seeing things in terms of penetration depth gives a skewed image of armor's effectiveness; if it takes 8million damage to penetrate 20 blocks of armor that will be perfectly reasonable for a certain size of ship, but ships do not necessarily die simply from being hit once by a 1 block thick weapon, it takes hundreds of shots, so hundreds of times going through that armor. If you cut shielding and other unnecessary components you can get that level of armor thickness on a fighter/small corvette easily, and those ships would be able to soak up hundreds of millions of damage.

Here's a super shitty graph i made to illustrate the problem:

Simply raising the HP of armor just moves the red bar up, resulting in much higher defensive gains for fighters and just raising the point where large ships gain nothing from piling on armor. Since fighters have such low profiles they only need their front armored, have better power and thrust options relative to large ships so they can afford higher mass percentage dedicated to armor while keeping combat stats high.

There's another problem when addressing armor that gets ignored too much because it currently isn't an issue, and that's armor HP to weapon DPS. Behold, more shitty graphs:

Right now both total armor HP and total DPS of a ship are nice linear functions of a ships mass. (You can pile on more armor but at some point your ship can't move anymore so there is going to be a stable sensible point where ships have a good ballance) If we implement something like the damage reduction based on armor depth then the amount of damage armor will soak up explodes, and ships would take hours of sustained fire to kill from a similar sized ship.

The problem therefore lies entirely with penetration depth, not with damage or HP. IMO the simplest solution to this is simply to remove players option to set weapon impact width and tie it entirely to the damage of the projectile. Impact width is a detriment, you'd only want it after you have more than enough damage to penetrate armor and most of your target, let's start treating it like a detriment and use it to offset weapons penetration depth.

If doubling a weapon's damage improved it's penetration depth 50% and impact area 33% each shot would need to go through many more armor blocks in order to get the same penetration depth, essentially lowering weapons ability to penetrate to better fit the curve for armor thickness.

Of course this can all get countered simply by waffling your guns and stacking the outputs behind each other, so it would need another balancing effect. I would like to see a passive effect that lets armor reduce the damage of all incoming projectiles by a flat amount per block; something like -3 damage per block, applied only once per projectile. Like that if your ship has 2000 of these blocks it would reduce all incoming fire by 6000, which would render projectile stacking extremely inefficient. It would also open a lot more balancing options since you would longer need the flat DPS across the board since faster weapons are hurt more, you could give small weapons a large DPS boost, something that's been requested a lot, plus it would deal with a lot of the spam currently in the game (no more 1000 missiles per second swarmboats)

It also creates a clear distinction between armor and shield tanking: Shields regenerate HP, so they can mitigate incoming damage based on their regen rate, but if shield tanks get hit by multiple ships, like a 5v5 fleet battle, the incoming DPS will quickly outpace shield regen, but armor tanking reduces the incoming fire by the same amount regardless of how fast it is; if you're being hit by 100x50000 damage projectiles per second for 10 seconds, a shield tank with 100k regen will mitigate 1 mil HP over that period, but an armor tank with 20k damage reduction would mitigate 1000x20k = 20 mil HP. We'd have a much better ecosystem for ships instead of the current all-ships-must-be-equal nonsense.

Problem with trying to control weapon width is that you just end up back in the multi-gun drilling meta. I'd just fire 100 cannons designed to cut through your armor, then one big shot in the back to eat systems away.

 

[Raisinbat]

Problem with trying to control weapon width is that you just end up back in the multi-gun drilling meta. I'd just fire 100 cannons designed to cut through your armor, then one big shot in the back to eat systems away.

Of course this can all get countered simply by waffling your guns and stacking the outputs behind each other, so it would need another balancing effect. I would like to see a passive effect that lets armor reduce the damage of all incoming projectiles by a flat amount per block; something like -3 damage per block, applied only once per projectile. Like that if your ship has 2000 of these blocks it would reduce all incoming fire by 6000, which would render projectile stacking extremely inefficient. It would also open a lot more balancing options since you would longer need the flat DPS across the board since faster weapons are hurt more, you could give small weapons a large DPS boost, something that's been requested a lot, plus it would deal with a lot of the spam currently in the game (no more 1000 missiles per second swarmboats)