Recognized Armor and HE blasts

[sgallaty]

One thing that modern armor is traditionally extremely effective about are high explosive blasts. As we all know, the purpose of a tank is to protect the crew inside. A High Explosive (HE) round detonated on the tank is likely to do nothing,. because the force of the blast is easily reflected.

That said, my suggestion is this :

Non penetrating damage types should be reflected / dispersed by armor on the order of (current hit points * resistance) - in other words, if armor has 100 hitpoints and 50 resistance, the first 5000 damage is reflected and ignored. Remaining damage is applied reduced by resistance.

Also, resistance should significantly reduce penetration and AE linearly by a factor of 1 for each block affected by the radius of the blast. That way, a very large blast works against the user if the target has armor with resistance.

This effect would not apply to penetrating weapons such as projectiles and beams.

Basically, missiles would be much less effective against heavy armor, and especially against armor tricks such as armor skirting, and other tactics that we don't see applied due to the lack of purpose of armor.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

I like the idea of armour that can fall off and bounce around, but I doubt this will be added because of engine reasons. It's one thing

Spoiler

space engineers

does right, armour actually means something. It also helps that there isn't any magical shield barrier as well.

Hell yeah, stug was a good tank.

 

[sgallaty]

Hells yes. Space engineers has a very similar appeal to me that this game does.

 

[Crusade]

.. Armor can fall off if disconnected from the main ship, you just need to enable it.
ENABLE_BREAK_OFF = false

In server.cfg

There's also collision damage in there.

 

[Criss]

Yeah but space engineers can only do that because there are a few weapon types with static DPS values. We need mechanics that can scale with ship size / weapon amount / armor amount.

 

[sgallaty]

The suggestion was intended to create a counter to huge splash damage.

The idea here is that if you have an unarmored ship, someone hitting you with a missile is going to basically blow a hole in your junk. Once they get through your armor, it's going to blow a hole in your junk too.

Until then however, missiles and other HE detonations are going to bounce off of armor with resistance.

With the methods I'm suggesting, a missile with little to no AE (perhaps by allowing missiles to use the punch-through mod to trade off armor piercing for AE)

Ok I'll make that a follow up suggestion -

If you like this suggestion, please consider allowing the use of the punch-through effect on missiles to reduce AE but add armor resistance penetration. That would basically be the user changing the missiles from HE (high explosive) to AP (armor piercing).

AP rounds do little splash damage but will damage the blocks behind the block hit if they penetrate the armor hit.

 

[Calbiri]

Some Armor buffs incoming, along with an entire Armor system (shipwide system) planned alongside the ship HP system (to rid us of the coring tactic.) I'm hoping Schema will have time to implement these shipwide changes alongside the rail system, but that is not seeming likely. The individual armor block buffs should be in the next patch (they are already in our configs for that.)

If the changes in those fail to create a proper feel and behavior in the armor, there is also already a setting in the configs to directly add a damage reduction effect to blocks versus missiles specifically, although this is a setting that is currently not enabled on any block.

 

[sgallaty]

I appreciate the thought given to this. It's a complex system with results that only come from players adapting to and exploiting it.