Damage & Toughness, in general

[D-Car]

Under current mechanics, the only way to make any kind of a ship take a solid hit is to cram it full of as many shield generators as possible and hope your regen rate is greater than your opponent's DPS (that is, if you're building anything bigger than small). Arguably, there's no reason whatsoever to use armor as a defensive option since a 5x5x5 cube of shield generators will give you 10,119 shields while a 5-thick wall of hardened hull blocks will give you 2,000 HP's of effective resistance before the wall is breached.

Consider the following:
- We all know anybody who can do some math will quickly shift toward shields and buy the cheap hull blocks for cosmetic effect
- We also know there are two kinds of hull blocks (not "armor" blocks, for some reason) with different effective HP amounts.
- Small ships can't fit a useful defense aside from their basic agility, which cannot be enhanced except by staying really small so they can keep that agility.

You all know where I'm going with this - we need better armor so it can begin to be a viable option. Of course. But, how much meaner and more damage-resistant seems like a good fit? Even assuming the game would allow it, we could all plaster our ships with faction blocks (51,100 effective HP's each), but the cost of armoring a ship would balloon very quickly and only the cruellest weapons would be able to end a fight in any kind of reasonable time unless the attacking pilot has absolutely excellent aim and he knows which spot to attack on his target.

So, assuming ship size restrictions are never put into effect and weapon systems are never rebalanced ... how tough is tough enough for an armor block?

 

[D-Car]

bump

 

[KuramaFox]

I agree with the fact that armor needs to be buffed a good bit. Even the basic \"tier 1\" armor.

It would also give the repair things more use, since armor with heightened durability would be more likely to have damaged sections before getting destroyed. Meaning you could repair them with such systems via a repair ship, rather then just replacing the missing parts that got one-shotted by enemy blasters.

It would also be cool to have such variation present in the battle damage scoring your hull. Plus, your armor really should hold up for more then just 1 or 2 shots. At least until pirates get ahold of your Omni-Blaster_500 ship. Then all bets are off and you will just stand by the shop sobbing that you never should have imported that blueprint. But that is a story for another time.

 

[Sypher]

I greatly agree with the fact that the hulls need to be buffed, as to how much, I think maybe to the point a normal hull piece can take twice the punishment the current \'hardened\' hull can. I do tend to go towards the shields, mostly because they tend to regen themselves. We already have the techno-beam, but an auto-repair feature would make buying hulls actully useful. As of now, just to repair them you need to have a separate ship to drag around that would serve as a major target to the attacking ships.

 

[Joe12473]

I would love to be albe to buy a factory unit called a compressor, where i could take a grey hull and compress it, so it is, say 1/5th of its original height, but same witdh and depth, and same mass, and hp. then i could stack 5 of them in the place of one uncompressed hull, and i would give me more Hp, and balance it by having 5 times the mass of a normal hull block. I\'d like to see it.

Also, possibly more types of armor, like reactive armor, plastic, ceramic, and maybe electrically charged, all having advantages and disadvantages.

Lastly, there does need to be some sort of autorepair as Sypher suggested. I would like to see either a module that would go on a station that whatever in its field would start getting repaired, or an addition to the bobby AI that would set it as a repair drone, doing all of the finding damage goodness for you.



Thats my 2 cents.

 

[Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW]

Armor needs a buff, but that will just compound the existing problem:ships get too damage-resistant too fast and everyone who wants to be able to punch a hole in anything ends up with five 50 meter antimatter cannons. To actually let armor shine, shields need a massive nerf to how they work so you can\'t just make walls out of the damn things, which is a part of why they\'re so much better: you need to actually put armor in strategic spots.

To start with, you shouldn\'t be able to expose shield generators to the outside with no downside. It\'s just stupid in almost any sci-fi to put the shield generators any closer than they need to be to the death lasers. Maybe shields should be reworked to only shield blocks around them instead of the entire ship. They\'d need to actually be put in smart places and would be best put just below the surface instead of actually BEING the surface. Plus, short of a really good design, there\'ll be shield weakspots that might mean people will need to use armor again.

At the very least we need something that can make armor a better choice in some way besides energy usage.