Regenerating armor

[Panpiper]

It occurs to me that there is probably some way of using Astrotech Module repair beams to regenerate armor blocks 'while' they are taking fire. At the moment, as far as I know, there is no way to get a turret to autofire an Astrotech Module's repair beam at a damaged block. (Wouldn't 'that' be nice?) However that does not completely preclude their use.

Imagine for instance a ship with a 50x50 nose that it would point towards it's opponent. The loin's share of the damage that would hit the ship would hit the nose. If that nose was built with a 50x50 plate of advanced armor, and behind that was a docked platform autofiring a waffleboard of independant repair beams, one at each armor block, would we not in effect have a self healing armor plate?

Note that this would in my opinion not imbalance the game at all, as a large enough weapon could easily obliterate an armor block in one shot. Even if the opponent had no weapons that could do it in that single shot, the quantity of repair would not likely be instantaneous unless someone built a very mass intensive repair system, and so enough damage over time would overwhelm the repair system's ability to regenerate the armor.

Has anyone tried doing this before? Have I missed some vital bit that would make this completely unworkable?

 

[StormWing0]

I'm sitting here thinking about this too. Was thinking of just firing beams into the core of the ship and seeing if that did anything but I know for a fact it can be done with a huge array firing at as many blocks as possible the only issue is it takes a docked entity to pull off since weapons of the same entity can shoot through itself. The other issue is the lagstorm created by collision boxes within each other even with docked entities.


It would be funny to make a ship where if the shots fired didn't kill blocks outright the opponents would watch in horror as the ship they were shooting at had its structure and armor values going up over time.

 

[Adonis0]

I think to make this idea work, the outer layer needs to be regenerating yes, but to make sure that survives long enough to regenerate, it needs to have a bank of armor somewhere else to up the armor HP enough to allow sustained shots.

Is it known if regenerating a blocks HP in this way can also regenerate the armor HP?

 

[StormWing0]

Not sure if overall armor and structure go back up but it is worth testing. Me I'm a mad scientist on a server chances are I can come up with something when I'm not half dead asleep. >_> Will post what I can tomorrow unless someone else beats me to it later. XD

 

[StormWing0]

Just went through and tested this, you can repair the individual block Structure and armor but you can't repair the overall ship/station structure and armor. So you'll end up with a layer of blocks that are harder to kill but the rest of the ship isn't going to fix itself over time.