Rename Hull and Armor blocks to Tissue Paper

[Weylin]

Just so new players don't get it in their head that armor actually provides any kind of meaningful barrier between you and enemy fire, I suggest renaming these to something more indicative of the protection they provide.

Also make a note in the description that armor... excuse me.. "Tissue Paper" will only block exactly one shot from an antimatter cannon.

You're better off just making a ship entirely out of shields, and keeping said ship small and agile enough to make your core a difficult target to hit, and giving your shields plenty of opportunity to recharge.

 

[thegingineer]

Not one of these again.

What does hull do? it means that you have just a few more seconds of surviving before your vital systems, like sheilds, turn to dust. It helps to delay those attacks from those pesky machine-type guns that shoot many bullets per second, but not very much damage. Armored is even harder to destroy. If you think that a few extra seconds will never be enough to save you, then you clearly haven\'t gotten in many battles.

 

[BlackZero500]

@thegingineer: Exactly. And even IF the armor was stronger, the players would just adjust their AMC Arrays so that they again need just one shot for one armor block. So its ok right now. Well a little more hp wouldnt be bad at all, but thats the way it is, and its good like that i think. If you got hardend Hulls for two or three layers and are agile enough to not concentrate the enemy shots on one spot, then its a good armor to delay the penetration of function blocks long enough to get the shield online again.

 

[Weylin]

I have been in and seen a few fights, and the armor DOES provide protection from glancing blows if shields have failed.
HOWEVER, on larger capital-type ships, the kind you can walk all around in and launch stuff from, and which can\'t really evade like the smaller ones can.. they just get completely obliterated unless they have a substantial focus on shields.

From many of the fights I have seen, I am under the impression that the core of a ship should base its HP on the combined hp of everything else on the ship.
On a tiny little fighter, this would amount to a couple hits.
On a large capital ship, it could take many seconds of fire, and possibly make it more sensible in these cases to try and disable the other systems first.

 

[jzimmerman4]

This forum title literally make me laugh out loud. I agree though that this is a problem and I hope schema is working on it. Personally I really like this idea to solve this: http://star-made.org/content/hull-armor-absorption

 

[Weylin]

That seems like a reasonable idea to dampen the whole issue of core drilling.
I think a combination of that, and tying core hp to the mass of the rest of the ship in some way would help a great deal.

The way Space Engineers has the ship building work seems a lot more reasonable.
Instead of having a ship core, you just start with an armor block, and there is no core at all... the ship just ceases to function once any of the numerous control panels and its operators have been killed.

Seriously. Go look at Space Engineers. Take from it what they managed to get right, and disregard the numerous downsides with many of the other things.