[jaylord]

Saner armor and engine systems!!

As they work now, they make no sense!! Pop six Ion Engines I in a 150KT escort and it has a movement of 6. Put the same 6 engines in a 600KT Battle Cruiser and it also moves 6!! Worse yet, to restrict the movement of BBs and up you're limited in the number of engines you can have. This actually leaves more space for other components, when a DN should have to use at least a 100KT of its mass allotment just to move 3 (with Ion Engines). The engines should be rated with the ability to move y-mass x-squares, with less mass meaning you move farther, more mass you move less. It sure would be fun (and make sense) to have little escort class scouts really zipping around the map.

As for the armor, the same thing applies. One armor provides the same protection to an escort that it does to a DN. It should be each ship size should have a min number of armor to cover that size ship. 1 armor for an escort up to 9 for a base ship. Then the calculation for whether a shot hits the armor could be based on the percentage of the armor coverage the ship carries, which of course could be reduced in combat. Add in the suggestion that many have made that emissive armor should actually reduce damage by 10-30 points, and you have an armor system that makes sense. Especially with properly working emissive armor.

As for difficulty in programming this, I'm a programmer myself and watching a game play you get an idea how the coding probably goes for certain routines. I even wrote some psuedo-code (not sure what language SE IV is written in) for the armor changes just for my own amusement. It ended up being fairly simple so I might share them with MM in the hopes it would be implemented.