[Karibu]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
If you have, say, 8 Crystalline Armor IIIs on a ship, that gives you 120 shields from damage. Any weapon that does 60 damage or less can not harm your ship. Once shields are down, 60 damage is done to the armor, and 60 points are added to the shield total. Next shot, you do 120 damage to the shields, as the partial damage from the previous hit adds to the current hit. The 60 shields are sapped, 60 damage is done to the armor. Next shot, the 60 damage is added to the damage against the shields. The 60 shield points are gone, 60 damage is done to the armor. This will continue for ever, without ever being able to destroy any armor. Try 420 kT of CA. That is 210 shields from damage. Any weapon that does 105 or less damage is useless. 420 kT is a lot of space to use though, but on dreadnoughts, it is doable.

Now, you can certainly through shield depleters between each weapon, which can help. Or use shield disruptors to eliminate the shield generators.

If it were not for large mounts doubling the damage per shot of your weapons and heavy mounts tripling it, this would be a huge problem. But, in practice, it is not that strong of a defense.

This is correct. I once did some math and results were, that most effective combination is to have 11 crystal armor and 2 shield generators. 11 crystal armor makes you invulnerable to anything that makes less than 150 points of damage. However if one armor breaks, your damage resistace is lessened 15 points, etc. Naturally, when your armor starts to breal, it'll break faster and faster every round because components, which can generate shield points form hits, are destroyed and your "reflective shielding" is therefore weaker. So to be certain to stand a lot of punishment, you would nees some "spare armor components". Obviously, all this takes so much space, that your firepower would be weakened accordingly.

So, crystal armor is superb at the early and mid game, but later it becomes less usable, yet not totally useless.

[ June 14, 2004, 20:10: Message edited by: Karibu ]