quote:
Originally posted by Baal:
Does anyone here use armor? (except to guard against PPBs)
no.
In my opinion shields should be weaker per tonnage than armor. Armor you see you have to repair every time it breaks, shields are regenerated every battle with out repair.
There should be some insentive to use armor as an alternative to shields, so why not make them better protection to offset the fact that you need to repair them?
1) Make it CHEAPER than shields per point of protection. It's just dead weight, after all, not some complex piece of electromagnetic machinery. Maybe it takes a lot of research to develop a very tough alloy but once you setup mass production the economics of scale takes over.
2) Increase the other benefits of armor so there are other reasons to use it. I've doubled the defensive bonus on my stealth and scattering armor since this now seems to stack with ECM. A 30 percent defense modifier is no small thing. Also increased the damage limits of Emissive armor, but that's the next suggestion:
3) Alter Emissive Armor to work slightly differently. As it currently works, you are either completely protected --
immune to whatever weapon is being used against you -- or it doesn't help you at all. If you set the ability of the armor high enough to stop most weapons then it's too powerful. But if you don't set it high enough to stop most weapons then it's nearly useless except against wimpy enemies with far lower tech than you have. You're just paying extra for your armor.
I have several times proposed a change in how Emissive Armor works and I'll repeat it here: Set a TOTAL limit per combat turn on how much damage emissive armor can absorb, not just a "per hit" limit. So, even if no single hit exceeds the limit it is still possible to 'overload' the armor with a massive amount of low powered fire. The 'immunity' effect is then much less of a problem and Emissive Armor can be given a decent damage resistance level. This can either be a second setting in the ability itself or a total of the capacity of all armor on the ship -- which would be best since this gives larger ships a reasonably scaled advantage AND provides a gradual loss of ability as armor is destroyed. When the limit is reached, armor would be damaged normally. As your plates of emissive armor are lost, the total ability decays and it becomes easier to further damage the armor.
[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 26 May 2001).]