[douglas]

Actually, its small size makes emissive armor less likely to be hit. It's just that when it does get hit, it's not tough enough to survive the hit.

A component's probability of being hit is directly proportional to its structure. Emissive armor has 50 structure, Crystalline has 150, so any individual piece of emissive armor is 1/3 as likely to be hit on any given shot as any given piece of crystalline armor. If there are 10 crystalline armors (minimum to get maximum immunity) and 1 emissive, each hit has a 1/31 chance of hitting the emissive armor.

Going with my usual combination of having 2 backup emissives, hitting an emissive armor when everything is still intact has a probability of 1/11. Once one emissive is destroyed, hitting another is 1/16. On average, it will take 11+16+31 = 58 hits with weapons that do less than 180 damage to destroy all 3 emissive armor components and bring the damage immunity down to 149. Meanwhile, the presence of emissive armor is taking 30 damage off of every hit the ship takes.