Using the Titanium Armor I (light: 1/10 kt medium 3/23kt heavy 10/50kt)...
The example I spoke of was a ship with all light armor vs. a ship with all heavy armor. This saw the heavy winning, right? Medium armor is a happy middle ground. Fewer overall hp than light, but still more hp/kT than most other components, like heavy armor. Generally, light armor's main purpose is to fill in kT gaps, and to be used on units.
Especially MONSTER SKIN does not make sense as "dense armor"...
Monsters are meant to be particularly tough. At least their shields are not leaky, so you just have to take them down once (save the 10% regeneration per round).
CRYSTALLINE ARMOR could need some changes anyway...
CA is a bit of an oddball; its SGFD isn't particularly useful anymore, since shield generators have as many SGFD as shield points (except for magic shields, which have a few extra shield points). All it has going for it is the denseness. I could never really think of a better role for it, so I left it alone.
As troop armor, it does not work out that good, though...
D'oh; so many armors to create beefy troop versions for, looks like I missed CA.
I wonder why "dense" armor doesn't use a mount that scales it to the size of the vessel?
Due to the nature of SGFD, a high amount of HP per component on dense armor can result it invulnerability. With sufficient SGFD ability and shield point capacity, you can shrug off the damage from any weapon that does less than twice the HP of your dense armor. Take a look at stock CA III; it has 150 hp and 15 SGFD. Add 1 high level shield generator for 300+ hp. Let's say you have a weapon doing 140 damage per hit. In the best case, the CA target has 140 shield points currently. Your first hit drops the shields to 0. The next hit does 140 damage to armor, and generates 140 shields. The way that partial damage works is that it is just added to the value of the next shot. So, when you hit a second time, the 140 partial damage to the armor is added to the 140 damage your weapon does. 140 points of it depletes the 140 shield points. The remaining 140 damage hits the armor, causing 140 partial damage points to accrue, and generating 140 shield points. The next hit gets the partial damage added to it, for 280 damage against 140 shield points. Repeat ad nauseum.
This is why the dense armors like Neutronium are small, with low overall hp. It is impossible to create an invincible ship with Neutronium and leaky shields. Even the ruins-based Xentronium is not too much help; at 100 hp/comp, it is vulnerable to weapons doing 100 damage, of which there are plenty (especially with heavy mount) considering its rather high tech reqs. Plus, you can only mount 3 of them, so you probably will have a lot of Neutronium to round out your armor defenses anyways.
Btw., its plain wrong anyway: A) it's not true for the shields...
Conceptually, the shields represent a nebulous energy barrier that serves to reduce the energy of incoming weapons fire, as opposed to the impervious wall of force as perceived by the stock game. This barrier is not depleted by weapons fire; it remains active until the generators themselves are destroyed.
Yes, technically the shield point values go down as weapons hit, but then they come right back up. The shield point levels aren't what the description refers to.
The MEDICAL BAY is problematical as well:
- to big for lots of ships...
- too expensive to be put on bases over every colony (5K/11K/3K resources!)
Indeed.
Note that all races have access to system hospital facilities, which cure plagues on any planet in the system. Due to the nature of the ability, they allow one turn of damage from the plague before curing it, but they are still a sage investment. They even generate a bit of research to ease the pain of devoting a slot in every system to them.
Ship-mounted medical bays are meant to represent a huge investment of medical resources and personnel. Though, I could have sworn I had made them count as cargo for mounting on transports... hmm.