Well, it's easy enough to mod lots of new armors and tech trees to reach them. The problem is that you also have to create huge numbers of individual components for each variation in the tech tree. I hope that the new mounts will allow much cleaner tech variations in armor especially. The primary characteristic of armor is its 'size/damage ratio' after all. Mounts have been able to modify these characteristics all along. Now that you can restrict mounts to certain component families it will be possible to have a tech tree of stealth armor or emissive armor based on one set of components and have several researchable mounts to create the variations in size or size/damage ratio.
And I'd still like to see now abilities for armor. I just recently had a 'light bulb' go off about the 'skips armor' damage type, for example. Why should all armor be the same? If we had 'levels' of armor and armor skipping like we have cloaking and sensors we'd be able to create some really cool armors and weapons. So I emailed MM about possibly making 'armor 1', 'armor 2', 'armor 3', etc., and 'skips armor 1', 'skips armor 2', skips armor 3', etc...
Plain old armor like steel or titanium starts at '1' of course. Crystalline armor could start at 2 and go up from there.
Other armors like 'neutronium' might be impenetrable with level 9 or something.
[ July 03, 2002, 23:53: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]