Emmisive Armor for Dummies, please...

[tbontob]

Originally posted by LGM:
Some of the better combat systems I have seen have two weapon factors: Penetration and Damage. In world war two, there were two typical weapon types: Armor Piercing and High Explosive. Armor Piercing actually had little explosive power (usually none) but would penetrate the armor of a tank sending shell and hull fragments around the interior killing the crew, igniting fuel and ammunition. High Explosive would detonate on the outside and need a powerful enough of a bLast to get through the armor.

My understanding is that armor piercing shells were designed for heavily armored targets, whereas high explosive shells were designed for soft unarmored targets like troops, buildings etc.

As you mentioned, the armor piercing shells were designed to penetrate armor and thereby do damage. High explosive shells seldom did any major damage against heavily armored vehicles like tanks.

In the same vein, armor piercing were pretty useless against soft targets.

The above being so, the tank commander had to do some strategic thinking in determining the mix of shells he was going to carry for the upcoming battle.

[Wardad]

Baron,

I agree about the different damage types. I would like to include nano tech, bio tech and slow acting types.

Imagine the damage RUST could to an unprepared empire that has never had to deal with it.

Imagine nano disassemblers taking apart a ships hull and eventually plagueing an entire fleet and all the ships it comes in contact with.

Imagine infesting ships with spiders that weave microscopic mono filament webs that slice through anything that crosses it's path.

Imagine a bacteria that drinks rocket fuel.

[geoschmo]

Imagine all the people...

Oh, sorry.

[ September 04, 2002, 20:16: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Yes, I think armor should work differently than it currently does. I think we've discussed this more than once before in other threads. Rather than being discrete components armor should be an attribute of the hull. And rather than armor always stopping damage until it is destroyed there ought to be a percentage chance to stop damage, to partially stop/deflect damage, and an increasing chance as damage is inflicted that 'holes' in the armor will let damage just pass through. This much more realistic system would take some serious code revision by MM, though. Let's hope for SE V to do something like this.

[geoschmo]

Well, the intrinsic part of the hull thing we can't do without code changes, but doesn't the "internal armor" used by some mods pretty well do the second part? That is armor that takes damage, but there is a chance of any particular shot damaging an actual component instead.

And by the way, does a ship with emmisive armor that hits a mine get the benefit of the emmisive value?

Geoschmo

[Phoenix-D]

"That's why you need to make it fairly expensive to research. There has to be a point where certain weapons become obsolete, doesn't there? Would an 18th century brass cannon be any use against a modern warship?"

Yes, but you can stick a weapon capable of damaging a large warship on a small one; in SE4 you *can't* do that without researching an entirely different weapons chain. 100 emissive ability on armor would FORCE players to A. use dreadnoughts or above or B. use wave-motion guns. Those are the *only* options, and that's kind of ridiclous.

Phoenix-D

[Zanthis]

I did some fairly extensive tests on emissive armor as part of my revision of the damage FAQ now that I have Gold. This pretty much confirms what others have said, but does talk a bit about damage assignment. I've not yet completed everything, but this is the relavent info for emissive armor:

First, a term: Volly. A volley is a set of damage treated as if it came from a single weapon. Whenever ships fire their weapons, each individual weapon creates its own volley. However, when a fighter stack fires, each type of weapon across all the fighters in the group becomes a volley.

Put 3 DUCIII on a fighter, and they fire as a single volley. In a group of 6 such fighers, all 18 DUCIII's fire as one volley. Use 2 DUCII and 1 APBII per fighter, and you get two volleys: 12 DUCII in one and 6 APBII in the other (assuming 6 fighters in the stack). Note that each weapon can still individually miss and so the damage of a volley can vary from shot to shot.

Emissive armor reduces the damage of a volley by its value. It does so even if the emissive component is destroyed by that volley. It does not affect damage absorbed wholely by shields. It also does not effect damage that strikes specific components: Engine damage, weapon damage, armor skipping damage, computer virus weapons, etc. Nor does it effect special effect damage such as tractors/repulsors, worm hole guns or increased reload effect weapons.

The greatest emissive value present is used against each volley. They do not stack in any way.

As far as damage assignment, the game now appears to feature a "if possible, destroy a component" strategy. That means, if you take enough damage to destroy a targetable component, that component will be destroyed and the damage won't be stored up against a possibly tougher component.

Suppose ArmorIII and Emissive ArmorIII, 40Kt resistance vs 50Kt. If your enemy has only 70 point damage weapons then use only a single piece of EAIII. Because every hit will do 70 damage, -30 from the EA down to 40, and since 40 is exactly enough to kill ArmorIII, every hit without fail will kill a piece of ArmorIII until you have no more and then finally the Emissive Armor will be destroyed in two hits.

However, if he can do enough damage after the EA reduction to kill a piece of EA (80 for EAIII), then any given piece of armor is equally likely to be destroyed.

This basically means that greater damage resistant emissive armor components are more powerful since basic armor is more likely to be killed. If you modded EAIII to be 60Kt with 150Kt resistances (same size to resistance ratio) it would be much more powerful than mounting three of the existing EAIII components. No weapon doing less than 171 damage could destroy the EAIII before killing all the Armor III.

BTW, the formula given Armor and EA to find the minimum strength damage to have a chance of killing EA before Armor is:

E + 2R - A + 1

where:
A = damage to kill a piece of armor,
E = damage to kill a piece of emissive armor,
R = reduction to damage from emissive component

[tbontob]

Zanthis...my head is beginning to hurt...

Can anyone tell me what Baron Munchausen meant when he used the terms "lowest" and "highest" in the following quote?

Originally posted by tbontob:

quote:

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Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
No matter which component is hit first, the emissive armor ability subtracts its level fromt he damage first. Then, the lowest damage armor tends to get destroyed first. Once you ae dealing with internal components the situation is reversed and the highest damage components tend to get hit first. These are not 'fixed' rules, though, so a clear prediction is not possible.

Ok.

But I am not sure what you mean by the terms "lowest" and "highest"

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[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
Geoschmo, your calculation of value is off. EA III is 50 structure + 30 emissive = 80 to kill, and 20kT size. Standard Armor III is 40 structure for 10kt size. You said armor was 4:1 and EM was 2.5:1, but it's really 4:1 as well, so EM III is never worse than SA III.

Ah, but PvK, but my figures ARE correct, if everything you said previously is correct. I believe you are not following it through to it's logical conclusion.

You get the 4:1 ratio for emmisive armor only on the first component destroyed by any single shot. So if someone were to go with all Em Armor and the enemy was doing say 180 damage points per shot (Not an exroidnary number mind you with mounts), 180 points would destroy 3 em armor III components because you only get the em value for the one em comp per shot. While the same 60Kt of standard armor III could withstand 240 points of damage. You see my point was the Em armor would never be any better than standard armor, and agaisnt larger weapons it is worse than standard armor. It's the additional comps that don't get to use their em value that have the 2.5:1 ratio.

And I did conceed some limited value for a single piece of em armor and several pieces of standard armor. I suppose a mix of one piece of em armor and several crystalline armor comps could be similarly effective. I just am doubtful of the effectiveness considering the chance of the em armor being destroyed on any shot. The only way it's really worth anything is if it lives through several shots, and you can't predict that it will with any certainty.

Geoschmo

[Zanthis]

Lowest damage meant whichever armor takes the least amount of damage before it gets destroyed. Highest damage is whichever takes the most to get destroyed. Between Armor III and Emissive Armor III, Armor III is the lowest at 40 damage to kill and Emissive Armor III is the highest at 50 damage to kill.