Improved armor model thoughts

[Emperor's Child]

I’ve been thinking how to get armor to work more in the “classic” sense where ships of a size class have armor that is hard for smaller ships to penetrate, and how this could be made to work within the SE construct.

The simple answer is to mod an internal ship component that has “emissive” ability but not name it as armor, and then match the amount of emissive ability to the size of the ship to give a roughly comparable WWII armor ability. This would allow the emissive ability to not be automatically scrubbed off on the first shot, but would (then) imbalance the armor penetrating type of weapons, so there are some problems. But this approach is really a stretch and you still have the rather unrealistic issue that if the component is hit, the armor is thereafter removed. Something of a glass jaw type of armor.

Next I thought of another approach. Armor should be basically a chunk of material that deflects (ballistic) shots without sustaining damage, or if it is penetrated it should not be entirely blasted away. An armored ship should remain armored right up to the point it is destroyed. Currently, armor can be easily scrubbed off in the game if that is the area that is the component that is randomly selected to be hit. This lead me to a second method of simulating armor: adding emissive capability to hull designs [ie: a part of the vehicle size.txt file] themselves. My concept is all hulls destroyer sized and smaller would not have any inherent emissive armor. The light cruiser would have something like emissive armor of value of 15, the Cruiser would have emissive armor of, say, 30, the battle cruiser 45, the battleship 60, and the Dreadnaught 90.. This is a more realistic approach compared to an internal component with emissive capability since the armor of the ship is matched to the size of the hull. The nice thing to this approach is that it remains all within existing game mechanics and will be AI friendly.

Has anybody tried a mod along these lines? See any balance / other issues?