Simple armor question

[Fyron]

Emissive armor and crystalline armor are absolutely, fundamentally different.

Emissive armor acts just as Spoo said, by reducing the damage of each shot by the highest ability level of any component on the ship (no stacking at all). It does not matter which component is hit, the reduction still occurs.

Crystalline armor does not reduce any damage. It requires functional shield generators to have any affect. You take full damage when a weapon hits your hull. An amount of shield points are added to your shield levels that does not exceed either the total of all CA ability on the ship or the total damage done by the weapon. The next shot will then have to damage these new shield points before being able to damage the hull. Any amount of partial damage that was left over from the previous shot does not stay on the hull, but instead is added to the damage for the next incoming shot. This allows you to become immune to weapons that do not do enough damage to destroy a complete CA component in a single shot, provided that you have enough CA ability. It does not matter which component is hit, the shield generation still occurs (this is what allows leaky shields in mods to function). Say you have 150+ ability points and the enemy uses weapons that do 70 damage. Assume that your shield points are currently at 0. Shot A hits, and does 70 damage. 70 shield points are added to the totals. Shot B hits. That 70 partial damage from shot A is then added to the damage of shot B. Shot B effectively does 140 damage. The 70 shield points are vaporized. 70 damage is done to the hull (which currently has 0 damage accumulated), and 70 shield points are generated. The next shot does the same thing.

Any sort of armor skipping weapon does not trigger either of these abilities, even if the ability is on a component that is not armor (in a mod). Shard Cannons, Null Space Projectors, etc.