Emissive armour - what is it used for?

[Barnacle Bill]

>The volley of a fighter group counts as
>ONE! damage, i.e. forget about emissive
>armor, even a group of 2 fighters will not
>be stopped by it.

I'm not sure this is correct. Read on for why...

I recently played a game in which I created a new tech area for a beam weapon that has a size of 10kt, with damage per turn per kt of hull space used comparable to other weapons. The idea was to be able to create "balanced" small ship designs even in late game (you need a shield, ECM, combat sensors, 6 engines and a solar sail and the little guys don't have room for all that plus any weapons). Anyway, this resulted in a smaller amount of damage per individual weapon, but if the damage from a volley is treated as one shot it should not make any difference (10 points each from 4 weapons fired together = 40 points from one weapon fired by itself). I found that this was not the case, at least against crystalline armor (which adds a given number of damage points out of every volley back into shields).

I had an exploration squadron of 3 battlecruisers equipped with large mounts (15kt) of mt new toy. Ran into a ship equipped with crystalline armor. Blew his shields away, then found that every weapon hit added back into his shields the amount of damage my weapon did - first shot after his shields went down put them back up and every subsequent shot knocked them down, then put them back up by the same amount. That ship was basically invulnerable to my weapons!

It appears to me that every shot in a volley from a ship is resolved separately. They clearly are for "hit or miss". It appears that the special armors (at least crystalline) treat each weapon as a separate shot, and it also appears that special damage effects of special armors are cumulative if multiple armor systems of the same type are installed.

Maybe all the damage from a fighter group volley is treated cumulatively, but that does not appear to be the case for ships.