A first!!!

[Fyron]

Arralen said:
I'm not sure if I like them (any more) - looks to me they don't really work out...

It seems to work as intended in the mods I've tried with leaky armor. The whole point is to let some damage get through, but still have the armor components take a good share of damage. Generally, leaky armor components have a lot more hp/kt than normal components (usually at least an order of magnitude). The component selection function is further biased towards hitting high hp components, disproportionate to the component's percent of total hp.

The size of leaky armor isn't so important; larger pieces actually generally work better due to having more hp/component. For example, in leaky armor setups like B5 Mod and Adamant, ships with heavy armor tend to defeat ships with (the same total tonnage of) light armor, despite the light armored ship having a ton more total hp. The lower hp/kt heavy armors tend to take more hits from the "internals" than the higher hp/kt light armors.

This gets rediculous if some armor types stay 'hit first' .. 1 piece providing 100% protection ..

If you are refering to Adamant, the "dense armor" components come at the end of the tech tree, after all leaky armors. They are not really comparable to them, and by that point leaky shields + dense armor are generally the way to go, rather than using much leaky armor. Though, note that there are armor-skipping weapons available to all races (graviton hellbore and graviton missiles for physical paradigm), so you can really pull off some surprise punches against those dense-armored ships.

Note that armor-skipping weapons (shard cannons, graviton hellbore in Adamant) have some interesting effects against leaky-shielded targets. The Skips Armor damage type does not trigger the SGFD (or Emissive) ability, so "skips armor" actually works well against both leaky shields and dense-armored targets. No shield points are generated as a result of an armor-skipping shot, and the damage bypasses the dense armor.

Shield regenerating ability was way too low to make any difference, at least at the tech level I got to try out: Again the shield should be reloaded to at least 30% between single hits, otherwise its not leaky, it turns into duct tape after the first go-through ...

First, not that regeneration abilities are not part of the leakiness; leakiness comes from the shield generation from damage (SGFD) ability.

But it is leaky; it doesn't block a percentage of each hit, so much as replenish the shields after each hit (to a point). Statistically, this has the effect of regenerating damage by a certain percent. If you have more total SGFD than what weapons do per hit, you essentially get the overall damage reduced by half. The percentage of reduction varies by damage type; for example, 1/2x to shields means that overall damage is reduced by 66% (it takes 2 shots to deplete the shield points generated from 1 hit that entirely damages internals). Naturally, the water becomes murky when different types of weapons are mixed together, but you still get some general overall reduction in damage.

At least in Adamant, low tech shields are not very powerful. At low tech levels, it is better to rely more on armor. As tech progresses, the shields start to come into their own. I did make them 20 kT to speed up the point when they start becoming useful, though.

When you get tech to efficiently mount both leaky shields and leaky armor, the damage from each shot is statistically reduced on two levels before reaching internals to do real damage to the ship. There is always the possibility of being unlucky and receiving several hits that do not hit leaky armors, thus incapacitating the ship more quickly than normal. There is also the possibility of getting lucky and having most/all hits go into the armor, thus making the ship remain operational far longer than normal. But overall, it tends to balance out. This is the beauty of leakiness.