Emmisive Armor for Dummies, please...

[tbontob]

Lets say I had the 4 types of armor on a ship
1) Emmissive Armor III
2) Armor III
3) Scattering Armor III
4) Stealth Armor III

Lets say I am hit with a 200 or 300 damage shot.

Is the above, the order in which damage is taken by the armor?

[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.

[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.

If you combine one or two EA with a bunch of SA III, you will probably get the EA effect for nearly all of the armor hits, most of the time. Even in mid-game cruiser combat with large-mount PPB's, that can easily get up to a 50% increase in survivability, which can be worthwhile.

Throwing an EA component in with a bunch of Crystalline or Organic armor can definitely be worthwhile.

EA is relatively expensive, but if you are trying to achieve ship design superiority for some classes, it can help tip the scales.

PvK

[Phoenix-D]

"Given that the standard APB can become a 195 points-per-shot weapon on a battleship and a 455 points-per-shot weapon on a starbase (!!!) I think that Emissive Armor ought to go to 100 points or more."

But then you make any weapon which cannot do 101 damage *utterly useless* against the armor.

Phoenix-D

[PvK]

Ya, 100-point emissive would be yet another reason to only build large ships with large mounts, which IMO wouldn't improve the standard game set. I'd say that battleship-mounted max-tech APB's should be the sort of weapon that will tend to degrade the usefulness of EA.

PvK

[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

[dogscoff]

If one emissive armour component gives all other armour emmissive ability, then emmissive + crystalline could be an interesting combination. Any hit below the emissive threshold would recharge your shields for free. Shots above that threshold... umm... my brain hurts.