Emmisive Armor for Dummies, please...

[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.

[tbontob]

Originally posted by 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.

Ok.

But I am not sure what you mean by the terms "lowest" and "highest"

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by 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

That's why you need to make it fairly expensive to research. There has to be a point where certain weapons become obsolete, doesn't there? Would an 18th century brass cannon be any use against a modern warship?

I do agree that the damage system is overly simplistic. For SE V I hope there will various types of damage. Not just different damage effects as we have now (Quad Damage to Shields, etc.) but really different damage types. Radiation damage (energy eapons), concussion damage (missiles and other explosives), torsion/stress damage (gravity weapons), chemical damage (acid globule, maybe invent some others to make the Category worthwhile... ). Then you can have weapons with damage Ratings in EACH of these fields, and shields/armor/components with damage resistance Ratings in EACH of these fields. Then you can have technologies to create armor/components with better resistance in the various fields and expand the 'rock/paper/scissors' game a bit futher.

[LGM]

Emissive Armor is definately of limited value as larger weapon mounts appear. The problem is that weapon mounts escalate the damage too much and are to cost effective to not use.

On ships, Massive mounts do 5 times damage for 3 times the cost in Space.

I would like to see the Mount progression reduced something like 1.3 Space/1.5 Damage, 1.69 space/2.25 damage, 2.197 space/ 3.375 damage.

Weapon Mounts make Emissive Armor obsolete with Battleships and of little benefit against high powered weapons on Cruisers. This is probably how it should be.

Emissive Armor is a counter against a hoard of small ships (or weapon yielding drones). However, Weapon Mounts already give bigger ships a signficicant advantage over smaller ships.

Here is what the game is missing: Critical Hits. Any hit that gets through shields should have a chance to skip armor and do 20 times normal damage. That would give players the option of trying to use lots of small weapons to land a critical hit instead of one big weapon that has a big damage bonus (mount). Emissive Armor would make those little hits do no damage until they obtain a critical hit. Make larger mounts have a reduced chance at critical hits (larger beam or projectile). Make the progression something like 5%, 2%, 1%, 0% (Normal to Massive Mounts).

If fighters do not pool attacks together, give them a 10% chance of a critical hit. No one answered the fighter question yet.

[LGM]

Some of the better combat systems I have seen have two weapon factors: Penetration and Damage. In world war two, there were two typical weapon types: Armor Piercing and High Explosive. Armor Piercing actually had little explosive power (usually none) but would penetrate the armor of a tank sending shell and hull fragments around the interior killing the crew, igniting fuel and ammunition. High Explosive would detonate on the outside and need a powerful enough of a bLast to get through the armor.

Each weapon should have a Penetration Factor that is compared agains the targets armor thickness. If Penetration is achieved, the full weapon damage is applied, otherwise, it is reduced by the armors natural emmissive property.

Also, to give unform armor coverage, larger hulls should require more KT of armor, based on surface area. An object that is 1 meter cubed, has 6 square meters of surface area. a 2 meter cube, has 24 squate meters of surface area. It contains 8 times the volume, but has 4 times the surface area. It needs 4 times the armor to achieve the same thinkness. Assuming all ships are cubes (kind of boring), each ship's armor thinkness would be (KT of Armor) / (6 x (KT Hull)^(2/3)). You can improve that ratio a bit if you use the perfect shape - a sphere.

In reality, tanks tend to be have facings with most of the armor facing forward. This allows armor thinkness to be increased in the most likely direction of attack, thus increasing armor thickness without increase cost as much. This could be acheived by reducing the multiplier (6 x).

You can go ever further by using sloping armor to increase the chances of a ricochette. Also, a shot that is not perpendicular to the armor must traverse greater thinkness, but slope gets real complicated.

Elongated ships or ships with lots of appendages require an even higher ratio of armor because they have so much surface area. But hey, they look neat don't they. The U.S.S Enterprise is a bad design based on surface area. Thats why they need spherical shields. Borg Ships on the other hand make a lot of sense surface area to volume wise. However, the Enterprise has better slope on impacts than Borg ships.

[tbontob]

Originally posted by LGM:
Some of the better combat systems I have seen have two weapon factors: Penetration and Damage. In world war two, there were two typical weapon types: Armor Piercing and High Explosive. Armor Piercing actually had little explosive power (usually none) but would penetrate the armor of a tank sending shell and hull fragments around the interior killing the crew, igniting fuel and ammunition. High Explosive would detonate on the outside and need a powerful enough of a bLast to get through the armor.

My understanding is that armor piercing shells were designed for heavily armored targets, whereas high explosive shells were designed for soft unarmored targets like troops, buildings etc.

As you mentioned, the armor piercing shells were designed to penetrate armor and thereby do damage. High explosive shells seldom did any major damage against heavily armored vehicles like tanks.

In the same vein, armor piercing were pretty useless against soft targets.

The above being so, the tank commander had to do some strategic thinking in determining the mix of shells he was going to carry for the upcoming battle.