Built-in armour for hulls

[CW]

Anybody managed to mod hulls with built-in armour?

[Suicide Junkie]

All hitpoints come from components, not abilities.
Hulls can't have built in hitpoints.

Instead, you can give hulls built-in shield generation.
You can also make a one-per-vehicle armor component that uses up zero space.

[CW]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
All hitpoints come from components, not abilities.
Hulls can't have built in hitpoints.

Instead, you can give hulls built-in shield generation.
You can also make a one-per-vehicle armor component that uses up zero space.

Hi SJ,

I was trying to make a special ship for each racial trait, but looks like I can't use armour after all. As to the shields, I don't think I want to use it too, since a non-phrased built-in shields can't mix with phrased ones and will cause problems later in the game with PPBs. On the other hand a built-in phrased shield is probably too much of an advantage in the early game.

[Nodachi]

No, you can't have built-in armor. Armor is just another type of component that really acts as ablative hit points becuase it gets hit first. There really is no hull to target. When you create a design and choose a hull size you're not actually selecting an empty hull, you're deciding how much space you're going to use. The system assumes that you'll use all of that space. That's why the different sizes have different defensive modifiers. Put only required components on an escort and a destoyer, and the same amount of engines, and the same amount of damage will destroy both ships.

Nodachi

[Suicide Junkie]

Adding a hundred or so phased shields to the hull is not that big a deal. If the player adds normal shield generators, the PPBs will work normally, and skip all the shields.
If the player dosen't add normal shields, the ship will be protected from the first 1 or 2 PPB shots, but that dosen't make much difference in the outcome of the battle.

[Baron Munchausen]

Inherent hull abilities would be nice, but might have unexpected effects. I think giving a ship built-in cloaking ability would make it permanently invisible, for example, like mines are. Would armor regeneration work as a hull ability? Or does it require the component family in order to know what to work on? hmm....

[Suicide Junkie]

Armor regeneration would work.
Cloaking on a ship hull can be turned on and off.

[Deathstalker]

I've gotten several abilities to work on hulls. Emissive armor ability does work (I've set it to 40 points, works fine), shields work fine. Cloaking works good, built in sensors, scanners, supplies, minesweepers, repair components, solar panel abilities, combat thrusters, Talisman.....

Just look at the abilities of most components, most of them can be applied directly to the ships hulls.

[Baron Munchausen]

Hmm, troop with 'weapons always hit' talisman power = Jedi.

Armor regen makes much more sense as part of the hull than as a seperate ability for the armor components. I wish we didn't have to mod a whole special set of ship hulls to make that work for organic races. But... since Organic Manipulation is already a racial tech I guess it wouldn't be too big a hassle to create alternative sizes in an "Organic Ships" tech field. Now here's the interesting question: Would the ship's inherent regen stack with the same ability on the armor?

'Intelligent' ships would justify master computer as an inherent ability.

I don't understand how emissive armor could work unless it is applied to all components in the ship? That would be difficult to destroy.

Scanner Jammer would be cool as an innate ability. If only it worked in combat as well as on the strategic screen.

[ June 13, 2002, 02:28: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

Organic armor regen ability only heals components that have that same ability.
The hull would just be adding a bonus amount, and would have the interesting side effect in v1.67 that you could take internal damage, and then have the OA heal over top of it (since there is still the hull's OA ability).

I don't understand how emissive armor could work unless it is applied to all components in the ship? That would be difficult to destroy.

That's the way emissive works already. You don't have to hit the emissive armor to get the effect.

It really wouldn't be hard to destroy, since anything over the emissive rating still does full damage as if there were no such thing as emissive.

[ June 13, 2002, 02:33: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]