Paper-thin and Tungsten-heavy: Armor Discussion Thread

[kiiyo]

Hello, forums. Let's talk about armor.

Currently, we have a selection of different plates available to us, the majority "standard" being a 12cm thick plate, x and z dimensions varying per plate. There are a few "decorative" plates that are 2-6cm thick, but their shape and size range is quite limited as of now.

These plates are able to be crafted from various materials, ranging from the "lighter" ones that are about as dense as Earth's iron, to "heavier" ones, approaching the ridiculous densities of some of the more complex materials used in specific technologies in real life. While I do not insist that we should base the game's design on real life - we fly around in space soup in a bright blue backdrop of peculiar space, after all - I think that we can all agree on one thing:

As comically dense and heavy as these plates are, they are crap at being armor. Meta ship designers can attest to this - one, even two outer layers are in no way enough to stop a single bullet out of an autocannon or lasercannon.

The effects that these properties of plates have had on ship design are likely much more deep than we think, them being such an essential part of a ship, but here are trends I think could be noted down:
- Few ships have (detailed) interiors
- Few ships have decorative outer (or inner) plating
- Meta-built combat ships require multiple layers of armor, resulting in designs that are tedious to build, tedious to repair in-world, and look objectively ugly
-- The above is also true for glass, with combat ships often stacking so much of it that at certain angles with the sun it's near impossible to see through the glare

---
To wrap the post, I don't really have any "devs should do this" suggestions, that isn't necessarily something I have any experience in - however, I just wanted to see others' opinion on the state of armor and its effects on how ships are built.

I just wanna build ships with interiors, man. Interiors are so cool.

 

[Foraven]

I agree with you, we build brittle battleships right now, everything is stupidly heavy but offer very little protection for their mass. I would like to see more of the thin plates and lightweight deco items, but also a revamp of how armor works (supposed to be in progress). I would also like to see lightweight variant of beams, and or tubular frames so we can build some lightweight ship that don't need literal walls of thrusters just to move.

 

[Kenetor]

before any rebalance they need to change the armour system, nothing can happen before that really

 

[kiiyo]

before any rebalance they need to change the armour system, nothing can happen before that really

I agree a change is needed. Is there a general community consensus on how it should work? Not very up to date on the very specifics of PvP builds and such.

 

[DivineEvil]

Yes, I agree. The density gradient of the materials present is way too swayed towards the heavy side. This is primarily bad for the use of plating as such, and as being mentioned, requires an excessive amount of thrust to make any ship work, especially those which are designed to carry those materials as ore. Because material densities affect the mass of everything, it doesn't require a very extreme change to make the thrust-to-mass ratio more manageable.

As for the functionality of armor, my opinion is that it should not have a "armor value" healthbar based on the volume. Instead, the material of the plate (or any object for that matter) should modify the volumetric damage being done. For autocannons and lasers that would mean the heavier the armor, the less voxels are being chomped with each shot.

Damage from Plasma weapons would deal more volumetric damage, but that damage would distribute over the parts being hit, melting larger volume of the armor or internal components but having no penetration factor.

Explosive weapons like missiles and explosions in general should have a maximum area-of-effect of with the volume*density of the damaged parts intersecting into that area-of-effect reducing the effective explosion area.

To still implement the fracture damage mechanics, plasma might have a principle by which the object hit fractures if the missing voxel volume (as possible to be viewed by U-Tool on damaged/incomplete parts) exceed a certain ratio. Similar effect can be applied to other weapons with corrosive damage factor.

Finally I would be open to the idea of having ballistic weapons in particular (AC, Railguns, Bolters etc) to work against Structural Durability value rather than versus density of the material. That would further differentiate and make use of different weapon types and the use of composite multi-layer armor and various alloys.

 

[Foraven]

Some time ago there was someone who brought the idea of using existing fracture point in plates to split hit points between them (you could destroy part of the plate without compromising the whole thing). I could not find the post (I believe it was on Reddit) but the idea was quite interesting and promising if implemented.

 

[Kenetor]

I agree a change is needed. Is there a general community consensus on how it should work? Not very up to date on the very specifics of PvP builds and such.

I think everyone wants it to be fair and a bit more dependant on material without the size connection.
How that looks in the end is anyone guess at this point.
But without info on how the game works and the performance overheads any particular suggestion might involve, no one can even begin to make up a new system idea.
I keep seeing people advise just do straight voxel damage but its too intensive, it cant be done.

 

[DivineEvil]

I think everyone wants it to be fair and a bit more dependant on material without the size connection.
How that looks in the end is anyone guess at this point.
But without info on how the game works and the performance overheads any particular suggestion might involve, no one can even begin to make up a new system idea.
I keep seeing people advise just do straight voxel damage but its too intensive, it cant be done.

Its hard to imagine how the current voxel damage is then applied without much issue with radius and depth in place.

If the armor stops operating as such after the armor value is exhausted, then the whole voxel damage model is purely decorative, and if there's no way to conditionally scale the amount of that damage then there's simply no feasible way to make it fair as far as I can tell, other than perhaps making hull purely decorative/connective and having fewer dedicated armor plates with specific durability levels.

Was there any official notice regarding why that solution is too intensive?

 

[ChaosRifle]

I agree a change is needed. Is there a general community consensus on how it should work? Not very up to date on the very specifics of PvP builds and such.

-Right now higher voxel volume makes the voxel damage get scaled lower. this is universally accepted as bad and needing removal.
-Many people still think that the time between no damage impacts and doing voxel damage, should also not scale based on voxel volume of the part. this one is a bit contested, some think one way, some think the other
-generally people want armour to be more effective per layer, even if its higher mass, because stacking 4x+ layers is just not fun. reworks to their stats in general are needed, and this also includes dormant code currently like transformabillity is intended to make lasers more or less effective, corrosion resistance for AC's last i heard (though i think thats odd), but the point is those mechanics are not even enabled right now, though the numbers exist.

 

[Tomasz]

Need of armor changes were often brought up as something important to do by community, and along with al lother community request completely ignored outside empty promises on forum.Instead they commited their all efforts to crap nobody asked for like easly bugged mode.
It was talked over many times with good suggestions.It all doesn't matter since devs dont give a flying f.. about what their players ask.

 

[pavvvel]

I will add: the problem of glasses is not only that there are glare. I noticed that the more layers of glass, the higher the load on the video card. Something needs to be done about it....

I feel pain when I have to install decorative panels.. The ship looks ugly without them. And with them - the useless weight of the ship, an increase in its value. Decorative panels, like small conventional panels, should either have armor, or should be available in lightweight versions (for example, with a void inside).

 

[kiiyo]

I think a hyper-light material that is useless for anything other than decoration could potentially work as well. Decorating interiors and exteriors is painful because it adds useless mass to the ship, which is far from optimal.