Actual armor plates.

[Foraven]

I posted something similar on Reddit (under Foraxen name).

Anyway, here the simplified idea to make armoring ships easier to do and less reliant on stacking large plates:

Light, medium, heavy armor. To make them actually useful over normal plates, give them immunity to small arms (ie pistols, shotguns and stuff like that) so you actually need ship weapons to break them (but you can damage the frames holding them so it's an alternate way to deal with armor). Standardized sizes (the picture just an example, other shapes could apply), easy to bolt with each others or on the frame (an inside and outside), more hitpoints than any similar sized objects so they are more cost/space effective than using random large parts to armor a ship. I think this could solve many problems making combat ships that look like actual combat ships and not a flying box with a wall of thrusters in the back.

Personally I would add a damage threshold to them (a minimal amount of damage required before the plate takes any damage), but I think the game engine doesn't support that (yet).

 

[Cavilier210]

I wouldn't mind that

 

[anton_stezhkin]

I like the idea of damege threshold.

 

[Womble]

I like the idea of damege threshold.

Yeah, all plates should have a damage threshold (damage below this level doesn't even register) or a damage reduction rating. Or both.

So:

• a damage threshold of 10* would mean you don't take any damage from projectiles that do less than 11 damage, but full damage from anything that does 11 or more
• a damage reductuion of 5 would mean that a hit of 10 would only do 5 damage
• a damage threshold of 10 and a reduction of 5 would mean that a hit of 11 would only do 6 damage, whereas a hit of 10 or less would do no damage.

 

[anton_stezhkin]

Another interesting idea is different type of damage reduction for different alloys. Some advanced alloys or shields could have damage reduction multipluier (e.g. multiplier 0.5 reduces 500 damage to 250). While less advanced alloys could have a damege reduction constant (e.g. 250 damage - constant of 100 = 150). So, combining the two would be interesting.

 

[Womble]

Another interesting idea is different type of damage reduction for different alloys. Some advanced alloys or shields could have damage reduction multipluier (e.g. multiplier 0.5 reduces 500 damage to 250). While less advanced alloys could have a damege reduction constant (e.g. 250 damage - constant of 100 = 150). So, combining the two would be interesting.

Let's call a fractional multiplier a "resistance" for the sake of reference?

Aye. It's possible to think of differrent types of damage, too, though the "credible" ones pretty much boil down to Chemical*, KE and EM (though you could subdivide EM into wavelength groups like "Thermal" and "Gamma Ray" or some broad categories basically boiling down to "long" and "short" wavelengths) and have resistance, threshold and reduction vary for each type for each material and each damage type.

* We know there's corrosion to be dealt with.

 

[Vanidar]

Don't like the idea of making anything "invulnerable" to weapons of any type. We already have safe zones popping up everywhere on every POI outside of Origin and on our stations and capital ships, I'd rather not also make ships have another magical layer of invulnerability. Maybe slightly harder to penetrate? Okay, sure. That's something we can balance and tweak. But let's chill on the absolutely invincible and immune stuff.

 

[J.D.]

yea, we already have material coming thats quite strong. I tested daltium in the ssc. it takes 20 autocannon shots to pierce through a 432x432 plate of daltium. pretty strong if you ask me.

 

[Womble]

Don't like the idea of making anything "invulnerable" to weapons of any type. We already have safe zones popping up everywhere on every POI outside of Origin and on our stations and capital ships, I'd rather not also make ships have another magical layer of invulnerability. Maybe slightly harder to penetrate? Okay, sure. That's something we can balance and tweak. But let's chill on the absolutely invincible and immune stuff.

It's hardly a "magical" layer of invulnerability to make armour plate meant to deal with autocannon and other ship weapons "invulnerable" (or just plain harder to hurt) to small arms.

 

[Vanidar]

It's hardly a "magical" layer of invulnerability to make armour plate meant to deal with autocannon and other ship weapons "invulnerable" (or just plain harder to hurt) to small arms.

Who said armor plates are exclusively meant to deal with autocannon and other ship weapons and that small arms should be 0% effective? I've never read that and I've looked over the wiki and lots of the forums and Discord. Is that just the way you feel and you're presenting it as a fact or did I really miss something here?

Small arms should have an effect on armor. Making plates 100% impervious to a whole category of weapons is crazy to me. I should be able to engage an infinite number of infantry in 30k ship with a single mounted autocannon and be guaranteed victory? And before you say that's an extreme example, that's the issue with the mechanic of absolute invulnerability in any application. You can't balance or tweak it and you end up with these situations.

 

[Cavilier210]

Don't like the idea of making anything "invulnerable" to weapons of any type. We already have safe zones popping up everywhere on every POI outside of Origin and on our stations and capital ships, I'd rather not also make ships have another magical layer of invulnerability. Maybe slightly harder to penetrate? Okay, sure. That's something we can balance and tweak. But let's chill on the absolutely invincible and immune stuff.

I think the idea is more against small arms fire. Good luck damaging titanium plate with a pistol, for instance.

 

[Vanidar]

I think the idea is more against small arms fire. Good luck damaging titanium plate with a pistol, for instance.

Sure, in the real world, a 9mm pistol would take a long time getting through titanium, if at all. But I think you're kind of cherry picking here and being a bit dishonest with that comparison. What about Desert Eagle in the same area multiple times? Look it up, it absolutely penetrates. How about we depart from only pistols and talk about other forms of infantry weapons? What about a Javelin shoulder-fired missile system? Where do you draw the line? Pistols? Rifles? Pocket knives? After a certain point, even titanium fails to small arms generally across the board, because in the real world there is no such thing as armor that is 100% immune to damage, let alone a "certain damage type".

Further, even if my point above was flat wrong, I could make an argument that game design sometimes doesn't (and sometimes absolutely shouldn't) follow real life. In this case, I think we should think about what healthy gameplay is, not how to model real life. Complete invincibility as a mechanic in a pvp-centric game, in my opinion, is not healthy or interesting for the reasons and situations I discussed previously. It's incredibly difficult to balance and doesn't make sense when you have the option of just reducing the penetration by some modest % a bit at a time until it feels right for the developers.

Me personally, I like the fast TTK and feel ships that are well-designed and armored don't have any real issues against small arms specifically. I don't want to see big changes here if I had it my way. Ships generally have a major advantage in mobility against infantry and can pick and choose when and how to engage them in the first place. If said infantry are standing on the outside of another ship shooting small arms, well, depending on the situation I'd say that's them being ineffective in the first place. Why nerf something into outright oblivion that provides another way to play the game? If you really feel they should be less effective, why not just advocate to reduce their penetration/effectiveness instead of making ships invulnerable to them?

 

[Cavilier210]

It can penetrate half a foot of titanium....? I'm not being dihonest here. There are materials that are truly immune to infantry weaponry on the scale of a ship. You don't shoot pistols and machine guns at cruisers, as the cruiser doesn't even notice due to raw mass. Same idea here. Should all mats be this way? No. Aegiseum is much weaker than charodium, for example. Armor wise. I would say charodium should be immune to anything short of a sniper rifle or rocket launcher.

I don't think its healthy gameplay to be shot by a guy who carried 30 mags of assault rifle ammo for the sole purpose of writing nonsense on my hull. Now should a warship be susceptible to those shenanigans.

Fast time to kill, is why people spend so much time to get a ship, and gripe about losing the ships in 5 seconds.

There are weapons for infantry with the sole idea behind them to be to destroy or damage ships severely. However, its not good for gameplay to have all infantry weapons damage ships no matter the material that ships plating is made of.

 

[Vanidar]

It can penetrate half a foot of titanium....? I'm not being dihonest here. There are materials that are truly immune to infantry weaponry on the scale of a ship. You don't shoot pistols and machine guns at cruisers, as the cruiser doesn't even notice due to raw mass. Same idea here. Should all mats be this way? No. Aegiseum is much weaker than charodium, for example. Armor wise. I would say charodium should be immune to anything short of a sniper rifle or rocket launcher.

So now it's a half a foot of titanium? Why not make it six feet?

Yes, weapons carried by infantry can defeat that with the appropriate type of weapon, a raw amount of concentrated fire, or just enough time. Because, again, there is no true 100% invulnerable anything in real life. If you want to move the goal posts to half a foot of armor, I'll do the same and have a half thousand guys with .50 cal ammo shooting at the same spot. But this is getting into the weeds. Us arguing how things work in real life isn't going to get anywhere.

I don't think its healthy gameplay to be shot by a guy who carried 30 mags of assault rifle ammo for the sole purpose of writing nonsense on my hull. Now should a warship be susceptible to those shenanigans.

Do you care about them writing things or do you care about them actually doing significant damage? Doing significant damage to a well designed ship isn't as easy as you are implying with a simple assault rifle. It seems more though that you don't want them to *ever* be able to do *any* kind of damage whatsoever no matter the circumstance.

Fast time to kill, is why people spend so much time to get a ship, and gripe about losing the ships in 5 seconds.

Like I said, ships that are well designed, armored in the right spots, and bonus points for moving aren't being critically damaged in 5 seconds under any circumstance due to small arms alone. That is simply not happening, even with only low-tier charodium. Also, again, ships have the advantage of being much, much faster over infantry and can choose when and where to fight in the first place.

There are weapons for infantry with the sole idea behind them to be to destroy or damage ships severely. However, its not good for gameplay to have all infantry weapons damage ships no matter the material that ships plating is made of.

That's your opinion and I respect that you have it, but mine is that weapons having literally zero effect (being invulnerable) instead of a mitigated effect is lazy and impossible to balance. Please reconcile your opinion this with the situation I presented where this mechanic makes it impossible for 1,000 or even 1,000,000 infantry to bring down a cheap disabled shuttle wrapped in this magical invulnerable armor. This situation is extreme, but it is extreme on purpose to highlight the brittle and exploitable nature of absolute invulnerability compared to the more simple route of just nerfing something's effectiveness a bit.

How about making small arms less effective on ships based on their total mass? I don't even like the idea and would vote against it, but at least it's not some armor material being 100% invincible, presenting a balancing nightmare while simultaneously completely removing a valid way in certain situations to fight back against ships.

I feel like you sidestep most of my concerns and direct questions and I hate repeating myself, so I'm going to exit the discussion here.

 

[Womble]

So now it's a half a foot of titanium? Why not make it six feet?

A single plate in SB, even if it's only aluminium is thicker than any plate a Desert Eagle could penetrate in anything less than hundreds of rounds, if ever. They're 12cm thick. Minimum. Add to that the fact that once a plate is penetrated, it's, to all intents and purposes, gone: any further hits will just go straight through. A Desert Eagle would take bajillions of rounds to disrupt the integrity of a 1.5m square, 12cm thick plate that completely.

Us arguing how things work in real life isn't going to get anywhere.

Except in so far as how credible it feels, and how it fits the general "feel" the devs are going for, which, as far as I've gathered, is early-mid C20th aero and naval combat. While you might, in such a period, expect individual-portable weapons to inflict damage on airframes, there are going to be structures which are battleship- and tank-equivalents. They're meant to be proof against small arms calibre weapons and, to varying degrees, were. It's why fighter planes shifted from rifle-calibre machine guns to autocannon. Good luck penetrating the plexiglass ball turret of a B17 with an MG bullet.

Please reconcile your opinion this with the situation I presented where this mechanic makes it impossible for 1,000 or even 1,000,000 infantry to bring down a cheap disabled shuttle wrapped in this magical invulnerable armor.

Easy: a million troops shooting at an M1 Abrams with assault rifles would get exactly nowhere. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my statement of position: I think armour plates (whatever level the devs want to set that at; they could decide Charodium is "armour", or they could say it only applies to Onionium, or they could make specific armour alloys later still) should be invulnerable to "small arms". Having a reasonably complex (4-5 factors) armour model would let them shade their way to that, from Valkite plates up to T10 Superalloys.

How about making small arms less effective on ships based on their total mass?

No, because that's nonsense and pushes the model in a way you've already indicated you don't like. That megafreighter clad in tinfoil? You ought to be able to breach its skin anytime with anything; it should be "hard" to kill because it's massive and there's a lot to get through to hit anything truly vital.

 

[Cavilier210]

Here i thought we were talking about game mechanics, which include half foot thick hull plates, and not real life. Because if we were talking real life, it takes special ammunition to defeat modern armors.

 

[YellowDucky]

I like it, i dont like damage until it breaks, as i love the destruction mechanics. I do think pistols and other small arms shouldn’t break it, but maybe a few shotgun shells or rpgs/grenade launchers should be able to break it.

 

[Foraven]

Don't like the idea of making anything "invulnerable" to weapons of any type. We already have safe zones popping up everywhere on every POI outside of Origin and on our stations and capital ships, I'd rather not also make ships have another magical layer of invulnerability. Maybe slightly harder to penetrate? Okay, sure. That's something we can balance and tweak. But let's chill on the absolutely invincible and immune stuff.

And I don't like the idea there is nothing I can hide behind that can't be broken by just wacking at it. It's not bad pvp that your target force you to change your tactics or use different tools to get to it.

 

[Womble]

Yeah. Try punching your way through 12cm metal plate... I mean, I know we're Endos, but...

 

[Foraven]

Yeah. Try punching your way through 12cm metal plate... I mean, I know we're Endos, but...

Well, in this game you can destroy pretty much anything using a pickaxe. Everything is stupidly fragile in this game.