Armour/shields

As might be expected, my random thoughts on Armour eventually triggered some long emails from my only serious rival for the post of "person who cares TOO much". Amid much thought provoking stuff, here's a thought:

ST uses shielding and armour for each aspect (otherwise how could you stick to genre and demand "All power to the forward shields Scotty").

Which leaves me wondering if it would be nice to have that as a thing to do; put all the power to the forward shields, or the rearward shields or whatever. We could all be mini-Savasku, juggling our power budget to where we needed it the most. Yeah, that's why we don't do it, because it would essentially suck.

Thinking is dangerous

The latest thoughts from an earlier commenter, and my reply

1) When fighting against beam weapons, you can't afford to leave a hole in your armour after it is damaged. The next shot will simply target the hole. So the armour has to be self-repairing in some way, and it will cease to function properly when mobile self-repair resources have all been used up.



2) If you think about it, you should be able to get a much better mass-performance relationship for armour that moves around in response to threats and damage, than from armour that remains static, once you get to the point of having really smart materials (a tech level or two ahead of where we are today). At the tech levels represented in Full Thrust, no one is going to be able to afford to waste mass budget on static armour.

On 1) I have a very different vision of the thing - if the attacking systems were accurate enough to throw a round down the hole they'd just made, we wouldn't be rolling for damage on systems, we'd just be picking the thing we wanted to knock out. In my view at the the kind of ranges we're talking about, the spread on a beam weapon bathes the whole ship in a warm and toasty glow, and burns through at some random point.



On 2) it's superficially attractive until you start to think about it, then you ask how the armour can actually know where to go. All the energy systems are coming in at the speed of light - how can the armour possibly react fast enough? Smart's one thing, faster than relativistic is another!

Yet more thoughts on armour

On the way into work this morning I had some spare processor time left over from not falling under a truck and I think I figured out why the designers of FTII didn't bother with armour arcs - other than the obvious "too much like hard work" reason.

Guns are armour. From a purely practical point of view, you try to set up your firing solution so that you don't get too much return fire, so you try to come in at the target from an angle which doesn't expose you to the enemy guns. Which means that ships should, in the long term, getting fewer attacks from the direction in which they can put the most firepower. This is generally the front, and then the forward side arcs. Which is pretty much historically where armour gets concentrated too. So since the natural reluctance of your enemy to get shot at is having the same effect as more armour, why bother keeping track of it?


Just as well, mind you. I hate to think what twisted compromises and insanity would be needed to implement armour for different areas. You'd have to cut the price or up the effectiveness. Probably easier to up the effectiveness, at least until you get to very small ships like those ESU and NSL corvettes with a single hull box and a matching single armour box. It would make for a really awful optional rule; give people the option to convert each armour box into five boxes which could be parcelled out over the various arcs of the ship, each counting as a "proper" armour box for that arc only. It seems like a superficially fair and balanced idea until you stop and think about it. Then you realise that in practical terms, you'd find that people would armour the living hell out of their frontal arc and charge in all guns blazing, confident that it will take the enemy a long time to shoot through the frontal armour since it's effectively five times as thick as it should be. And really, not having armour on other aspects isn't that big of a deal if our own games are anything to go by. Of course, there would be some amusement to be derived from shooting up people like that with ignore-armour weapons.

There's also the irritation of trying to work out which arc you've been hit in, but we overcome the opposite problem without too much trouble. Still, none of it seems worth the aggravation.

More thoughts on armour

And some more thoughts come in. As a further Rorschach test, ask yourselves whose mind works this way:

Alteratively, some types of armour on a ship dissipate the force of the attack throughout the whole of its structure. In some cases, it may be a unimolecular structure. In others, all the armour may be in a single quantum state, and react uniformly (as a superfluid might).

And some other types of armour may be able to do something similar to the kidshield thing. Some ships may be covered in nano-scale field generators, but only able to power a small share of them at a time. And damage may mainly be manifested in burning out redundancy in power distribution.

The Sa'Vasku may have a biological form of this, or may actually have semi-sentient kid-tiles rushing around to catch incoming fire, and patch up holes.

And perhaps some other bioship types may take damage analogous to shock, that is much more debilitating than the damage they take directly.

Armour; an explanation

And this just in; can you guess the source?

FT armour works on the kiddie shield principle. You know how in the movies an escaping badguy picks up a cute kiddie to use as a shield? Well, when your sensors register that your opponents weapons have locked on, all the armour tile modules are sent scurrying round to the expected point of impact like lots and lots of sacrificial kiddies (The armour may in fact be made from kiddies, but I'm not telling - that information is classified). As your opponent is not a clean cut movie hero, instead of holding his fire he just keeps blasting until there are no more kiddies between him and the target.

50% of pulse torpedo damage penetrates because it burns through kiddies really fast.

Kravak projectiles work because they incorporate Big Scary Angry Dog DNA that snarls as it comes in and scares away the kiddies.

Armour

The gathering momentum of Campaign Eddie has seen me reading a lot of draft rules of one kind and another. In the course of reading them, I got to thinking about Armour in FTII.

There's a funny thing that none of us have really thought about (or at least not talked about); weapons of all kinds are constrained to various arcs of fire. Armour isn't. It's completely homogenous, an even skin all over the ship. What got me to thinking about it was how you'd go about making a ship to ram another ship. Since the work is going to be done by the impetus of the ramship and perhaps the secondary explosion when the drive went up, what you'd really want, in abstract terms, would be something which would hold together till impact, and preferably go really fast right up until then. One version of that would be an engine with a bridge and a huge slab of armour in the front which would protect the engine and the control room right up until impact. I had this lovely picture in my mind of a sort of titanium mushroom with a vast flame of exhaust coming out of the stem.

And I realised that the standard FTII rules don't let you make something which would look like that. And I started to wonder why armour doesn't have arcs when weapons do....