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....