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!