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.