Armour and Shields

This article is about defensive system design. For the component page concerning shields, see Shields. For armor, see Armor.

Armour and Shields are passive defence components, which can improve a ship's defensive capabilities to resist avoid or absorb incoming damage, thus preventing or delaying its destruction. This protection comes at the cost of added mass and build cost for vessels.

Armour

Armour layering is the most basic way of protecting a ship from damage. Each ship has armour consisting of at least one layer of armour-plating distributed around the hull. Additional layers increase protection but reduce the top speed of the ship. The thicker the armour is the more armour it takes to add another layer, as the ship's surface area increases with each added layer.

For a detailed overview of armour, including basic mechanics, research costs and weapon penetration, see the component article.

Armour's main disadvantage is that it slows down the ship, meaning that ships with heavy armour may be forced to engage the enemy head-on and sustain damage to that armour. Armour tech decreases the weight of each armour layer, so you can add more for the same weight or build lighter and faster ships.

Armour has a good strength per HS ratio compared to other ship components. A ship with a higher armour rating can take much deeper hits from highly penetrative weapons such as lasers and still have its internals intact. Armour also adds to the maintenance needs of a ship. Damaged armour can only be repaired at a shipyard or in a hangar.

Shields

Shields are designed systems, and therefore must be designed and researched before becoming available in the class design screen. They must be activated manually and use fuel when active. In overall ship defense, the shields act as a buffer between the armour and incoming weapons fire. They absorb damage up to their rating and are slowly recharged, recharging speed depending on technology researched. Shield components scale linearly as more are added (unlike armour, which increases in cost and weight per layer added) and provide consistent protection over the entirety of the ship in contrast to the per-area protection of armour.

Shields will block all weapons except for Mesons until depleted, and unlike armour will block High-Powered Microwaves, albeit at a 3x damage multiplier. Their strength-per-HS is vastly inferior to armour, but their passive regeneration enables a potentially much larger capability to absorb damage as long as the overall strength of the shields is not depleted. When activated, shields begin charging from zero strength at their normal charging rate. It is therefore possible to be caught at a tactical disadvantage if shields are not activated well prior to engaging in combat. However, this carries the strategic disadvantage of broadcasting your position to passive EM Sensors, as shields increase the EM signature of their ship by an amount equal to three times their strength.

Unlike armour, shields may be prefabricated separately using construction factories, considerably reducing a ship's overall build time.

Example of Armour and Shields

Smaller ships can be considered of negligible risk to use as well so it is fine to armour them lightly for the possibility to close with the enemy and unload their lethal cargo all the sooner. But they need to actually close with the enemy without dying which bring about the age old problem: Armour, Speed,or Firepower. Pick 2.

For example, I have Armour rating 13 on my ship now, that is a total weight of 4585 tons, providing a total of 1100.4 Armour strength. If i did that Tonnage amount in shields (3 strength 300 recharge shield) I would have only 276 shield strength!

92 shields x 50 weight each = 4600 tons, and the cost is actually just slightly cheaper than armor at that weight amount, 100 less cost. But those 92 shields will regenerate 1 shield strength each every 100 seconds. (total recharge time is 300 seconds for a 3 strength shield)

so that is 92 damage you wont be taking against normal weapons every 100 seconds. Using some simple math, we know over the course of a 100 second battle,even if your shields were brought to 0 from the get-go, you'd absorb an additional 92 damage. This makes shields a good buffer for enemy attacks,especially against "Sandblaster" tactics, where high-ROF weapons are used, rather than slow-firing armour-piercing attacks. Shields also absorb all damage given to them, instead of allowing "piercing" like armour does, shields will ALWAYS attempt to protect the ship from impacts or beams, even if they are thin.

BUT 276 total shield strength is... very anemic. that is only 50x6 strength missiles to blast right through! That is just 1 salvo from some NPR's! If you were relying on this alone against NPR's your ships would be fodder.

The break even point for these shields would be around a 800 second battle with very slow enemy attacks allowing you to recharge your shields. This almost never happens, though.

Weapon Penetration Data on Armour

• Lasers dig deeply into armor in a single spot they hit.
• Missiles spread their damage over a large triangular formation. That's how the damage from a 4-damage-point missile warhead would look:

.	X	X	X	.	.	.	.	.	.
.	.	X	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.	.
Ship's Internals

That's because all damage up to 3 is applied to the first layer. If the warhead causes more than 3 damage, the next damage point is applied to the next layer. A 5-point warhead pattern would look the same, but with an additional box in the first row destroyed. A 6-point warhead would destroy two additional boxes on the surface, etc. To penetrate to the third layer, the warhead would need to cause at least 9 damage points.
1 Damage : 1 box on the surface of the ship's armour is destryoed
2 Damage : 2 boxes
3 Damage : 3 boxes
4 Damage : 3+1 on the second layer
5 Damage : 4+1
6 Damage : 5+1
7 Damage : 5+2
8 Damage : 5+3
9 Damage : 5+3+1 on the third layer
etc. You can see that square numbers (4,9,16) are optimal for missile warheads.

• Mesons pass through with no effect.
• High Power Microwaves pass right through with no effect.

General Shield Info

For weight they aren't worth it at all when alone, and other than for ships that are large and meant for decade long voyages through enemy space you should think carefully about your approach to using them en masse.

Shield strength tech goes from 1-15 per shield generator and recharge.

By lvl 5 strength you begin generating a noteworthy amount of protection along with recharge.

5x20 = 100 shield strength for 1000 tons

By lvl 10 strength you have a fairly decent protective field around the ship per generator. Take into account that with lvl 10 shield recharge you would have

10x20 = 200 shield strength at 1000 tons. That is the point where you can start exchanging shields for armor and easily shields would do better than armor due to regeneration technology as long as the enemy's salvos of missiles weren't all bunched into a single giant strike.

Each shield generator regenerates 3.3 damage per second, with 20 shield generators that's 66 dmg every 100 seconds. Not too bad for only 1000 tons of shields. Every 100 seconds you could be absorbing plenty of extra damage.

This also protects you from minor conflicts forcing you to use up maintenance supplies repairing the armor on the hull.

Weapon Penetration Data for Shields

• Mesons pass through shields unaffected.
• High Power Microwaves do 3 damage to shields for each point of standard damage they do.

Combining Armour and Shields

A effective ship should have a mix of Armour and Shields. Armour is always more cost effective at all levels than shields for just plain Strength.

However no damage leaks through shields (except for meson) while they have some strength left, while armour leaks even if it has 95% of its strength left due to lucky hits and certain deep cutting weapons like Lasers.

It's a very good idea to base a shield + armour combo off of the following.

You can create a damage reducing shield barrier that constantly recharges and reduces the damage done and thereby the Depth of damage done by Lasers (which gouge deeply) and Missiles (which make a big wide hole but the more damage the wider and deeper it makes it)

so if you have 20 shields x 5 strength with recharge rate 300 seconds, every 100 seconds you could bring each shield back up to 1.6 strength x 20 and reduce incoming laser and missile strikes on the armour by 32 damage every 100 seconds!

This only gets better with higher shield technology and can provide quite a buffer for the armour Rating, allowing a player to lighten his ships for increased speed or more firepower in a weight range.