Armour and Shields

Armour

Armour plating is the most basic way of protecting your ships from damage. Each ship has at least one layer of armour. You can add as much additional layers as you like, but the weight will slow down your ships. Also, the thicker the armour is, the more armour it takes to add another layer, since the ship is becoming larger with each added layer.

Think of armour in Aurora as rows and columns of steel boxes. The rows are the layers that you added in ship design. The number of columns is determined by the number of components the ship has. A 3-10 armour (three layers deep and ten boxes wide) on a ship that took a 2-damage-point laser hit would look like this:

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

Underneath the armour are the ship's components. Each box is destroyed by one point of damage. When a ship is hit, the location of the hit is randomly determined. The game remembers which boxes are destroyed and what component lies under each column. Additional damage in the same column destroys the armour beneath it. Finally, when all armor in a column is gone, the next point of damage hits the ship's internal component (bridge, sensor, engine etc.) under that column and might destroy it.

Armour's main issue is that it slows down your ship, but large heavily armored ships aren't meant to chase down the enemy and beat them, they are to meet the enemy's attack head on and beat them off while surviving the battle.

Armour tech decreases the weight of each armor layer, so you can add more for the same weight or build lighter (and faster) ships.

Destroyed armor boxes can only be repaired at a shipyard.

Armour has a great strength per ton ratio compared to other ship components. A ship with more armour rating can take much (deeper) hits from lasers and still have its internals intact. Armour also adds to the breakdown chance of a ship.

General Armour and Shields Info

Armour on smaller ships is where this issue lies. Small ships under 10,000 tons require minimal Armour to reach high speeds.

These ships can also 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.

Ok so here we are.

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.

Types of Armour

Component armour

Turrets, magazines, power plants, engines, fuel tanks, etc) the armor on these components reduces the chance that a point of internal damage will destroy one HTK point on the component. The chance is equal to (armour) / (armour + HTK), so 2 points of armour on a 3 HTK turret means 40% of the time it will be undamaged by a hit.

Note that all internal damage is applied one point at a time.

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.

Shields

Shields are created by shield components you have to design and build. You have to switch them on manually and they use fuel when active. They are the buffer between the armor and the incoming weapons fire. They absorb damage up to their rating and are slowly recharged, recharging speed depending on technology researched. You can add as many shield generators as you like.

They block High Power Microwaves giving protection to your sensors and fire controls.

Unlike armour you can prefabricate shields separately at construction factories and thus considerably reduce the ship's overall construction time.

Strength per ton is much worse than armor at every point.

Nearly same cost as armour for worse protection.

There is no time to ready shields if you are taken by surprise e.g. after a Gate jump.

When active, they can give away your position to passive EM sensors.

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.