Out of curiosity (since most people seem to favor shields), what would one consider heavy armor? Five? Ten? Higher?
FYI, I almost never use shields - it always seems to cost too much to get them to a level where they'll be significant.
As for my definition of heavy armor in a game last year I needed to probe a WP that kept eating my scouting attempts (there were a bunch of NPR on the other side armed with heavy plasma carronades). I ended up making a jump ship class that was nothing but engines, jump engines and armor - kind of like the minesweeper classes in SF. Oh yes, and an active sensor so I could get an ID on whatever was on the other side. I think I had the armor cranked up to level 20, and these were probably 6000 ton ships. I sent two of them through the WP - one made it back. I consider this heavy armor.
There are two things you need to worry about when thinking about armor: single-shot penetration, and "sand-blasting". Different weapons have different penetration patterns - for missiles it's wedge shaped, while for beam weapons I think it's more narrow and deep. For missile warheads, an easy rule of thumb is that to penetrate N levels, you need a strength N^2 warhead. So strength 1 warheads never penetrate (since armor is always at least one); strength 4 will do 1 point of damage to the second level (which means they damage a ship with level-1 armor); strength 9 will do 1 point to the third level (and 3 and 5 respectively to 2nd and 1st levels) etc. If the enemy warheads/beams can't penetrate your armor with one shot, then they need to sand-blast entire levels away with a lot of little hits until it becomes thin enough to get penetration. In the WP scouting effort described above, the bad guy carronades couldn't even come close to penetrating my turtles' armor, but there were enough of them and they did enough damage that they sand-blasted away whole layers of the armor (ok, so this was more like "brick-blasting").
So I consider 1 as "unarmored", 2 or 3 are "light armor" (putting a little bit on to require decent size warheads for penetration) - these are the levels of armor I usually use for missile combatants who I don't expect to close within range of the bad guy and for who speed is important (both to chase and run away). For beam combatants, I'll pile on a lot more armor; I'll probably try for at least 5-8 (I consider this medium), and put on more if I can manage it.
Coming back to Steve's (and others') comments about logistics being the crucial factor in analyzing missile vs. beam warfare, I suspect that it's a lot cheaper for me to slap level 10 or more armor and a few beams and engines on a "turtle" design than it is for the bad guy to build enough missiles to eat through that armor, and he'll probably end up shooting his magazines dry while he's at it. In fact, that's the way I won my first battle with precursors (many years ago when they were much more stupid and the armor rules were different) - I slapped enough armor on my ships so that their missiles couldn't penetrate, then walked up to them and plinked away with beam weapons. That being said, I find that my first designs from a conventional start are dominated by missiles and FAC - I think this is because that's the quickest and cheapest way to give yourself a long-range punch (more importantly) to defend against the bad guy dropping missiles on your home world.
Hope that answered your question - I realize I diverted pretty far from it.
John
John
