Lighter is correct. If you look at how much hull spaces your armor is using you can see the difference. Try making a ship with 10 points of armor with the initial armor and then upgrade it, use the new armor button on the bottom of the ship (F5) screen, upgrade and repeat. You will see quite a difference between a couple of levels of armor. A fairly good example is with a gunboat. At max tech it can have about 4-5 armor and still have all the other bells and whistles. With the starting tech you will be lucky to get 2 points of armor in and still have a useable warship.
Brian
