In trying to take some of the guesswork out of ship design when putting together mixed fleets I endeavored to put together an Excel spreadsheet (it seemed fitting) that replicates the performance of the class design window. The idea was to be able to easily see how various components would fit on a ship before they were designed, allowing for better component engineering.
I’m posting because I can’t quite figure out how the armor calculations are being run. I think there is either some rounding or truncating (or display rounding but not actual rounding) going on that I can’t follow, or an additional mechanic not detailed in the description Steve gave in 2010, as a close examination in 2014 will show that description to be either outdated, wrong, or both. I’ll try to outline what I’ve done so far and hopefully get some insight, perhaps even from Steve himself.
To begin with, let’s establish that the description in the Basic Ship Creation tutorial either does not fully describe the mechanic or is simply wrong. Definitions from the tutorial:
Exact Class Size is the size of the ship in Hull Spaces. This will also be the size of the ship for the purposes of active sensor detection.
Armour Rating is the thickness of the armour and can be increased or decreased by clicking the small arrows to the right of this box.
Armour Area is the surface area of the ship based on the assumption it is spherical in shape.
Armour Strength Required is equal to (Surface Area / 4) rounded up.
And an example:
The armour area is 14. 1. Dividing by 4 gives us a Required Armour Strength of 3. 525. As Duranium has a strength per HS of 5, we need 3. 525/5 HS of armour, which is 0. 705, rounded to 0. 7.
We see that Armour Strength Required (ASR) is apparently equal to Armour Area / 4, rounded up. However, in the example immediately following that is not the case: no rounding occurs, the value is just used raw. Were it rounded up the ASR would be 4/5 = 0. 8. It is already apparent that this description should not be taken at face value.
An even greater fallacy is evident if you attempt to follow what the computer is doing with pencil and paper: Design a new ship with Duranium Armour technology. Set the Armour Rating to 1 and construct a ship which lists its Armour Area as 14. 1. The easiest way to do this is with 3x Crew Quarters – Tiny and 4x Crew Quarters. You’ll see that you have all the same values as Steve is describing in the tutorial. Okay, so now try to figure out how much armour this ship needs on your own. You take the Exact Class Size, 5 in this case, as the volume of your sphere and find the surface area, which is 14. 1…
Wait a minute, why is the ECS equal to 5 if those seven crew compartments that make up the ship are only 4. 3 HS, you are surely thinking. Thinking a little more will lead you to realize that the computer has added in the 0. 7 HS of armour on the ship to give you the ECS, and some experimentation will lead you to the first important thing I learned, which is:
The ECS and Armour Area listed in the class design screen represent what will be used to calculate the size of the next layer of armour applied to the ship (with the Armour Rating buttons), not what was used to calculate the current armour on the ship.
If you do happen to run the calculations by hand for a 4. 3 ECS you’ll come up with about 0. 7x Duranium Armour required, depending on where you do the rounding. This is a direct contradiction to how Steve said it works in the example. I wasn’t playing Aurora in 2010 so I can’t say if it was correct back then, but I suspect he just made a mistake but the rounding covered it up. The rounding is one of the biggest roadblocks to this project, as it is difficult to figure out exactly where it is being applied, and how it is being applied.
But we carry on. If the ECS and Armour Area are used for the next Armour Rating, we assume that the current armour HS applied to the ship is based on the previous Armour Rating. Let’s see what else we can find out using that same ship, 4x CQ and 3x CQ – T. It currently has 0. 7x Duranium Armour. Working backward, it should have an ASR of 3. 5 as Duranium Armour has 5 points per HS, and indeed the ASR of the vessel is listed at 3. 5. That shows us where the disconnect is: The ECS and Armour Area are for the next layer but the ASR is what the computer is actually using to calculate the current armour HS requirement, thus the listed ASR must be based on the previous Armour Rating’s ECS and Armour Area.
Now the real trouble begins. Steve tells us the ASR is equal to a quarter of the Armour Area, but we’ve found out for ourselves that it must actually be equal to a quarter of the previous Armour Rating’s Armour Area. Okay, bump that same ship up to Armour Rating = 3. You can see that the ECS is exactly what you’d expect at 6. 9, with 4. 3 for components and 2. 6x Duranium Armour on the vessel, and the Armour Area is correct at 17. 3. The ASR is equal to 13, though, which doesn’t bode well for what we’re about to do which is bump the Rating up to 4. The ASR is now 19. 5, higher than the previous Rating’s Area and almost high as the current one. This only gets worse as you keep going, at high Ratings the ASR will be double, triple, quadruple (etc) the Area.
At this point I’m going to stop, as I think it’s clear that the armour calculations are pretty weird and the description in the tutorial is insufficient, outdated, or wrong. I had a couple other things to bring up but as I typed this out I just muddied the waters for myself more and more to the point that I don’t even know where I stand anymore.
So what’s going on here? What this whole thing boils down to is, in eight words,
How exactly is ASR related to Armour Area?
I think I knew that I could probably guess my way through the rest. If somebody wants to explain how all the stuff I’ve written is wrong that’s great, in fact I even see a place where it might all come apart: in the tutorial Steve says “each additional layer will be cover a greater area and therefore require greater strength than the previous one. ” I took this to mean that since the overall volume, and therefore area of the ship would increase as layers were applied the ASR would increase as expected, but it could very well mean “for Rating > 1, an additional mechanic comes into play that I don’t mention here. ”
