I understand. He is referring to the cap on the damage template to armor. There is a point to stupidly powerful weapons that instead of making another armor level wide, it simply does one more deeper (one armor piece wide). It does not reduce the amount of damage, it just makes it better penetrating. So if you had a ship that could absorb a ~300 damageshot to the armor, you would see a massive triangle with a line going strait down at the end.

That's a thing? Nifty!

I'm not sure what you're referring to, could you link that page of the wiki?
A power 240 missile will always cause 240 damage, though some will be absorbed by shields and some by armour. Everything after that is applied to components using the damage allocation table, destroying those components, when all components are destroyed the whole ship is lost.

If I recall correctly, the wiki seems to hint that a ship can actually be destroyed long before all components are lost.
Just found it, actually.
http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Internal_Damage
"Damage that attempts to reallocate 20 times without finding intact components to apply to will destroy the ship. Any components which are still intact upon ship destruction may be found via salvaging the resulting wreck."

I'm not sure what you're referring to, could you link that page of the wiki?
A power 240 missile will always cause 240 damage, though some will be absorbed by shields and some by armour. Everything after that is applied to components using the damage allocation table, destroying those components, when all components are destroyed the whole ship is lost.

YwesSir!
Well, or I would, but the thing is I have never edited a wiki ever, so there is that barrier every time for me to actual learn this. Procrastination says next time, and someone else will surely get this.

It's no harder than typing in a forum post

I find these calculations mostly useful the other way around though, which is planning armor strength.

Thanks for this ...

Since no one, including the wiki has yet supplied the accurate penetration depth formulas (though most people here know them from other posts since forever..):





And soon to come in 7.2, the most devastating of all:



So this means a missile warhead of 4 will harm 2 layers. A warhead of 9 - 3 layers, and a 25 warhead is 5 layers. Note that this of course means that you need a 25 warhead to punch through 4 layers of armor (dealing only 1 point of internal damage with that 5th row though).

With lasers for example you have a stretched out, but still essentially square expanding structure, so that is why there is multiplication inside the root. A 3 damage laser pierces through sqrt(3*3)=3 layers as obvious, and a 6 damage laser does 4.{something}, so that is 4. (5 damage would however only be sqrt(15) and not make it)

I find these calculations mostly useful the other way around though, which is planning armor strength. I won't spoiler you, but there are certain attack strengths you can count on out there, and having the exact armor strength that can tank one of those is only sensible planning.
So to figure out what your armor can block, reverse the formulas..


Against lasers that means that x armor layers are at minimum needed to block these y laser powers:

3 blocks 3
4 blocks 5.333, so that is a 15cm with 6
5 blocks 8.333, meaning that a strength 9 laser hit will be enough to pierce 4 armor, so you need 5 from then on.
6 blocks 12, which means up until then 5 armor were enough, so 5 layers also block 20cm laser with strength 10
7 is 16.333, so 6 layers are barely enough to ward against the 25cm~-16 damage laser
8 provides enough against the damage 24 size 30cm lasers
9 is needed against damage 32
11 against 42
22 against 168
88 layers against 2598

More would be vanity, especially considering that shock damage switches into the deal much earlier. With lances coming, up to 51 might also look kind of convincing, depending on how much and how strong use AI make of those.(I dare to predict however: not too much)

///edit: Had to correct wrong armor calculations.

I don't understand why we don't know the damage templates with certainty. Surely at some point over the last five years Steve has told us what the templates are? I don't see why they need to be a secret.

Steve, if you see this, could you just tell us what the templates are for each weapon and each damage value?

I haven't played with lasers of that sort of damage level but I was always under the impression that a laser just did a single line of damage equal in layers to the damage output of the laser.

EDIT: Did some digging in the wiki and found an actual explanation of how damage is applied with beams and missiles, it would seem like the beam patterns you came up with are working according the wiki.

http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Armor