I was trying to work out how thick the armor on a pdc would need to be to survive a strike by a single warhead strength 3000 missile (1 size 100 missile all warhead at max tech level) when I discovered a simple way to do it. missiles will penetrate the square root of the strength of their warhead in layers. thanks to this I just simply plugged in 3000 and square rooted it to find out I need about 55 layers of armor to stop a conventional warhead from penetrating a pdc. laser warheads i'm not sure about since I don't really know how they work, so I just counted them as a strength 10000 warhead since they divide effective armor by 10 at the final tech level. (which I know is actually them spreading over less armor but gouging deeper) which would mean armor that is 100 layers deep would survive a single hit from a maximum strength laser warhead without damage to the internals.
Why am I talking about this?
well it makes it easy for me to see how strong I need to make my missiles to penetrate armor on a single hit since I can just square the layers of armor to find out the strength to break it.
just posting it because i'm a bit bored and stuff
Ummmmm my recollection is that the damage templates for each damage type and strength of damage are defined in the DB, and go up to some maximum strength. In other words, I'm not at all convinced that a strength 3000 warhead would do any damage at all!! (It might just give an error.) In other words, my recollection is that the damage patterns are hard-wired based on strength, NOT calculated using a formula that allows arbitrarily large damage strengths. OTOH, Steve may have changed it since I noticed this.
STEVE - Do you want to comment on this?
That being said, you're right - the warhead strength required to do 1 point of penetration damage on the first hit to undamaged level-N armor is (N+1)^2 So a strength-4 warhead is required for level-1 armor, strength-4 for level-2, and so on.
ON THE OTHER HAND, missiles have (I think) one of the "shallowest" penetration patterns. Beam weapons like lasers or plasma carronades (I think) do damage that's more of a rectangular shape, and so will penetrate more deeply.
John