Triple post, sorry, but as I said I looked into the armor cap theory today, and yes, I can pretty much confirm this. I rescaled the ship's armor that was making problems into an area where I wouldn't get the lockup errors when selecting the ship in the ship window. Since I haven't posted the picture of those, here they are:
...this comes first, followed by an infinite chain of those:
After the scaledown I increased the armor gradually by one layer and checked each time if the error would spawn again.
Here is when that happened for this ship (36 layers were too much, 35 is A-O-K):
...But what is really causing the problem here? Could be column count, total size, armor strength or area.. - not clear. So since I wanted to check if it happened with my orbital habitat aswell, that also was the opportunity for a illuminating cross-check. I got the same error that I reported way above some days ago, so it is also confirmed that this happened due to maximum armor cap.
This habitat was around 125 million tons, and the freighter ~37 million, so size didn't matter. If you look at the numbers it becomes clear that 'armor strength'(total count of boxes) is indeed this ominous limiting factor, and the point at which Aurora just can't handle the awesome anymore must lay between 345k and 355k armor boxes. Further testing closed that in to pretty much exactly 350k.
I don't know why, but it seems as if intentionally setup. I was expecting a power of 2 factor behind this somewhere(which often comes with natural memory limitation), but the next potency is pretty much equally away in both directions (2^18~262k and 2^19~524k). Addionally 350k is just too round of a number to be an incident.
Now, what does all that mean? Well, if armor is capped, and every ship has to have armor, that also concludes in that ship sizes are capped. I wanted to find out the two hard limits that are inclined by such a number:
- 1. The maximum ship size where you could technically still have maximum possible armor of 100 layers.
- 2. Of course maximum ship size with the 1 minimum layer of armor.
Here is what I got for the first (with maximum armor tech of course, otherwise resistance testing would be futile):
..After this size (approx. 7.75 million tons) you would have to reduce the layer count to not excede the total box limit.
Aaand the ultimate maximum:
...7.75 billion tons. It needs 10 minutes just to design because the program becomes so slow that you need to wait some seconds for every click to being processed. Although a ship of that size would not excede the maximum armor, it would possibly run into other errors like with the round function that works insinde the maintenance amount calculation. Isn't completly game breaking like the other though, but certaintly quite bothersome.
So, I don't know if this (or these) limitation(s) where intended, but if not, it is hereby reported by imperium intelligence for a steve to look after.
