Re: Armor vs shields?

Glen Bailey wrote:

> I don't have any books yet but with FT3 being 
> promised(?) soon I was wondering if any release date has been 
> announced?

None that I've heard of. Jon's a bit too busy with the model-selling
part of the business, I think  :-/

> Both FT battles I've been in have seen the armored ships win
> and the screen ships lose.  People seem to prefer armor. Anyone 
> done any analysis of armor vs screens?  

Oh, certainly. Not enough of it in time for the FB1 printing (I didn't
have Excel then, so had to do all my number-crunching with pencil and
paper... takes a *lot* longer, it does :-/ )

Armour is underpriced compared to normal hull structure (or, rather,
the hull structure is overpriced - IMO hull should cost 1xMass instead
of 2xMass), but which of screens and armour is best depends very much
on what weapon mix your enemy uses and how large your ships are. If
your ships are small (less than NMF 60 or thereabouts) or use
Fragile/Weak hulls armour is better, and screens lose power rather fast
if your enemy uses screen-ignoring weapons.

Elaborating on Alan's difficulties a bit:

a) Screens can go down due to treshold checks - on average, a system
goes down when the ship has lost 67-70% of its hull boxes (armour
doesn't count here!). The probability for this is fairly easy to
calculate, but screens can also come back *up* thanks to the DCPs - and
the probability for that depends on how big the ship is (ie, how many
DCPs it has) as well as how fast it takes damage (ie, how many chances
you get to repair it) and what other internals it has suffered (eg,
power core and life support hits tend to have higher priority <g>)...
and this makes it virtually impossible to calculate the average effect
of the screens exactly. You can get a reasonably good estimate, of
course.

b) Opponents don't use all beams. You can get around this by assuming
that the ratio between screen-ignoring damage and beam damage is
constant, but it isn't a very realistic assumption (it depends rather
heavily on range).

c) The cost difference between armour and screens isn't very important
- about 2% of the total cost of the ship unless it is smaller than Mass
60 or so (in which case it probably shouldn't have screens anyway -
both because of the Mass breakpoint for screens and because it won't
have a strong enough hull to benefit from it!).

[snip]

> I was thinking of adding a Meson battery as another weapon: size of 
> class 3 (A) but damage as class 2 (B) and it ignores armor.  This a
fair
> weapon?

Should be reasonably OK. Maybe a bit weak, but at least that's better
than too powerful :-/

Later

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry