Revisit- Armor should have a minimum threshold for damage
This got archives some time ago, I'd like to get it back into the discussion.
Cliffs notes summary is that armor should have damage thresholds, below which certain classifications of weapons simply won't damage them. Example, you can shoot at a real life tank armor with a 9mm pistol all day and best you're going to do is scratch the paint. No appreciable damage.
This could be summarized like this:
- Anti-personnel weapons (small arms, guns, SE1-style interior turrets) damage soft targets (i.e. space engineers) and un-armored components of grids. This would mean that precise targeting would be required to hit the un-armored parts of a ship if all you have is one of these. These might do greatly reduced damage to light armor and zero damage to heavy armor.
- Light anti-ship weapons (Gatling turrets, handheld rocket launchers and similar) Full damage against light armor, reduced damage to heavy armor and extra damage to soft targets.
- Heavy anti-ship weapons (big guns). Full damage against everything, and extra damage against light and no armor, but these are (in SE1) currently too accurate. These should have reduced accuracy against smaller targets (I've actually had my space buddy picked off by heavy artillery while flying too close to an enemy grid)
The point being that each gun classification has its own strengths and weaknesses. Your heavy artillery shouldn't even bother to fire at soft targets and even if it does, it should be incredibly unlikely to hit anything small and fast. Your ship build would want anti personnel turrets for soft targets, light anti-grid weapons for smaller craft and heavy ones for big grid to grid combat.
This would also reward different types of ammo for different guns. AP ammo, High explosive, sabot, etc each with different characteristics. Is your explosive ammo contact or delayed fuse (to allow it to penetrate some armor prior to exploding around soft targets), etc. Straight high explosive ammo is less effective against heavy armor because it's exploding outside the armor for example.
I like this feedback
Replies have been locked on this page!