Poly-metal ceramic ablative armour coating

Deon Beauchamp shared this feedback ago

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A coating for armour that will boost the armours surface endurance to projectile weaponry.

The coating material pre application would be considered unstable requiring application from a static grid onto a mobile grids armoured surfaces.

This would be achieved via the use of heated storage vessels and a plasma field application device.

The high energy field electrical deposition would require support from a large capacitor array to raise energy levels to the required intensity.

Material resources required for the coating.

Cobalt

Titanium

Magnesium

Silicon

The coating on any individual piece of armour will last until sufficient damage has worn the coating away.

The coating is incredibly light.

The coating can only be applied to the exterior faces of a vessel.

The coating will deteriorate over a week naturally.

Applying a second coat over the top of the first does not result in any improvement to an armour block with a partial or complete coating. It will however reduce coating performance where some coating remains on any particular block.

Grinding the coating back to a normal armour state is possible.

My guess is that the coating will provide for an armour boost on light armour by a factor 2 to 3 times, but significantly less on heavy armour in the region of about a 0.4 factor of improvement.

This would be a late game technology

The coating would affect the look of the armour making it recognisable from a distance.

I like this feedback

Replies (2)

Deon Beauchamp ●

Blah, armour shield blah. Hardly anyone reads topics that are not boosted to 'updated'.

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Tael ●

Or things are just quiet because nobody has any significant input to provide.

As for this... "only applied to the outside" sounds like it's just asking for cheese and abuse (such as a 25cm gap between layers that don't form a complete enclosure, or layers that are merged/landing-geared in to place after coating).

Also, having to grind and then repaint a ship after every fight would be massively tedious. The repair-feature in SE1's services terminal was added to remove the tedium of having to check every block for bullet-holes with a hand-welder on a 150m long large-grid ship after it got strafed with gats. Requiring that someone first grind the coating from every block on a 150m long unified-grid ship and then repaint it after every fight sounds like the kind of painfully tedious thing a drill-sergeant would make you do in boot-camp, not the kind of thing you'd want in a game.

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Deon Beauchamp ●

Hi Tael, I think that the players have a lot more to give, but play testing and playing are not the same.

My hope is that the coating would be too expensive and difficult to apply to large vessels, my intention is for it to be used as a medium armour or a heavy armour plus for small vessels to resist those initial seconds of a combat encounter, prolonging the fight without impacting manoeuvrability too much.

I did not wish to see this tech without cost, both in resource and tedium. The coating would flake off over time reducing the need to grind, the flake off time could be balanced to be acceptable.

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Wilhelm ●

I kind of see the maintenance side of this similar in time investment for a theorized (and suggested) reactive armor. Something you put on the outer surfaces of your ship that would need to be replaced after they explode, meaning ship repair time. I think as long as that time isn't too painful it would be a nice addition.

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