Leaky Armor (SEIV)

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Have you ever wondered why all armor on your ship, no matter which facing it is on, must be completely vaporized before any damage can be done to internal components (other than from armor skipping weapons)? The solution to this conundrum is leaky armor. Leaky armor is armor in the sense that it protects your ship from physical harm. However, it is not armor in the sense that it does not have the Armor ability. It will protect from some weapon hits, and not protect against others. Some hits will leak through the armor layer to damage internal components. Thus, there is no magic wall to be penetrated as with normal armor. Leaky type armor first appeared in the Pirates & Nomads mod, in the form of Bucky-Tube Gel Plating.

1 How It Works Mechanically
2 A Note on Abilities
3 Implementation
4 Complexity
5 External Links

How It Works Mechanically

What happens when a ship is hit by weapons:

Shields get first crack.
- Skip this step if the weapon deals shield skipping damage, or the damage is taken outside of combat (such as damage due to mines, intel ops, random events or dangerous storms/blackholes)
- Shields are reduced by the weapon damage, and any excess damage points move to the next step.
If the damage type is NOT armor skipping, then the following abilities will trigger their effects.
1. Emissive
  - Weapon damage remaining is reduced by the best emissive ability from any component on the ship (armor or not).
2. Shield Generation From Damage
  - Shields are increased by the smaller of:
    - Weapon damage remaining
    - The sum total of S.G.F.D. ability on the ship (from all components, armor or not)
  - Shields will not increase beyond their maximum amount.
Components with the Armor ability are damaged next.
- This type of armor is not leaky
- Skip this step if the weapon deals armor skipping damage.
1. Almost always, the one with the smaller amount of hitpoints per component will be destroyed first, and the ones with the highest amount of hitpoints will be destroyed last.
2. If the damage is insufficient to destroy a component, then the damage points are added to the next weapon hit to this ship.
Components without the armor ability are finally damaged.
- This is the category in which Leaky Armor falls
1. A random component from the list of undamaged components is chosen for the weapon to hit.
  - The choice is made via a "hitpoints lottery" - Every component gets one "ticket" for each of its hitpoints, and one ticket is chosen at random.
    - EG: A bridge has 10 hitpoints, on a ship with other components totaling 150 hitpoints. The chance of the bridge being chosen to take damage is 10 / 160 = 6.25%
2. If the damage is greater than the component's hitpoints, then that component is destroyed. Repeat step #3 with the remaining damage.
3. If the damage is less than the component's hitpoints, then the component is not destroyed. The damage points are instead added to the next weapon hit to this ship.
Any remaining components with the armor ability are damaged now, even if the damage type was armor skipping.
If you got all the way down to this step, then there are no components left on the ship. It explodes in a giant fireball.

Notes:

Leaky armors treat armor-skipping weapons as normal weapons; since leaky armor does not have the armor ability, it is not skipped!
Leaky armor is called "armor" only because it reduces the damage taken by other components, much like you would expect armor to do.

A Note on Abilities

Armor-skipping damage has one role, to bypass the Armor layer. Or, in other words, those components with the Armor ability. However, testing has shown a few other side effects. The abilities of Shields From Damage and Emissive Armor do not get triggered by weapon shots with the armor-skipping damage type. Both of these abilities will function when any component gets hit, even if that component does not have that ability. This is why combining stock Armor and Emissive Armor works. Any shot from a regular weapon that hits any armor component will be emissed by so many damage points. The same occurs with Crystalline Armor, which has the shields from damage ability. If you assign either of these abilities to an internal component, then that ability will be triggered when any component on the ship is damaged. Whether it is internal or armor is irrelevant. But, their effects do not get triggered from weapon damage of the armor-skipping type. So, if you mod in an internal component that has the Shields From Damage ability (such as leaky shields as in some mods), no shields will be added from the damage incurred by an armor-skipping weapon (such as Shard Cannons).

Implementation

To implement leaky armor, create a component that has no abilities. Give it more structure (hit points) than the average internal ship component has. This way, it is more likely to be hit first than other internal components. If the average component has 10 hit points, then leaky armor with 15 hit points will have a good chance of being hit first. But, a lot of shots will still hit other internals.

Since the only purpose of leaky armor is to absorb damage, it should have a much higher structure to space taken ratio than other components. If it does not, then those other components might end up as being better leaky armor than your new armor! The exact values are up to you, but I would recommend as a bare minimum that all leaky armor components have at least 2 times the structure to space taken ratio as most internals do. In stock SE4, most internals have a ratio of either 1:1 or 2:1 (engines being those with 2:1). So, 4:1 is a good minimal ratio for your leaky armor. In mods which have actually implemented leaky armor, the ratio goes as high as 20:1 to 40:1.

The higher the ratio, the more protection you will get from the same tonnage of leaky armor:

20% of your hull space filled with 40:1 leaky armor will cause weapons to hit the armor first 91% of the time.
20% of your hull space filled with 20:1 leaky armor will cause weapons to hit the armor first 83% of the time.
20% of your hull space filled with 4:1 leaky armor will cause weapons to hit the armor first 50% of the time.

Complexity

You can implement a system where there is just one type of leaky armor. Or, you can implement a system with multiple types, to create more strategic diversity. Let's take a system with two types of leaky armor as an example. Light Armor is 1 kiloton in size and has, say, 20 structure (hit points). Heavy Armor is 10 kilotons in size and has 100 structure.

In this system, the Light Armor has twice as many hit points per kiloton of space taken as the Heavy Armor. This means that it should create ships much stronger than Heavy Armor can, right? Well, not quite. Even though the Light Armored ships can take a lot more damage, you will find that the heavy armored ships tend to win more often. Although the same tonnage of heavy armor has fewer hitpoints, and is hit less often, it absorbs far more damage each time it is hit. So while the LA ships can take more damage overall, they tend to be more leaky, and vital internals (engines, weapons) tend to be struck more quickly than they do on the HA ships.

Example:

Ship size of 1000
Internals have 1 hp per kt and are size 10
Many armor sizes available:
1. 1kt, with 30hp. 30hp/kt
2. 2kt, with 54hp. 27hp/kt
3. 4kt, with 96hp. 24hp/kt.
4. 10kt, with 200hp. 20hp/kt.

	60x 1kt Plates	30x 2kt Plates	15x 4kt Plates	6x 10kt Plates
Armor HP	1800	1620	1440	1200
Total HP	2740	2560	2380	2140
Leak Chance	34.3%	36.7%	39.5%	43.9%
Damage Absorption	86.2%	90.3%	93.6%	96.2%

The thicker plates have a higher chance of leaking, but they have to roll the dice fewer times since they stop a shot faster. The small plates can only block a piece of the damage each time they're hit, so they have more chances to fail even though the chance of failing on any one try is lower.

Note: One of the big advantages of the larger plates is that they take many times fewer repair points to fix (since there are fewer armor plates). Depending on how expensive repair is in your mod, people may choose to use thicker armor even if it is inferior in damage absorption... simply because they can fix a ship and get it back on the front lines faster.

Using these examples, you can create complex armor systems. More complexity (to a point) means that there are more strategic options when designing and employing your ships. This in turn leads to a greater depth of game play. Of course, you should avoid going overboard. 12 different types of armor (not levels, but different types entirely) would probably be too many.