[ft2.5] armour v hulls

right, here's a really stupid question.

why bother building ships with hulls other than fragile? for the same mass as
an Average hull, i can get a Fragile and a coat of armour. this gives me the
same amount of boxes in total, and i take thresholds later.

or am i missing something? or, rather, what am i missing?

Tom

> On Wed, 3 Mar 1999, Thomas Anderson wrote:

> right, here's a really stupid question.

Well, let's see... rerolls from beam hits bypass armor, so all of that
damage goes direct to hull.  Pulse torp hits are 1/2 to armor, 1/2 to
hull, so half of the damage bypasses the armor and goes direct to hull. After
just a
few beam rerolls or PT hits, and you are making threshold checks - even
though your armor may be mostly intact. Good enough answer? <G>

> right, here's a really stupid question.

That's okay, you're likely to get stupid answers.

> why bother building ships with hulls other than fragile? for the same
You're aware that armor does not stop 100% damage from all weapons? From
several systems it only stops half the damage from a shot, and the rest goes
to hull.  And re-roll damage all goes into hull.

My general theory (arrived at by guesswork rather than analysis) is to take a
Weak hull and about the same amount of armor as the first damage track.
However, I fight SML-armed opponents, and would do something different
if I
were facing a Beam-heavy opponent.

> Thomas Anderson wrote:

I Beg to differ, it's a good one.

> why bother building ships with hulls other than fragile? for the same

Re-rolls. These ignore armour. Also half the damage of SMs and Torpedos,
likewise.

Thus if you get hit by 2 torps, doing 3 and 4 pts respectively, that's 2
off the armour + 1 off the hull, then 2 of the armour + 2 off the hull.

Similarly, if you get hit by a beam, and he rolls a 6, then the re-roll
damage goes directly to Hull.

So your 12 armour 4 hull ship, if hit by the 2 torps above, has 8 armour
left, but just took a threshold check with a +2, AND you only have 1
hull and 1 DC Party left. One Torpedo (not rolling a 1) or 1 beam that rolls a
6, and it's goodnight Irene.

A 4 armour 12 hull ship would have no armour left, but would take only 1
threshold, and still have 9 hits left.

Summary: the proportion of the hits that burn through with beams is low. Only
about 20% under most conditions. But a real killer is the "multiple thresholds
per turn" die addition. Very often a ship which has lots of

Thomas Anderson

> right, here's a really stupid question.
this

> gives me the same amount of boxes in total, and i take thresholds

As the others have said, you forget that armour lets some damage through
to the hull structure - on average 17% of the sub-pack damage,
and 42% of the SML and pulse torp damage; also 17% of the beam damage if
you don't have any screens, but 21% if you have level-1 screens and
almost 29% if you have level-2 screens.

With twice as much armour as hull boxes, an SML- or pulse torp-using
opponent is pretty much guaranteed to kill your ships before they've lost all
armour, and even a beam user has a better than even chance of inflicting at
least one treshold before the armour goes. (Unless he does
a Teske, of course - in which case you get almost no use out of the
armour!)

Having said this, however, armour *is* better than hull boxes. It should IMO
cost 3xMass (just like weapons) to reflect this.

Later,

In a message dated 99-03-02 19:37:35 EST, you write:

<< why bother building ships with hulls other than fragile? for the same mass
as an Average hull, i can get a Fragile and a coat of armour. this gives me
the same amount of boxes in total, and i take thresholds later.

or am i missing something? or, rather, what am i missing? >> Pulse Torps come
to mind.
-Stephen

> On Tue, 2 Mar 1999, -MWS- wrote:

> On Wed, 3 Mar 1999, Thomas Anderson wrote:

very true, but i can't see that's a huge effect...

> Pulse torp hits are 1/2 to armor, 1/2 to hull, so

d'oh! <bashes head on table> i forgot about that. right, fair enough.

> After just a

yes, thanks! and to laserlight + alan too.

Tom