Armor as a factor of tonnage

[phavoc]

In regards to some of the other discussions floating around, what is the consensus of making the maximum armor for a vessel related to it's overall tonnage? This would help address some of the issues with 200 tons ships flying around with 15 armor, or small 10k Dton Battle Riders killing ships 3-5x their size.

While we don't have the same paradigm naval vessels have (buoyancy), we still have the concept of mass (albeit loosely applied). Bigger ships need bigger engines to move more mass. It seems to me that smaller ships simply should not be able to have the same amount of armor as say a heavy cruiser or battleship.

 

[Chas]

I think you'd need to present that as a complete package, all the weapon systems have been balanced around the TL armors and this could make fighters redundant, which we want to avoid.

I'd put in another thread I'd like to see some advantage for large ships myself though, what I suggested was in a similar vein but rather making the armor tougher, make the hulls tougher, able to withstand more damage which would be easier to implement. You could allow hull reinforcement at a scale of say 50% cost (per Feb update) of hull, 40% for >10K, 30% for 40K, 20% for 70K, 10 % for 100K, allowing multiple use and capping at say a max of 3 times. Or just put in a sliding scale of hull points themselves but I'd prefer this to be optional for the player.

 

[phavoc]

Well, that's one option. Since players aren't going to go through the same issues that a naval designer has to do (balance, mission, cost, etc) you see players building designs that probably would never exist in the real world.

And I'm not sure the changes would unbalance things like fighters. In any universe they should be swatted from space - assuming you can hit them. A fighter or say a small ship with the same armor factor as a dreadnought just bugs the hell out of me.

 

[Nerhesi]

Yeah this would seem like a giant alternate setting. Not totally opposed to it either - but it is a massive change. This is like how T5 does things.

But not only do we need to take craft agility into play, but size and other things.

Having different "toughness" values for fighters is a good thing in either case. I don't want swappable-tie fighters. It's 5000 AD - some fighters should tak out battleships if need be (picture that TL9 vs TL15 like a few trek episodes out there).

But yeah, you'd need to redo all weapons, armour, balance, everything. Even just adding "agility penalties" - makes every weapon miss etc etc

 

[AnotherDilbert]

MegaTraveller and TNE addressed this by calculating weight and volume separately. I rather liked Fire, Fusion, and Steel but many people ran away screaming.

Keep it simple. The current system is simple.