The rules allow for a small 50ton fighter to have the same armor factor as a 500,000 Dton dreadnought. That has always struck me as nonsense. Common sense tells us that this is impossible. And reality tells us that armor capability is more than just slapping more slabs on top of slabs. In reality armor is highly dependent upon both materials science and engineering. And smaller anything simply cannot take the same amount of energy applied to it. The rules acknowledge this in comparing starship weaponry vs. vehicle.
Armor has two issues related to it (for the most part, though materials make this a more complex discussion) - mass of the armor and then the protection offered by the armor. If you use the basic crystal iron armor, adding more gives you a better armor factor. However as navies discovered when they started adding armor (and to a lesser extent, it's true in vehicles), simply welding more iron and steel on top of the other armor it doesn't give you linear extra armor protection. To begin with, it's just too massive. But more importantly, unless you had the proper underlying hull structure to both mount the armor against AND to handle the impact of the shells, it would quickly fail. So the armor technology had to address how to add more protection factor, minimizing the amount needed, and how to put it all together so it could actually work. Traveller simplifies all this and just has an armor factor, which isn't a bad thing for a game system. But the game also allows a 50ton fighter to have the same armor level as a dreadnought... and that's just silly. If you simplify the design system then common sense says that you are going to need to assign maximum levels for craft based on their size. Small craft might be armor level 0-2, 100-1,000 ton might be 0-4, etc, all the way up to the max. It makes no sense to allow a small craft to have all the benefits of being tiny, super-agile, and armored as much as a dreadnought. That's just... silly. The more armor you add the more mass (which isn't considered) and more hull structure to make it work in combat. Which means small ships don't have enough space to devote to it and function. Of course players are going to min-max the hell out of their designs, but this is why you have to put some sort of framework around things to make them somewhat workable and still be playable. It's hella fun to mount weapons on every surface point and wipe out armada's.. but Traveller has never been a bulletstorm style gaming system.
How do others handle this in their sessions?
Armor has two issues related to it (for the most part, though materials make this a more complex discussion) - mass of the armor and then the protection offered by the armor. If you use the basic crystal iron armor, adding more gives you a better armor factor. However as navies discovered when they started adding armor (and to a lesser extent, it's true in vehicles), simply welding more iron and steel on top of the other armor it doesn't give you linear extra armor protection. To begin with, it's just too massive. But more importantly, unless you had the proper underlying hull structure to both mount the armor against AND to handle the impact of the shells, it would quickly fail. So the armor technology had to address how to add more protection factor, minimizing the amount needed, and how to put it all together so it could actually work. Traveller simplifies all this and just has an armor factor, which isn't a bad thing for a game system. But the game also allows a 50ton fighter to have the same armor level as a dreadnought... and that's just silly. If you simplify the design system then common sense says that you are going to need to assign maximum levels for craft based on their size. Small craft might be armor level 0-2, 100-1,000 ton might be 0-4, etc, all the way up to the max. It makes no sense to allow a small craft to have all the benefits of being tiny, super-agile, and armored as much as a dreadnought. That's just... silly. The more armor you add the more mass (which isn't considered) and more hull structure to make it work in combat. Which means small ships don't have enough space to devote to it and function. Of course players are going to min-max the hell out of their designs, but this is why you have to put some sort of framework around things to make them somewhat workable and still be playable. It's hella fun to mount weapons on every surface point and wipe out armada's.. but Traveller has never been a bulletstorm style gaming system.
How do others handle this in their sessions?