The MT ship design system is broken, the armour rules doubly so.
The best canonical description is the jump space article by MWM and what is written in T5. ...
More and more reason to get T5 once I get a little spare cash. Sigh.
I could probably make MT work for me if I did some modification to it, but then it wouldn't be useful to anyone but me, so not really worthwhile.
...Two other issues:
First, at least in CT, an exterior shell is going to increase volume and decrease drive potentials. Under LBB2 this will hit HARD, bumping the hull size up to the next increment on the drive table.
This is also a problem for
High Guard, though it only becomes apparent if you try to take fighters up against vehicles in ground combat. Fighters don't jump, of course, but that free 40 factors of armor at no volume cost makes them more formidable in ground combat than they probably have a right to be. By extension, that free armor is also being granted to unarmored ships, ergo those are jumping with slightly greater volumes than their descriptions actually declare. Again, I'm being a bit OCD; it's a White Whale thing.
...Second, wouldn't this put the ship inside the 100D radius of the outer shell? I'm given to understand this is not desirable.
I honestly have no idea. The shell has little mass compared to the ship proper, but I don't know if that makes any difference in the context of a ship essentially jumping out from inside of something, which is pretty clearly what's going to happen if I try to put a Whipple shield on outside of a ship's jump grid. Ought to make for some nice fireworks though.
I can't see a way to give a ship adequate radiation and micro-meteor protection without grabbing a bit of volume out of the craft, since the grid needs to be outside of all that. The modern answers seem to be combinations of polyethylene and other materials to give the best balance between stopping high-speed particles and stopping high-energy gamma, and those run several inches thick at minimum. (On the other hand, polyethylene is likely to behave more like the Book-2 hull than the Book-5 hull if it comes under fire, which is something to think about.)