Playing around with armor in CT HG. It's been mentioned that an issue is a fighter mounting the same percentage of armor as a battleship carries proportionally thinner armor - 1/15 to 1/30 the thickness - while getting the same level of protection. Several people have mentioned their methods for addressing this.
Problem starts at 0 armor. Canon sources describe it as something you can cut through with an energy weapon and some work - presumably the energy weapons have some sort of "tool" setting where they can be used as cutters rather than high-power penetrators. Then Striker comes along and says it's armor rating of 40 - equivalent to 13 inches of hard steel, almost the same as USS Missouri. That's not to say it's 13 inches of hard steel, just that it would stop the typical 8" naval gun and cut gamma ray exposure by better than a factor of a thousand or so.
Neither CT Book 2 nor CT HG assign any volume to the base hull - hull's a freebie, which is actually a bit of a headache when you consider volume plays a role in space for docked boats and in jump mechanics. Some suggest taking it from bridge volume, but then there are the boats without bridges. Maybe all the equipment has a bit of hull volume included, like your arm already comes with skin attached. (That sounded a lot less morbid when it was in my head.) At ant rate, MT does its own thing, and there you get the steel, but CT could be using ceramic heat tiles with aerogel between it and an inner hull layer to provide added heat resistance and space for a plasmafied impactor to expand before it hit the inner hull, or maybe a Whipple shield that expands out from the hull during flight in normal space but contracts tight against the hull for jumps or docking, or pretty much anything we can think of. That nonspecific volume bit does save us from having to explain why the methods they use to give civilian spacecraft the ability to repel naval artillery aren't applied to tanks, and we may yet be able to cut it with personal energy weapons and maybe a hammer for the tile.
Then we come to the armor. That 4+/3+/2+/1+ bit throws me; maybe that's the framing on which the armor is mounted, not a major issue. MT's clear that it's the same as tank armor. CT doesn't speak to what it is, just that it takes up a certain percent per rating, and the method results something like the 10-ton boat being as heavily armored as a 200 kt battleship of the same rating despite having about 1/30 the thickness of armor. When I do the math, balance point seems to be at about 100 dTons, but that's a terrible balance point since it pretty much eliminates any give-and-take in armor percentages for pretty much all the capital ships, who can max out armor with little effort. But ... tanks! Cross-pollinating versions is always fraught but sometimes interesting. That Imperial Marine APC for example is carrying equivalent of CT HG USP code 1 to 4 for armor; allowing for angled faces, call it a 1. Took roughly 38% of its volume. For something battleship-size carrying that thickness of armor, it'd be around about 1 1/2% of its volume.
Anyway, what I get from that is a table that looks like this, which is avoiding the big breakpoint jumps that show up in simpler methods and is doing more or less what I want at the fighter level - but which strikes me as overly complicated and too ambitious. I do have a bit of a problem with overcomplicating things. So, I'm interested in how other people are doing this.
Problem starts at 0 armor. Canon sources describe it as something you can cut through with an energy weapon and some work - presumably the energy weapons have some sort of "tool" setting where they can be used as cutters rather than high-power penetrators. Then Striker comes along and says it's armor rating of 40 - equivalent to 13 inches of hard steel, almost the same as USS Missouri. That's not to say it's 13 inches of hard steel, just that it would stop the typical 8" naval gun and cut gamma ray exposure by better than a factor of a thousand or so.
Neither CT Book 2 nor CT HG assign any volume to the base hull - hull's a freebie, which is actually a bit of a headache when you consider volume plays a role in space for docked boats and in jump mechanics. Some suggest taking it from bridge volume, but then there are the boats without bridges. Maybe all the equipment has a bit of hull volume included, like your arm already comes with skin attached. (That sounded a lot less morbid when it was in my head.) At ant rate, MT does its own thing, and there you get the steel, but CT could be using ceramic heat tiles with aerogel between it and an inner hull layer to provide added heat resistance and space for a plasmafied impactor to expand before it hit the inner hull, or maybe a Whipple shield that expands out from the hull during flight in normal space but contracts tight against the hull for jumps or docking, or pretty much anything we can think of. That nonspecific volume bit does save us from having to explain why the methods they use to give civilian spacecraft the ability to repel naval artillery aren't applied to tanks, and we may yet be able to cut it with personal energy weapons and maybe a hammer for the tile.
Then we come to the armor. That 4+/3+/2+/1+ bit throws me; maybe that's the framing on which the armor is mounted, not a major issue. MT's clear that it's the same as tank armor. CT doesn't speak to what it is, just that it takes up a certain percent per rating, and the method results something like the 10-ton boat being as heavily armored as a 200 kt battleship of the same rating despite having about 1/30 the thickness of armor. When I do the math, balance point seems to be at about 100 dTons, but that's a terrible balance point since it pretty much eliminates any give-and-take in armor percentages for pretty much all the capital ships, who can max out armor with little effort. But ... tanks! Cross-pollinating versions is always fraught but sometimes interesting. That Imperial Marine APC for example is carrying equivalent of CT HG USP code 1 to 4 for armor; allowing for angled faces, call it a 1. Took roughly 38% of its volume. For something battleship-size carrying that thickness of armor, it'd be around about 1 1/2% of its volume.
Anyway, what I get from that is a table that looks like this, which is avoiding the big breakpoint jumps that show up in simpler methods and is doing more or less what I want at the fighter level - but which strikes me as overly complicated and too ambitious. I do have a bit of a problem with overcomplicating things. So, I'm interested in how other people are doing this.
Volume dT | Multiply % by | Volume dT | Multiply % by | Volume dT | Multiply % by |
10 | 27 | 4,000 | 4 | 45,000 | 2 |
20 | 21 | 5,000 | 3 | 50,000 | 2 |
30 | 19 | 6,000 | 3 | 55,000 | 2 |
40 | 17 | 7,000 | 3 | 60,000 | 2 |
50 | 16 | 8,000 | 3 | 65,000 | 1 |
60 | 15 | 9,000 | 3 | 70,000 | 1 |
70 | 14 | 10,000 | 3 | 75,000 | 1 |
80 | 14 | 11,000 | 3 | 80,000 | 1 |
90 | 13 | 12,000 | 3 | 85,000 | 1 |
100 | 13 | 13,000 | 3 | 90,000 | 1 |
200 | 10 | 14,000 | 2 | 95,000 | 1 |
300 | 9 | 15,000 | 2 | 100,000 | 1 |
400 | 8 | 16,000 | 2 | 200,000 | 1 |
500 | 7 | 17,000 | 2 | 300,000 | 0.9 |
600 | 7 | 18,000 | 2 | 400,000 | 0.8 |
700 | 7 | 19,000 | 2 | 500,000 | 0.7 |
800 | 6 | 20,000 | 2 | 600,000 | 0.7 |
900 | 6 | 25,000 | 2 | 700,000 | 0.7 |
1,000 | 6 | 30,000 | 2 | 800,000 | 0.6 |
2,000 | 5 | 35,000 | 2 | 900,000 | 0.6 |
3,000 | 4 | 40,000 | 2 | 1,000,000 | 0.6 |
