ORIGINAL: Aeson
Getting at least the lowest level of armor early is always worthwhile, since railguns have a chance to bypass shields but have trouble penetrating armor and pirates tend to field lots of railguns. What the good minimum and maximum values for armor are is rather more difficult to answer, as it depends a lot on what else your design carries, what kinds of weapons your opponent is fielding, and what your steel situation looks like (armor tends to require lots of steel) - if you don't see any railguns in play, then it's not unreasonable to not use any armor at all as you can theoretically tank all the damage on your ship's shields, although I'd say it's better to have at least a minimal amount of armor (perhaps 5 or 10 plates for something of at least 300 size) than to go completely without; similarly, lots of phasers would tend to suggest a low-armor strategy because phasers are good at penetrating armor but have low enough DPS that shield regeneration can be a bit of an issue for them. On the other hand, if your enemy is fielding lots of high DPS weapons like blasters, you'll probably want more armor because your shields are less suited to dealing with high DPS and low per-shot damage (high DPS should rapidly overcome the shield regeneration, but low per-shot damage means that the armor is more likely to absorb the shots rather than being destroyed). Note that if you're facing a weapon which is very likely to destroy one armor plate per shot, you're probably better off relying mostly on shields regardless of whether the weapon is high DPS or not.
Thinking about this further, it occurs to me that, as far as Phaser Lances go, going with an alpha strike optimization is not a terrible idea - the alpha strike optimization given in the above tables has 2.97 damage per size unit on the alpha strike and 0.71 DPS per size unit sustained, while the sustained DPS optimization has an alpha strike of only 1.61 damage per size unit and a sustained DPS of 0.77 DPS per size unit. Thus, the alpha strike optimization has nearly double the alpha strike while losing less than 10% of the sustained DPS, at least per size unit dedicated to weapons and the supporting reactors. Larger vessels with a greater percentage of their size taken up by weapons will benefit more from a Phaser Lance alpha optimization than smaller vessels will, as smaller vessels are less able to support enough Phaser Lances to have a meaningful difference between the alpha strike and sustained DPS optimizations. This is significantly better than the percentage trade-off with the Titan Beam, which gains ~5% extra damage on the alpha strike while losing ~28% of its sustained DPS per unit size dedicated to weapons and supporting reactors. Moreover, because the Phaser Lance alpha strike optimization doesn't fully utilize the reactor output and you probably have some energy storage capacity available from the fraction of your ship's reactors which are supporting the static and cruising energy requirements, the Phaser Lance alpha strike optimization can be boosted to have a slightly larger alpha strike while bringing the sustained DPS closer to that of the sustained DPS optimization, whereas increasing the alpha strike on the Titan Beam alpha strike optimization will only worsen its sustained DPS per size unit dedicated to weapons and supporting reactors relative to the sustained DPS optimization. I would still tend to say that a Titan Beam alpha strike optimization is fairly decent for a small vessel, since small vessels don't really have that much staying power in the first place, but the trade-offs between the alpha strike and sustained DPS optimizations using the Phaser Lance are much more favorable, especially for larger ships. (I have edited the tables to include the Phaser Lance (cont.) entry in the Alpha Strike table and the Titan Beam (alpha) entry in the Continuous DPS table, since these are worth having for comparing the trade-offs on the optimizations.)One quick thing I feel like saying, however, is that I'm not sure I follow the idea of using TBs as an alpha strike weapon. They're a rapid fire weapon rather than a heavy hitter and they excel exactly because their cooldown is minimal. Rather than alpha striking and running out of juice, I'd personally much prefer just go with 13 per HypFus. PLs would be a solid alpha strike weapon due to the damage and fire rate but a reactor is the same space as two PLs, so the gain by going alpha instead of continuous doesn't strike me as huge.
Awesome. Thanks![:)]
