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I'm new to manual designs, but I'm having fun learning the ins and outs of ship design. I was wondering if there's a good rule of thumb when it comes to defences. Since armour doesn't use energy I've generally been favouring something close to a 1:1 mix of shields to hull+armour (in other words I just try make the blue bar look close to the grey bar) but I'm not sure if that's ideal.

Edit: Thinking about it again and revisiting Scott's explanation of damage, I suppose this approach is wrong and I'd generally want more shields since they seem to offer more points of damage mitigation, with armour filling in the gaps given space/energy limitations.

On a related note, I noticed that if you mix in one bit of ion armour (e.g., ion sheath) with normal armour, the ion defence stat still increases. Does this essentially give you the ion defence for all hull+armour or does this kind of mix work in some other way? I didn't see this mentioned in Scott's guide or video on armour.

It entirely depends on the ship hull, its role and the type of weapons that you face.

All shields will leak to some extent and weapons such as rail guns can wreak havoc on ships will little to no armour on them.

But generally shields are more powerful than armour as long as you have the space resources and energy to use them. Armour also generally have allot more damage mitigation than shields have, so you can't generally compare shields and armour point for point. If armour deducts six points of incoming damage in a weapon that does 12 damage it effectively cut the weapon damage in half. A weapon that does 8p damage now only does 2p of damage which is a huge reduction, so it really depends.

Most of the energy weapons are stopped effectively by shields... heavy missiles and heavy rail guns can be very effective against ships with little to no armour.

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Fri Oct 27, 2023 4:27 pm It entirely depends on the ship hull, its role and the type of weapons that you face.

All shields will leak to some extent and weapons such as rail guns can wreak havoc on ships will little to no armour on them.

But generally shields are more powerful than armour as long as you have the space resources and energy to use them. Armour also generally have allot more damage mitigation than shields have, so you can't generally compare shields and armour point for point. If armour deducts six points of incoming damage in a weapon that does 12 damage it effectively cut the weapon damage in half. A weapon that does 8p damage now only does 2p of damage which is a huge reduction, so it really depends.

Most of the energy weapons are stopped effectively by shields... heavy missiles and heavy rail guns can be very effective against ships with little to no armour.

I guess I have to inspect my opponents' ships more! Do you have any idea regarding the ion defence thing? Anecdotally it seems enough to just mix in one piece of ion armour for protection against nebulae but I haven't tested it thoroughly.

You only need one Ion plate to get the Ion defence, more will not add to Ion defence.

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Sat Oct 28, 2023 10:14 pm You only need one Ion plate to get the Ion defence, more will not add to Ion defence.

Thanks

So what happens if that particular piece of armour looses function?
I never tested, but I still like to have two or three pieces of ion armour on bigger ships, just to avoid this particular risk of a cascade failure.