Armor Is Useless: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' has it halfway: armor is ubiquitous, but is really good only against low-grade threats. On the body level, common "carbonan crotch-huggers" reduce a gunshot to weak punch, but if hosed with a plasgun, even relatively good hardsuits can only take one for the wearer once - which saves the (former) wearers ''if'' no one continues to shoot at them and there's breathable air around. On the ship level, a heavily armored (military grade) hull can absorb minor leaks, but is no substitute to having [[Deflector Shields|shield]] adequate to the threats and enough of juice to keep it up, plus point defences and now also [[Teleport Interdiction|TAD]].

** Oafan ships have expensive hulls of superdense alloys everyone else uses only for powerplants. This allows them [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2014-12-23 to take head-on kinetic impacts that their shield could only divert aside]. If a breacher missile can punch through the shield, however, [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2015-11-03 it can punch through this hull too] - you just will end up with a boat husk venting its glowing innards out of a hole rather than adding its own pieces to the cloud of overheated fragments and droplets. It's understandable given that the builders were fragile bubbles and had a very good reason to not throw around gravitics when it can avoided. [[Cool but Inefficient|But generally it's very inefficient]] - especially given that normally cost of PTU alloys is one of the limitations on a ship's power, i.e. getting rid of it is likely to be cheaper, as long as the total mass of shells on extra annie plants is significantly less than that of this whole hull.

 

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