Is spaceship armor useless?

[Xplo]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Well, you're missing that guns are pretty much worthless unless other options are forbidden, due to their awful range and penalties to hit, and you seem to have the damage very wrong somehow.

Spaceships 68 shows 2cm guns doing 6dx5 - and as with everything in Spaceships, that's decade-scale. Electromagnetic guns triple this (at least) due to their minimum velocity. If the damage is wrong, show me.

On a 1-minute scale, our small fighter armed with a Very Rapid Fire gun can fire 300 rounds. Cumulative modifier to hit with at least one of these kinetic kill monsters is only -2; a professional (skill 12) can do it half the time and an expert (skill 16) can do it, what, 90% of the time? (In fact, with Rcl 3, he's probably hitting at least twice.)

Admittedly, guns do have a poor range, but that doesn't mean you can't shred anything within that range.

Alternately, the smallest missile is 16cm, fits on our SM +5 fighter, and does 6dx40 (or about 800) x5, or x10 at longer ranges. An unstreamlined SM +15 ship with 3 layers of TL9 armor per section has dDR 600. The missile goes through it like soft cheese - and at TL9 it has an overall +1 to hit before ECM and other defenses are taken into account. Honestly, it makes me wonder why anyone would bother with larger missiles or nukes, and why there isn't some kind of micromissile option (other than balance, since micromissiles might as well be the wrath of God).

(All of which suggests that large ships have point defense like crazy. Admittedly, so do oceanic combat ships, for much the same reason.)

The uselessness of armor depends on what's hitting you. If blunting ... a small-caliber autocannon is useful, you can do some good with a modest amount of armor.

I think I've shown otherwise.