Is spaceship armor useless?

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Seems like I did. So, more power to the defence. Point taken.

Still, the combat devolves into a contest of saturation.

Hmmm. Crits normally mean that defence isn't possible, though I wonder if that applies to PD too.

Honorverse, here we come. Seriously though, there's nothing unrealistic about this issue. If combat in space comes down to missiles, then naturally the tension between missile numbers and penetration aids and point defense and jammers/spoofers will overtake that of warhead vs. armor. I'm sure, on some level, it will be both, but the main thing when you don't have the Honorverse's impenetrable grav shield from your reactionless drives is point defense.

Defensive doctrine would evolve with the weapons. The enemy shoots missiles at you. You start doing everything in your power to make it so those missiles don't hit you. You can (1) dodge them, (2) confuse them, (3) outrun them, (4) destroy them, or (5) have armor sufficient to ignore them. If GURPS spaceships lacks rules for ECM/ECCM, jammers, decoys, etc, then those are all things to create to make an interesting missile-based space combat paradigm. Destroying them would also happen in stages--you might have a small craft screen tasked with destroying missiles. Then you'd have a countermissile stage, where you launch your own small missiles to take out the larger incoming ones. Any that get through the countermissiles are engaged with point-defense weapons (lasers and autocannon). Hopefully there are very few left to deal with, but it depends on the lethality of the missiles. If just one is enough to blow up a ship, then point defense is going to be HEAVILY favored because it's suicide not to.

In my opinion, to have any meaningful discussion about space combat tactics, you have to do a tremendous amount of world-building first. Cost matters, resources matter, laws may even matter. Technology is just the start! The Honorverse was exhaustively set up to create a desired style of space combat, and except for the reactionless grav engines, tries to be consistent with physics (ok, he also has FTL grav communicators, but in his defense, at the time he wrote about those, real physicists weren't sure how fast gravitons propagated).

Anyway, I'm not sure what my point is any longer, except that there's nothing wrong with wars of saturation!